The Appeal of Conscience Foundation, a group devoted to the preservation of religious freedom throughout the world, has issued an interfaith condemnation of the “shocking” arrests of more than two dozen Soviet Jews in recent months. Their detention “is all the more shocking since Russian authorities, beginning with Premier Kosygin’s declaration in 1966, asserted that Jews living in Russia would be permitted reunion with their families in other countries,” the statement said. “To now arrest those who took advantage of this offer is an entrapment of the most sordid kind.” The declaration was signed by Rabbi Arthur Schneier of Park East Synagogue, president of the foundation; Dr. Harold A. Bosley of Christ Church Methodist, vice president; and the Rev. Thurston N. Davis of the Department of Communications of the United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference, also a foundation vice president.
Noting that “The mass arrests and the prospect of a trial must be construed as a measure to stem the tide of applications from thousands of Jews for exit permits,” the foundation officials appealed for the release of those under detention and urged “leaders of all religious faiths and men to whom freedom of conscience is dear to join their voices to ours.” Sen. Jacob K. Javits, New York Republican, and Sen.-elect James L. Buckley, New York Conservative, have written to Rabbi Schneier deploring the upcoming “show trial.” Sen. Javits said that kind of trial was “so reminiscent of the Stalin era” and “raises anew the issue of Jews being able to live at peace and in freedom in the USSR and the spectre of the persecution of the 1930s and 1940s.” Mr. Buckley said those arrested were “Jewish prisoners of conscience who, frustrated by the spiritual and cultural repression of Jews in the Soviet Union, are known for their persistent demand to leave the Soviet Union for Israel.” He added that “No camouflage will be able to cover up the fact that these men are on trial for their convictions and are persecuted as Jews.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
