Charlotte Jocobson, chairman of the World Zionist Organization – American Section, told a meeting of its Executive that “the dire prediction of a Soviet clamp-down on Russian-Jewish immigration as a result of a high drop-out rate; has unfortunately become a reality.”
The Soviet authorities, she reported, “are refusing to accept the letters of invitation received by Russian Jews, on the grounds that the letter writers are not close relatives. This has had an inhibiting ripple effect not only on the original applicants for immigration who, unlike the former refusnik activists, accept their denials passively, but also upon potential applicants who do not even apply as a result.”
The result, Mrs. Jacobson said, “is a devastating decrease in the number of letters requested from Israel by Russian Jews. This is seen in the fact that the once teeming stream of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Odessa has slowed to the merest trickle.”
Reporting on the recent meeting in Paris of the Presidium of the Brussels World Conference on Jewish Communities on Soviet Jewry, Mrs. Jacobson said the former refusnik Aleksander Voronel, now living in Israel, who had favored aid to Soviet Jewish emigrants opting to settle in the United States, publicly conceded that “I was wrong. We have made a terrible mistake in allowing this situation to continue.” In fact, she said, Jewish leaders from Belgium, France and Scandinavia strongly criticized American Jewry “for pursuing policies toward the noshrim (drop-outs) which are disastrous for Israel.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
