A New York rabbi who returned from a visit to the Soviet Union, two weeks ago, reported here tonight that “in the entire city of Leningrad, there now remains only one synagogue to serve 300,000 Jews.” He also said that the last known private minyan (prayer gathering), held as a consequence of the synagogue shutdowns, was forcibly closed by Soviet authorities in Leningrad a few months ago.
Rabbi Jacob Goldberg, of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, made these revelations at a mass rally following a Chanukah torchlight parade through the streets of New York in protest against the religious and cultural repression suffered by Jews in the USSR. The parade and rally, one of 18 such demonstrations held in American cities from coast-to-coast on the eve of Chanukah. was sponsored here by the New York Jewish Community Relations Council’s Coordinating Committee on Soviet Jewry, and the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, an organization embracing 25 national Jewish organizations.
Rabbi Goldberg’s report on the restrictions on Jewish worship in Leningrad bore out earlier charge by the Conference that more than 450 synagogues in Russia have been systematically closed by Soviet officials over the last 10 years. Only 60 synagogues remain in the entire country to serve the Soviet Union’s 3,000,000 Jews. The closing of the synagogues compelled the growth of private prayer gatherings which are now being systematically repressed, the Conference said.
Rabbi Israel Miller, chairman of the Conference, said that the mass rallies and demonstrations in the U.S.A. demanded that “the USSR remove the disabilities and inequities which block religious and cultural development of Russian Jewry, and accord them the necessary communal facilities available to other religious and cultural groups; to permit the reunion of families split by the holocaust of World War II; and halt the virulent anti-Semitic campaign of intimidation carried on since the Six-Day War.”
Outside New York, rallies and torchlight parades in which thousands participated were held in Newark, N.J., San Jose and San Francisco, California, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Ga., Norfolk, Va., Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Trenton, N.J., Waterbury. Conn., Miami, and Minneapolis and St. Paul.
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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.
