Jewish Student Groups Use May Day to Demand Amnesty for Soviet Jews

Various Jewish student groups marked the major Soviet holiday of May Day with demonstrations protesting the plight of Soviet Jewry and demanding that amnesty be granted to those Soviet Jews held as political prisoners in prison camps, mental asylums and in jail awaiting trial. More than 60 members of the Radical Zionist Alliance, an umbrella group of various Jewish student groups, marched yesterday near the Soviet Mission to the UN waving placards that charged the Soviets with betraying the ideals of the revolution, amongst which, the protestors asserted, included self-determination for all peoples. “Anti-Semitism is counter-revolutionary” read on placard while another proclaimed “Free all Soviet political prisoners!” One sign written in Russian demanded “Let My People Go!” while another Russian sign stated “The Russian homeland is Russia; the Jewish homeland is Israel” The RZA protestors called upon the Soviet Union “to give genuine expression to the Socialism whose victory they are celebrating this May Day” by granting the following three concessions to Soviet Jews: freeing all political prisoners; cancelling all up-coming trials of political prisoners and granting immediate exit permits to all Soviet Jews who have requested them and will request them in the future.

On Friday, 50 members of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) also demonstrated in front of the Soviet Mission, bearing a black maypole from which a noose and blue-and-white streamers were suspended. Students marched around the maypole carrying replicas of the new Soviet Jewry liberation flag and giant photos of imprisoned Russian Jews. Glenn Richter, SSSJ national coordinator, noted the chronological closeness of Israel’s Yom Haatzmaut, which he said represents independence, and the USSR’s May Day, which, he asserted, represented “repression.” Richter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that a Soviet official photographed the demonstration with a tiny camera. Both the SSSJ and the RZA called for the release of Ruth Aleksandrovich, the 24-year-old nurse from Riga, now awaiting trial. In a related incident yesterday, while a May Day rally was being held in Union Square, eight members of the National Renaissance Party, a neo-Nazi group headquartered in the Yorkville section of New York City, held a counter-demonstration of their own. The neo-Nazis marched in a small cordoned off area ringed by police wearing red arm bands with the sign of the thunderbolt emblazoned on them (the insignia of the NRP), and waved placards reading “No mercy for Red Jewish scum” and “No American troops to help Jews in the Middle East.”