Three Jewish leaders have expressed to President Nixon “the revulsion with which we and the overwhelming majority of American Jews view the recent attacks against Soviet offices in this country ostensibly in protest against Soviet anti-Semitism.” Max M. Fisher, president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds; Rabbi Herschel Schacter, chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, and Dr. William A. Wexler, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, cabled Nixon today to “denounce this strategy of terror and the men who are guilty of it” and to “reiterate our determination to create a climate of international opinion that will cause the rulers of the Soviet Union to free those millions of Jews for whom the USSR has become a prison.”
Meanwhile, Mayor John V. Lindsay, in a sharp statement issued late this afternoon, announced that he has “directed the New York City Police Department to be as alert and forceful as is necessary” to deal with the “threat of the Jewish Defense League to harass foreign diplomats” here. Warning that the JDL tactics is inimical to “the vital cause of freedom for Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union.” Lindsay declared that “by taking the law into their own hands, this small, extremist group challenges the rule of law and principles of freedom everywhere.”
The three leaders, who conferred privately with Nixon last month in Washington, D.C., on the question of the harsh sentences imposed on nine Jews and two non-Jews in Leningrad, told him today that “we know of your compassionate understanding of the plight of this community of 3.5 million men, women and children who cannot leave and cannot live as Jews.” They advised him that the “reckless and dangerous…outrageous, cowardly” acts against Soviet installations in the United States are “imperiling the cause of Soviet Jewry,” and in addition “do malicious harm” to the aspirations of Soviet Jews, “win sympathy for the USSR and “jeopardize the very foundation of a free society that is based on the rule of law.” Rabbi Schacter, Dr. Wexler and Fisher said they looked forward to Nixon’s “continued sympathy and support.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
