A massive airlift of 25,000 Soviet Jews from Italy to the United States began yesterday with 613 in three jetliners making the journey between the two countries. By June 9, 10,000 East European refugees, the vast majority of them Soviet Jews, will make the journey, with the balance of 15,000 by Sept. 30.
The floodgates were opened by the U.S. Attorney General exercising his parole authority April 9, repeating previous promises by President Johnson and President Ford to allow exceptional quotas of Cuban and Vietnamese refugees to enter the United States. In the record airlift yesterday, 391 Soviet Jews arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York on a Pan American airliner, 121 on TWA, and 101 on Alitalia.
The Soviet Jews, who live in three main areas in Rome and nearby Ladispoli and Ostia, have had to wait between three and five months (not four years as incorrectly reported yesterday) to be processed in difficult conditions. The Israel Embassy here has ignored them on the grounds that they do not want to go to Israel and some have even left that country after originally arriving there from the Soviet Union.
Gaynor Jacobson, executive vice president of HIAS, who was here to see the Soviet Jews off, said that the Russians let 4435 Jews leave the Soviet Union last month, “an annual flow of 50,000, so we have to find means of increasing the flow” to the United States. He hoped this would be achieved by passing current legislation proposed by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D. Mass.) and Rep. Peter Rodino (D. NJ) to ease immigration laws. Jacobson said half the Jews arriving in Italy had close relatives in the United States. “Forty percent of them will stay in the New York area and the others will be spread though 100 locations in the rest of America,” Jacobson said.
Twenty of the Jews due to fly to New York yesterday missed their plane because their bus was detained by a traffic accident. They were forlorn, Jacobson said. “But we managed to get them on one of the other flights anyway for our record day.” (by Lisa Palmieri-Billig)
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