A 31-minute “Service of Concern” was scheduled to be conducted this morning on the front lawn of Tifereth Israel Synagogue to dramatize the plight of the 31 Soviet Jews facing trial. A spokesman for the city’s Jewish community said a telegram was sent to Washington to Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the United States, expressing solidarity with the Soviet Jews “whose only crime is their passion for Judaism.” The telegram, in the name of the city’s 3,000 Jews expressed alarm with “the trends and developments within Russia which portend the cultural death of Soviet Jewry.” It urged “responsible Russian leadership” to release the 31 Jews, to honor Premier Alexei Kosygin’s 1966 commitment that Soviet Jews who wish to leave to be reunited with their families abroad be permitted to do so, to permit Soviet Jews to maintain formal bonds with world Jewry, and to allow them to maintain Jewish education and their cultural and communal institutions. The telegram ended with the exhortation: “Either let our people live or let our people go.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
