Sen. Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island, urged today that the United Nations consider the question of the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. “Our common conscience still bears the scars of our silence in the 1930s,” declared Pell, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “History must not record that in the 1970s we again closed our eyes and our hearts to the persecution of the Jewish people.” The 52-year-old non-Jewish legislator called on President Nixon to instruct the United States representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Mrs. Rita E. Hauser, to bring the matter up at the commission’s next meeting. “It is time,” asserted Pell, “that all men of good will join together in condemning the continuing anti-Semitism that today is so rampant in the Soviet Union. While some may say that the Russian brand of cultural and religious discrimination is not the equivalent of the German slaughter of the 1930s and 1940s, to my mind they do have a common goal–the annihilation of a race and religion. One was physical extermination, the other is spiritual and cultural death. But both represent a similar kind of genocide.” Pell, before entering the Senate in 1960 served on the International Rescue Committee and the National Council of Refugees and the American Immigration Conference.
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