Israel is quietly in favor of this year’s Olympics Games being held in Moscow and is unofficially pressing Western Jewish communities not to join in the current worldwide attempts to have the Games moved elsewhere. This emerged here on the eve of today’s meeting of the Olympics Committee of the Brussels World Conference on Soviet Jewry, to discuss its attitude towards the Games.
Prof. Yosef Rom, a leading Liked member of the Knesset, will tell the special committee that the Games are an opportunity a gain concessions from the Kremlin over the numbers of Jews allowed to leave the USSR and the release of Prisoners of Conscience, Including Ida Nudel, Anatoly Shcharansky and Yosef Mendelevich.
Rom, a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, outlined his views last night at a meeting with British Herut supporters, who agreed with what he said. The Jewish people should act in accordance with its own interests, he said, and not be swayed by what was happening in Afghanistan. "I hope 1980 will be the year of the Soviet Jewish Prisoner," he said.
Rom is one of two Israeli delegates — the other is Prof. Yoakov Roi — attending the Olympics committee meeting of the World Conference on Soviet Jewry. Its chairman is Charlotte Jacobson, chairman of the World Zionist Organization American Section.
The meeting is being held against the background of deep divisions among Soviet Jewish activists over whether the Olympics should be boycotted. These divisions existed long before hints of a boycott were announced by President Carter, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other Western leaders.
In Britain, calls for a boycott of the Games have been mode by the Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, one of the most active groups in the Soviet Jewry movement. However, Britain’s National Council has opposed the boycott campaign, claiming that Soviet refusniks and prisoners themselves want the Olympic Games to be used as a springboard for strengthening the Jewish emigration movement.
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