Will Petition UN to Take Up Question of Soviet Discrimination Against Jews

Petitions urging the United Nations to “take up the outrageous discriminations and deprivations imposed on the Jews of the Soviet Union by the Soviet Government” will be presented shortly to United Nations Secretary-General U Thant on the 20th anniversary of the world organization’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The move was announced by Lewis H. Wein-stein, recently elected chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, at a press conference here. Mr. Weinstein, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, said he was “encouraged to hope that the incoming Administration may move forward on the task of impressing on the Soviet Union the concern of our Government about the plight of Soviet Jews…and to raise the question in the UN.”

Mr. Weinstein cited a letter from President-elect Richard M. Nixon to Rabbi Israel Miller, previous chairman of the Conference on Soviet Jewry, in which the then candidate deplored resurgent anti-Jewish propaganda by the Soviet Government and urged documentation of all the facts “so that the profound American concern about the treatment of Soviet Jews can be adequately communicated to Soviet authorities on all echelons and levels.” He noted that Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Mr. Nixon’s rival in the Presidential race, had expressed similar sentiments to the Conference.

Mr. Weinstein said, “We know that the USSR reacts to protests, that it is sensitive to criticisms, that the pressure must continue.” He noted that, “right now, leaders of the Warsaw Pact nations are attending a Congress in Warsaw. Our plea to Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Communist Party leader, is to cease the religious and cultural repression of Russian Jews. And our plea to Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish party leader, is to refrain from the use of Stalinist terror tactics with show trials and trumped up charges.”