UNESCO Votes Branded by Four Dissident Soviet Writers in France

Four dissident Soviet writers now living in France yesterday branded the recent UNESCO anti-Israeli resolutions as “unfair” and a gross injustice. The four, Alexander Galich, Vladimir Maximov, Victor Nekrasoy and Andrei Syniavsky, issued their statement in a letter to the French paper, “Le Monde.”

The paper also printed a letter from the Israeli delegate to UNESCO, Dr. Eliezer Yapou, who condemned the UNESCO votes describing them as “blind” to reality and grossly one-sided. UNESCO’s Director General Amadou M’Bow, in an answering letter also printed by “Le Monde,” promised that he will try to “bring about a compromise” between opposing points of view. He pointedly refrained, however, from criticizing the votes “of the sovereign states which comprise the UNESCO General Conference.”

In the meantime, a number of left-wing intellectuals published a communique supporting the UNESCO votes and calling the arguments used by a number of Nobel Prize winners and other intellectuals “lies.” The pro-Arab intellectuals, none of whom is known by the general public, concluded their statement with the call for “a democratic Palestine in which all the communities will find their place.”

CORRECTION

The Dec. 23 Bulletin story on the National Religious Party and Rabbi Bernard Bergman stated that last week two major American Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Congress and the Federation of Reform Synagogues, urged New York Governor-elect Hugh Carey to launch a state-wide probe of the Bergman homes. In fact, the AJCongress, as correctly reported in the Dec. 17 Bulletin, urged Carey to probe alleged corruption and mismanagement of nursing homes but did not refer to Rabbi Bergman or his homes.