Jewish Agency Official’s Attack on Soviet Olim Stuns Leadership

A scathing attack on Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union by a ranking official of the Jewish Agency for Israel stunned overseas Jewish leaders in Israel this week.

It was delivered by Meir Sheetrit, treasurer of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, at a meeting of the agency’s Board of Governors in Tiberias.

Embarrassed officials hastened to attribute Sheetrit’s outburst to his relative inexperience. The Likud Knesset member is serving his first term in the WZO-Jewish Agency Executive.

Sheetrit, who is of North African origin, compared the conditions that greet Soviet olim with those confronted when his family arrived in the 1950s, a time of severe austerity in Israel.

He flayed the Soviet newcomers for complaining, demanding and criticizing. He claimed that the money spent on one immigrant family from the USSR “could be used to prevent the yerida (emigration) of six Israeli families.”

Sheetrit singled no one out by name. But his attacks appeared to be aimed at two of the most prominent Soviet Jewish refuseniks who arrived in Israel in recent years.

They are Natan Sharansky, who recently urged a special fund-raising effort for Soviet Jewish immigrant absorption, and Ida Nudel, who has publicly criticized the way Israeli society treats Soviet olim.

The Jewish Agency and the government announced, meanwhile, that they are postponing for 18 months the government’s planned takeover of immigrant absorption facilities and services, some of which the agency now handles.

The delay drew criticism from various immigrant organizations. They want all absorption services concentrated under one roof, at the Ministry of Absorption.