U.S. Doesn’t Seem Ready to Halt Giving Refugee Status to Soviet Jews

The Israeli government’s efforts to get the United States to end the practice of providing refugee status for Soviet Jewish emigrants who do not go to Israel does not appear to have much chance of succeeding in the foreseeable future.

During his recent visit to the U.S., Israeli Premier Yitzhak Shamir strongly urged that Soviet Jews no longer be considered refugees since they all automatically become Israeli citizens once they leave the USSR. He made this plea directly to the Reagan Administration during his talks here and in public addresses to Jewish leaders.

But the Administration rejected his request, arguing that the U.S. believed in “freedom of choice.”

The position was reinforced last Tuesday by Warren Zimmerman, chief of the U.S. delegation to the follow-up meeting on the Helsinki Accords, now going on in Vienna; and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D. Md.), chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors compliance with the Helsinki Accords.

They appeared in Washington on the U.S. Information Agency’s “Worldnet” program, on which they answered questions from reporters in several European cities and Tel Aviv.

“I think the climate in the Congress of the United States is focused on the rights of individuals to leave, as guaranteed by the Helsinki Final Act,” Hoyer said.

‘THEIR OWN JUDGMENT’

“The destination of those persons are really, from our perspective, in their own judgment,” he added. “They will have to make that option.”

Zimmerman rejected the view that the Soviets have reduced Jewish emigration because so many of the departing Jews go the U.S. rather than Israel.

“We have not heard an argument from the Soviet delegation (in Vienna) about the abuse of visas because of emigrants going to the United States instead of Israel,” he said. “That is not an argument they use.”

Instead, the Soviets claim that few Jews want to emigrate, Zimmerman noted.

“Of course, the new emigration legislation tends to limit the right of emigration to those who have very close family ties outside the Soviet Union,” he said. “Of course that is a smaller pool than those who would like to emigrate.”

Zimmerman added that the U.S. urges free emigration and “we are looking at what they are doing, rather than what they are saying, or what their new regulations are saying. What they are doing tends to be, so far, very disappointing, and they don’t justify it in any new or more open terms.”

Hoyer said there “are some 400,000 Jews in the Soviet Union who wish to emigrate. We know that there are at least 11,000 individuals who have asked to emigrate and who have been refused.”