Prominent Americans Hold Conference Tomorrow on Jews in Russia

Nearly 100 prominent Americans, including leading authorities on life in the Soviet Union, will take part in a day-long Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews which will take place Saturday at the Carnegie International Center. Sponsors of the meeting, who will participate in the discussion, include Associate Justice William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Rt. Rev. James A. Pike, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of California, who will preside.

According to Moshe Decter, a specialist in Soviet affairs, who is serving as executive secretary of the conference, the speakers and discussion participants will deal with “discrimination and cultural repression directed against the 3,000,000 Jews of the USSR.” The invitation to the conference cited the “tragic fate” of Soviet Jewry, described as “a truncated, repressed community,” and cited the “moral, cultural and intellectual suppression of Soviet Jewish life.”

In addition to Justice Douglas and Bishop Pike, sponsors of the conference include the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Negro integrationist leader; former Sen. Herbert H. Lehman; Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers of America; Norman Thomas, veteran Socialist and pacifist leader; and Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet. Among the persons who have accepted invitations to participate in the conference are a number of distinguished figures in intellectual, academic and public life. They include:

Paul B. Anderson, department of international affairs, National Council of the Churches of Christ; Irving Brown, United Nations representative, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions; Zbigniew Brzezinski, director, Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University; Clark M. Eichelberger, executive director, American Association for the United Nations; Ralph Ellison, novelist; Merle Fainsod, director, Russian Research Center, Harvard University; Louis Fischer, author and historian; the Rev. Donald Harrington, minister, Community Church of New York; and Homer A. Jack, executive director, National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.

Also, the Rev. John LaFarge, associate editor, America; Dwignt Macdonald, critic; Seymour Melman, professor of industrial engineering, Columbia University; Hans J. Morgenthau, director, Center for the Study of American Foreign and Military Policy, University of Chicago; James M. Nabrit, Jr., president, Howard University; Ernest Nagel, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University; Jan Papanek, chairman, International League for the Rights of Man; Henry L. Roberts, director, Russian Institute, Columbia University; I. F. Stone, editor; Lionel Trilling, professor of English, Columbia University; and Harry A. Wolfson, Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy, emeritus, Harvard University.