Israeli scholars and academicians, headed by President Ephraim Katzir took part in a solidarity conference here last night to express their support for the Moscow Jews whose symposium on Jewish culture in the USSR was aborted by Soviet authorities.
The Moscow gathering opened as scheduled on Tuesday in defiance of Soviet threats and harassment. Although it was to have lasted three days, it was forced to adjourn after several hours. Subsequently some 120 Jews, including the organizers and would-be participants were arrested. Scholars from the U.S., Israel and other countries who were to have presented papers were refused entry by the Soviet authorities.
Katzir told the conference at the Van Leer Institute here that despite Soviet suppression, the organizers had demonstrated their determination to maintain and foster their Jewish identify and to fight for the revival of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Prof. Ephraim Urbach, vice-president of the National Academy of Science, likened the symposium organizers to “the brave Maccabees.” He said the fact that “the Soviet authorities resorted to arrests, confiscations and searches shows that a great power cannot tolerate a symposium on Jewish culture.”
Dr. Mordechai Altschuler, of the Hebrew University, was pessimistic over the future of the Jewish community in the USSR. He observed that the Jewish population there is growing older faster than babies are being born. Intermarriage, assimilation and emigration is further diminishing their numbers, he said.
PROTEST TO KOSYGIN
(In New York, the Congress for Jewish Culture sent a cable and memorandum yesterday to Soviet Premier Alexel Kosygin protesting the arrests and harassment of Soviet Jewish intellectuals and scholars who organized the Moscow symposium. The messages to Kosygin, signed by Dr. Israel Knox, Congress president, and Hyman Bass, executive director, urged the Soviet leader to intervene to stop harassment, home searches and to free those arrested. “As writers, artists and educators who believe in peaceful coexistence of nations and the free flow of scientific knowledge and communication of ideas, we consider the suppression of the symposium as an infringement of the Soviet constitution, the UN Charter on Human Rights and the Helsinki convention,” the messages stated.)
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