More than 250 Jewish leaders from the United States and abroad gathered here tonight for the opening of a two-day National Leadership Assembly to discuss the current crisis confronting Jews in the Soviet Union. The participants included representatives of the Jewish communities in Britain, France, Belgium, Canada, Mexico and Israel as well as Jewish activists from the USSR.
Stanley H. Lowell, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry which convened the assembly at the Statler-Hilton Hotel, declared that “Soviet Jewry and its needs should be made part of the agenda of every meeting between Administration officials and their Soviet counterparts” because “the Soviets must know that world opinion will condemn them for the harassment and second class status of Soviet Jews as well as for the languishing fate of the prisoners of conscience.”
Dr. Victor Polsky and Dr. Aleksander Voronel, two Soviet Jewish scientists and activists who were permitted to emigrate from the Soviet Union last year, urged that immediate steps be taken to prevent the Soviet authorities from destroying the Jewish activist movement in the USSR. The opening plenary session was chaired by Mrs. Charlotte Jacobson, vice-chairwoman of the NCSJ.
The NCSJ received two messages from Moscow on the occasion of the assembly. One was from Vladimir Slepak who ended today his three-week hunger strike. The other was signed by 10 Jewish activists who expressed the belief that “our friends in the U.S. will do everything in their power to save Soviet Jews, the prisoners, the ‘refusniks’ and all of those striving to be re-united with their people.”
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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.
