In separate letters to President Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, the International League for the Repatriation of Russian Jews called attention to a new violation of the Helsinki agreement and urged U.S. intervention.
Rabbi Benjamin Blech, League president who made the announcement, said his group has been informed of a new strategy that has been introduced by the Soviets to prevent reunification of families in direct violation of the Helsinki accord and Soviet law which specifically permits emigration for the purpose of reunification with family and one’s ethnic group.
According to Blech, within the past three weeks Soviet Jews applying for visas have been called to the “ovir” and interrogated for hours about their relatives who have invited them to come to Israel. “Emigration papers, painstakingly assembled after months of hard work, are torn up in front of the applicants and they are forced to sign statements denouncing relations in Israel,” Blech reported. “Many such incidents have already been reported in Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa.”
In his letters to Ford and Kissinger, Blech urged that the U.S. government take this matter under advisement and call these violations to the attention of the Soviet government.
WARSAW CEMETERY STILL AN ISSUE
In another issue, the League, which describes itself as an “American social service agency dedicated to the resettlement of Russian and East European Jews through its program of education, counseling and research,” again called upon the Polish government to withdraw its plans for up rooting the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw to replace it with a housing project.
Blech said that the League had written in January to W. Trampcynski, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, and New York Consul Z. Demoski with a similar request. “A noncommittal reply was received and nothing has been heard since,” Blech said. The January appeal was made after a League officer, who completed a tour of East Europe to study Jewish life there, said that leaders of the approximately 3000-member Warsaw Jewish community asked him to carry the message to the West.
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