Hundreds of Washington area Jewish youth and adults yesterday greeted the upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva with demonstrations, a march and a folk sing-in here, on behalf of Soviet Jewry. One of the protests led to the planned arrest of more than 40 religious school principals, teachers, rabbis and synagogue congregants.
As the demonstrators assembled– first outside the Soviet Embassy, and then at Lafayette Park across from the White House — similar protests were taking place or scheduled to take place over the next few days in New York, Chicago, London, Paris and Jerusalem.
The demonstration in front of the Embassy brought the largest number of arrests since the Washington Board of Rabbis began sponsoring the protests last May. As volunteers prepared to be arrested by moving to within 500 feet of the Embassy, some 300 others, many of them children and teenagers, watched silently across the street.
Like the 90 rabbis, ministers, students and others arrested in the six previous demonstrations sponsored by the Board, those arrested yesterday were expected to be charged and released pending trial.
Many at the Embassy protest proceeded to another demonstration at Lafayette Park — this one sponsored by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, Jewish Youth Assembly of Greater Washington, the Midatlantic Region Student Zionist Council and the Principals’ Council of the Board of Jewish Education.
Addressing the rally at the park, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D. Md.), a co-chairman of the Committee on Security and Cooperation in Europe and of the Helsinki Commission, which monitors Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords, called this week’s summit in Geneva “an appropriate forum at which to insert political and moral pressure upon the Soviet government to undertake just and expeditious actions to alleviate human rights abuses and to take steps that indicate an intent to abide by past international agreements such as the Helsinki Final Act.”
Hoyer repeated a theme of the students who preceded him at the podium, quoting the late President John Kennedy in relating the plight of Soviet Jews to the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting: “What is peace after all, but a matter of human rights?”
Carrying an Israeli flag and a banner prepared by the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization with the figures for Soviet Jewish emigration — from 51,000 in 1979 to 896 last year — students led the demonstrators in a march to the White House and then circled the area of the Soviet Embassy. The marchers returned to the park for a session of folk songs.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
