Mrs. Rita Hauser, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, declared today that the Administration has aided and will continue to aid Soviet Jews in two ways: by “pressing the Soviet government to permit the emigration of all those Jews who seek to leave, on fair and humane terms,” and by “resisting every attempt” on the part of the Soviet Union “to argue that the treatment of Soviet Jews is of concern only” to the USSR.
Mrs. Hauser, speaking at the opening session of a two-day National Interreligious Consultation on Soviet Jewry at the University of Chicago’s Center for Continuing Education, stressed that “the plight of any one Jew or groups of Jews living in the Soviet Union is subject to arbitrary determination by the Soviet leaders-determinations neither guided nor controlled by the rule of law, due process or constitutional guarantees of any kind.”
The consultation, the first such gathering by Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Greek Orthodox leaders, is sponsored by the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry. R. Sargent Shriver, former Peace Corps director and former ambassador to France, is honorary national chairman of the Task Force. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, interreligious affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, is a co-chairman.
Declaring that the Nixon Administration “has repeatedly” expressed its concern for the plight of Soviet Jews and for their right to emigrate, Mrs. Hauser noted that the issue of Soviet Jewry has been raised by the US at the United Nations General Assembly, the Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-Governmental Committee on European Migration, and in “numerous private, high-level diplomatic approaches to Soviet authorities.” She also recalled that the Administration “provided for the eased entry of Soviet Jews under the parole authority granted to the Attorney General by the Immigration Law.”
Mrs. Hauser told the 200 civic and religious leaders that “so far as we can determine, the few Soviet concessions of recent years have come about in response to expressions of concerned public opinion from abroad.”
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