Lindsay, Stokes Cable Leningrad Mayor to Use His Influence to Obtain Release of Ii

Mayor John V. Lindsay, of New York and Mayor Carl B. Stokes, of Cleveland, have urged their counterpart in Leningrad to use his influence to obtain the release of Jews currently on trial in that Soviet city. Mayor Lindsay and Mayor Stokes addressed separate cables to Alexander A. Sizov, chairman of the Leningrad City Soviet, expressing concern over the trial in which 11 persons, most of them Jews are charged with “banditry and treason” in connection with an alleged plot to hijack a Soviet airliner last June. Mayor Lindsay’s cable read in part, “Information indicates that the arrested persons are not anti-Soviet and were not engaged in hostile actions. They want to leave for Israel, to reunite with families. It is incomprehensible that people who wish to leave a country should be perse- cuted.” Mayor Stokes said in his cable, “The circumstances surrounding the arrests and detention of the defendants have caused neutral observers throughout the world to question the purpose of the court action. We are led to believe that the main purpose of this trial is to discourage the growing numbers of requests by Jews for emigration from the Soviet Union.”

Philip E. Hoffman, president of the American Jewish Committee, called on the Soviet leadership today to “reverse the death sentences reportedly requested by the prosecution in the current trial of Jews and others in Leningrad.” In a cable to Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Alexei N. Kosygin, Hoffman said, “As a signatory of the Teheran Proclamation of May 13, 1968, your government agreed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community.’ We ask you to observe that obligation toward these people whose only crime is their expressed desire to live where they may practice their religion freely and openly…” A petition with 3700 signatures protesting the trial of Jews in Russia was sent to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin in Washington by the Baltimore Committee for Soviet Jewry. A covering letter signed by committee chairman Louis J. Fox, claimed that the Soviet Union’s anti-Semitic campaign “undoubtedly stems from the government’s awareness of the growing frustration and resentment by young Soviet Jews toward the discrimination they face in higher education and employment.”

Some 200 Jewish youths staged a vigil this afternoon at the Isaiah Wall opposite the United Nations to protest the Leningrad trial. The rally was sponsored by the New York Union of Jewish Students, a coordinating council of local Jewish student unions in the metropolitan area and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. The students represented the Radical Zionist Alliance, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. Betar, the Jewish Defense League and Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University. They displayed signs reading “Recognize Zionism, Lenin Did”: “Zionism is the National Liberation Movement of the Jews”; “Recognize the Jewish People”; “Mr. Kosygin: Free the Russian Jewel” They sang Hebrew songs and lit eight torches to symbolize the Chanukah candelabra. Earlier, the students had picketed outside the offices of Tass, the Soviet news agency. At Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, several hundred students held a 90-minute silent vigil last night on behalf of the Leningrad II. Rabbi Avi Weiss of the college and Glenn Richter, national coordinator of the SSSJ, read eyewitness accounts of Soviet oppression and a letter from 44 Soviet Jews declaring that “when people are thrown into prison for their convictions, this is evil.”