An American rabbi claimed here Sunday that Jews of the free world were “tragically misled” by the visit of Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin of Moscow to the United States last year into believing that “this peripheral gesture” represented a change in the Kremlin’s attitude toward Soviet Jewry. Rabbi Bernard A. Poupko, of Pittsburgh, addressing a conference of the Canadian Jewish Congress, urged world Jewry to continue to “demand, soberly and tactfully, that the Kremlin extend to its Jewish minority the very same rights and privileges which it extends to other minorities under the Soviet Constitution.”
He said that even though Soviet authorities permitted a rabbi to come to America for the first time in 52 years, no “new and hopeful era was being unfolded for our silenced, isolated and frightened brethren.” He said that Moscow “has emerged as the world center of a senseless and frightening vilification and slander campaign against the State of Israel, Zionism, world Jewry and Judaism.”
Rabbi Poupko has written a number of articles about the situation of Soviet Jewry, He was one of two American rabbis invited to attend Rabbi Levin’s 75th birthday celebration in Moscow earlier this year but was subsequently denied a Soviet visa and did not attend.
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