Korey: No Future for Jews in USSR

There is no future for Jews in the Soviet Union, the director of B’nai B’rith’s International Council charged here yesterday. Dr. William Korey told the final session of the Jewish Labor Committee’s biennial convention at the Hotel Roosevelt that Soviet Jews have detected "the smell of pogrom" in recent events that have taken place in the USSR.

Korey told the 400 delegates who had earlier passed a resolution calling for the right of Soviet Jews to maintain their own cultural institutions without government harassment or curtailment, that by "coincidence or design the Soviets published an almost full-page attack on Jewish activists linking them with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Izvestia on the anniversary date of Stalin’s death."

Earlier in the year, Korey charged, the Soviets televised an anti-Semitic film entitled, "Buyers of Souls" which they repeated on Soviet TV on March 11. He noted that over the years, since Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the Soviets had used the CIA charge a number of times. The last was on March 17 which led to the arrest of Anatoly Sharansky, a Jewish activist.

Warning that there "is no future for Jews as individuals in the Soviet Union," Korey said that since 1968 there had been a drop in the number of Jews permitted to enter scientific studies in the universities. He stated that 75,250 Jews were now permitted to study engineering and other scientific subjects as contrasted to 111,900 in 1968. He predicted a far steeper decline in the next years.

Korey said that the U.S. would face a strong effort by the Soviet Union at next month’s Helsinki Pact agenda meeting in Belgrade to avoid cultural deprivation of Jews as a subject for discussion. The delegates re-elected Jacob Sheinkman, secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, as its president.