Soviet Jews see President Nixon, who will visit their country in May, “as their salvation and their Messiah,” the national commander of the Jewish War Veterans reported today. “If only he would speak out (on their plight), if only he would say something,” it would have a “great effect” on the Supreme Soviet,” said Jerome D. Cohen, who returned last night from a 10-day fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union. He noted that the Supreme Soviet can commute sentences “as they desire.” A spokesman for Cohen said the visit was a “breakthrough” in that the Soviet authorities were heretofore “reluctant” to grant a visa to a JWV leader.
Cohen told newsmen that he based his report essentially on secretive conversations in Moscow with 14 Jews representing Jewish communities across the USSR. He said they gave him a list of 4,000 Jews who had applied for emigration and had subsequently become unemployed. Cohen said that in Leningrad, Jews with the title Hero of the Soviet Union “were trying to paint this rosy picture that things are better for the Jews in the Soviet Union than in the United States,” and that the Jewish drivers assigned to him insisted “that everything was peaches and cream.”
But he himself found, he reported, that the charges of official repression that have reached the West were all true. In addition to Jews’ losing their jobs for seeking to migrate to Israel, he said, Soviet Jews are “furtive” and “reluctant to talk at all” to visitors. Cohen added that Jewish political prisoners and their families are “in dire need of food and packages.” He said he would report on his tour to President Nixon at the White House shortly, probably later this month.
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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.
