European Conference on Soviet Jewry to Urge Russia to Give Jews Constitutional Rights

A European conference on Soviet Jewry will open here next Sunday with the participation of 350 delegates representing 17 European Jewish communities. The conference will launch an appeal to improve the conditions of Russia’s three million Jews, said to be suffering “Grievous cultural, religious, social and economic discrimination.” The conference plans were announced at a press conference called today by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, represented by Sir Barnett Janner, a Labor MP, and the Representative Council of French Jews, headed by Claude Kelman. A Sorbonne lecturer on philosophy, Robert Mizrahi, told the newsmen that “the Soviet Union should either give its Jewish community the same rights as other minority groups or permit those Jews to emigrate.” The conference will hear from a number of experts on Soviet affairs and from Jews who recently left the USSR. The organizers stressed that the conference will not be “anti-Soviet or anti-Communist” and will ask only that Moscow “apply the Soviet Constitution and Socialist legality” to the Jews.