Plans for Brussels Confab Outlined

Plans for a major world conference to mobilize international action against the “ever-harsher” treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union were announced today by the American co-sponsors of the event. The assembly will be held in Brussels Feb. 17-19, with more than 1000 delegates expected from 20 countries. Former Israeli Premier Golda Meir will serve as honorary chairman of the conference and deliver the closing address.

Sen. Frank Church (D.Idaho), a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will head a delegation of nearly a dozen members of Congress who will fly to Belgium for the meeting. Details of the Brussels conference–which will convene less than two weeks before the All-Union (Communist) Party Congress in Moscow were disclosed at a news conference today by three American Jewish leaders who will play key roles there:

Mrs. Charlotte Jacobson, chairman of the American Section of the World Zionist Organization, who is co-chairman of the Brussels steering committee; Stanley H. Lowell, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, one of the seven Jewish organizations around the world that are sponsoring the conference; and Rabbi Israel Miller, immediate past chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the other American sponsoring organization. Other conveners of the Brussels conference are the B’nai B’rith International, European Conference on Soviet Jewry, Israel Public Council for Soviet Jews, Latin American Jewish Congress, World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organization.

112,000 JEWS LEFT USSR SINCE 1971

The Brussels conference has been called just five years after the first international assembly on the plight of Soviet Jews, held in the Belgian capital in February, 1971. Since that meeting, Mrs. Jacobson said, Soviet authorities have issued exit visas to an estimated 112,000 Jews–almost all of whom have gone to Israel–compared to only 10,000 in the previous 25 years.

Mrs. Jacobson noted, however, that in the past two years the USSR had “out back sharply” in the granting of permission to emigrate. From a high of 35,000 in 1973, visas to leave in 1974 were given to only 20,000 Jews and, in 1975, to 12,000. Commenting on this decline, Mrs. Jacobson said: “A major purpose of Brussels II will be to draw world attention to the ever-harsher Soviet policy toward Jews seeking to emigrate and to the Kremlin’s failure to live up to the 1975 Helsinki agreement on the free movement of people and ideas.”

Lowell, who will be one of the speakers at the Brussels conference, reported that the U.S. delegation would comprise more than 300 persons, including Jewish community leaders, Catholics and Protestant church officials. Black spokesmen and personalities in law and government. The Congressional delegation will include, in addition to Church, Rep. Robert Drinan (D.Mass.), Joshua Eilberg (D.Pa.), Hamilton Fish (R.NY), Stephen Solarz (D.NY) and Sidney Yates (D.Ill). Lowell said a large delegation at Brussels would consist of Soviet Jews who had emigrated to Israel, including a number of former “Prisoners of Zion.”

Rabbi Miller said that official Soviet anti-Semitism had increased “sharply and alarmingly” since the Yom Kippur War. “The Brussels conference will serve as a signal to the free world of the unity of all those who have joined the Soviet Jewish struggle from outside the USSR,” he said. “It will remind the men in the Kremlin of the strength of our identification with Soviet Jewry and of our determination to help them win their struggle. Finally, Brussels II will tell the Jews of the Soviet Union that they are not alone, that their cause is our cause and that we continue to take fresh inspiration from their incredible courage.”