Israeli officials directly concerned with immigration say that Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev gave a false picture of the rate of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union in his presentation to U.S. Congressmen in Washington last week.
According to Absorption Minister Natan Peled and Jewish Agency Executive chairman Louis Pincus, Brezhnev’s figures do not tally with those compiled in Israel.
Speaking on a radio interview, Pincus said that while Brezhnev claimed that 250 exit visas are granted out of 750 applicants on a list of “hardship” cases presented by Dr. Henry Kissinger to the Soviet authorities, only ten persons on the list have emigrated.
Pincus also disputed Brezhnev’s assertion that 60,200 exit visas were granted out of 61.000 applications submitted in 1972. According to Pincus, only 62,000 Russian Jews have reached Israel from 1968 to the end of May, 1973. He said that in that period 180,000 visa applications were submitted by Russian Jews.
Pincus and Peled conceded that the Soviet authorities appear more flexible on the emigration issue now than in the past. (Addressing 1500 persons at a rally for Soviet Jews outside the Russian Consulate in San Francisco last night, Mikhail Shepshelovicz, a recent emigre from the Soviet Union remarked that Brezhnev may have been sincere in his presentation to the U.S. Congressmen but might not be getting the right information from his subordinates. “That happens in lots of countries,” he added, an apparent reference to the Watergate scandal.)
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