Secretary of State George Shultz raised the issue of Soviet Jewry several times with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko during their arms control talks in Geneva, according to Mark Palmer, a senior State Department official Shultz sent here as a special envoy to brief Israeli officials on the Geneva talks.
Palmer, who arrived this evening, is Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. He reported to Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir tonight that Shultz dwelt especially on the plight of Jewish refuseniks such as imprisoned Anatoly Shcharansky and Yosef Begun, in the course of his two days of talks with Gromyko and that he urged the Soviet Union to halt its persecution of those activists and of other Jews in the USSR who study Hebrew.
Palmer is going to Egypt tomorrow to brief officials in Cairo on the Geneva talks. Other U.S. officials have similar assignments in the capitals of most countries with which the U.S. maintains friendly relations.
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