Jewish Agency Protests Plans by Hias to Open Moscow Office JTA Staff Report

The Jewish Agency for Israel has been actively seeking to keep the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society from opening an office in Moscow, according to Simcha Dinitz, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive.

A decision to take such action was made by the Jewish Agency Executive some weeks ago, aides to Dinitz have disclosed.

Since then, Dinitz has approached the Council of Jewish Federations and various other Jewish organizations in North America, in an effort to influence HIAS to forgo any plan to set up a Moscow operation.

Dinitz believes that a HIAS office in Moscow could trigger a renewed spurt of interest by Soviet Jews in immigration to the United States.

The United States had been the destination of choice for the vast majority of Soviet Jews prior to Oct. 1, when the Bush administration changed its policy on admitting refugees to the United States.

Since then, it has refused to consider Jews who leave the Soviet Union on Israeli visas. With an annual U.S. quota on Soviet refugees now set at 50,000, the required American visas are hard to come by. Therefore, most Jews now leaving the Soviet Union are settling in Israel.

Under the old U.S. policy, HIAS officials based in Vienna and Rome assisted Jewish refugees who had arrived there from the Soviet Union and were interested in immigrating to the United States. Now that such refugees must be processed before they leave the Soviet Union, HIAS wants to set up an office in Moscow.

HIAS NOT TRYING TO DIVERT JEWS

In New York, Karl Zukerman, executive vice president of HIAS, strongly took issue with the Jewish Agency’s position against the Moscow office.

HIAS is “not interested in encouraging anybody to come to the U.S.,” he maintained.

Zukerman said he found it “interesting that the Jewish Agency Executive, which took this decision several weeks ago, has talked to all kinds of organizations in the U.S., but never to HIAS.”

“If they had, we could have explained to them exactly what was going on, and their concerns could have been alleviated,” he said.

Zukerman said that the office HIAS hopes to set up in Moscow would be designed in a way that could not be possibly be construed as encouraging Soviet Jews who might otherwise go to Israel to hold out hope that they would be permitted to immigrate to the United States.

The office, he said, would only assist Soviet Jews who had already overcome a major hurdle toward being granted refugee status and admission to the United States: winning an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

Such an office would not exclusively be occupied by HIAS, but would be shared by all voluntary organizations that assist Soviets in their immigration to the United States.

“The Department of State has asked HIAS to run an office on behalf of all the voluntary migratory agencies, to assist persons who have already applied to (immigrate to) the United States and have been scheduled for interviews,” said Zukerman.

In any case, Soviet authorities so far have been opposed to the plan and are “holding strong in their refusals to allow any of the voluntary agencies into Moscow,” said Phillip Saperia, assistant executive vice president of HIAS.

PREFERENCE FOR DIVIDED FAMILIES

The Soviets have a “a political concern that they don’t view any citizen of the Soviet Union as a refugee and they don’t want voluntary agencies involved in processing people from the Soviet Union as refugees,” he said.

To qualify for U.S. refugee status, the Soviets must demonstrate a “well-founded” fear of persecution. Because the number of would-be emigrants is astronomical, and the number of refugee slots limited, the State Department is giving preference to those with immediate family already in the United States.

Zukerman said that contrary to the Jewish Agency’s fears, HIAS does not wish to send a signal to Soviet Jews that immigration to the United States will become easier.

“We share (the Jewish Agency’s) concern that people who do not have close family in the United States not be misled into thinking they will be able to come to the United States in the next several years,” he said.

Early indications are that the U.S. government is holding potential Soviet immigrants to tough standards for refugee status. In October and November, two thirds of Soviet Jews who applied for U.S. refugee status in Moscow were refused it, said Saperia of HIAS. He did not have any updated figures.

But Saperia said those refusals are not “arbitrary and capricious,” as HIAS termed refusals in Rome between September 1988 and the summer of 1989.

He also said there is “every indication” that the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service is going to review the Moscow refusals in light of new congressional guidelines approved last fall.

In effect, the guidelines would make it easier for a refugee applicant to demonstrate “a well-founded fear of persecution.”

(Contributing to this report were JTA staff writer Allison Kaplan in New York and JTA correspondents David Landau in Jerusalem and Howard Rosenberg in Washington.)