London ‘observer’ Publishes Appeal by Riga Students Against Soviet Repression

An appeal to the West for help against the Soviet repression of Jews and restrictions on emigration to Israel has been made by Jewish students of Riga, Latvia, the Sunday Observer reported. The paper published a reproduction of a letter in Russian which the students purportedly smuggled out of Latvia after the attempted suicide by fire of 21-year-old Ilya Ripps, a student in the physics and mathematics department of the Latvian State University. The Observer quoted the letter as saying, “We Jewish students of Riga appeal to the students of Israel, the United States, England and the world for help.”

The letter described how young Ripps set himself afire at the foot of the liberty monument in Riga with a placard on his chest protesting discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union. It said he ran burning through the streets shouting in Russian, “Let’s go to Israel,” until a group of passing sailors knocked him down, stamped out the flames and beat him. Secret police who quickly arrived on the spot hustled Mr. Ripps into a car and drove away. He has not been seen or heard from since then and is believed to be in the prison of the State Security Committee, the letter said. The account contained in the letter coincided with purported independent eye-witness accounts of the episode that reached Western countries last week.

According to the appeal published in the Sunday Observer, “Ilya Ripps expressed the demand of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia.” The student’s father is an engineer and his mother is a doctor. The Observer said that this episode marked the first time since the establishment of Israel that young Russian Jews have dared to organize themselves and show a keen interest in emigrating to Israel. The Observer said that about 30,000 of 100,000 Russian Jewish students have already applied for passports but only a handful have been allowed to leave. Mr. Ripps’ application was denied and he attempted self-immolation to dramatize his plight, the account said. The Observer reported a small group of Russian Jews who have been allowed to emigrate recently say the Jewish spirit is alive among vast numbers of Russian Jews.

(A conference of French intellectuals on behalf of Soviet Jewry, the third to be held since 1960, closed in Paris yesterday after adopting a resolution that expressed anxiety over the fate of Ilya Ripps. The resolution authorized the conference to send a mission to Riga to gather details on the incident and make inquiries about Mr. Ripps’ whereabouts. The gathering, attended by 80 scholars, writers and clergymen from France and Switzerland, heard papers on the general position of Soviet Jews and on Soviet anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism. One resolution adopted demanded that Soviet Jews be granted the same cultural and organizational rights enjoyed by other national minorities in the USSR. Another called for a halt to the present anti-Semitic campaign masked as anti-Israel policy, and a third urged the right of Russian Jews to maintain contact with fellow Jews outside of Russia, to move freely and to leave Russia if they wished to re-unite with their families abroad.)