Hadassah Appeals to Soviet Woman Official to Secure Release of Jewish Women

Hadassah resorted today to a woman-to-woman approach to try to secure the release of Ruth Aleksandrovich and other Jewish women imprisoned in the Soviet Union after applying for emigration visas. Mrs. Max Schenk president of the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, the largest Jewish women’s organization in the U.S., appealed to the top woman official in the Soviet Union to intervene. Her cable was addressed to Mrs. Yekaterina A. Furtsova, Minister of Culture. Pointing out that her Ministry “is the agency through which the civilizing forces of society should be promoted,” Mrs. Schenk’s message said, “We, over 300,000 women of Hadassah, wives and mothers, beseech you to intervene in behalf of Ruth Alexandrovich and other Jewish women who are imprisoned because they wish to go to Israel, their spiritual and cultural homeland where they can freely and fully live as Jews. We appeal to you, as a woman, to speak up in behalf of these young women separated from their families–one of them jailed on the eve of her wedding….We ask that you act in accordance with your own Constitution and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, which your country supports, in appealing for their freedom. We turn to you for help, now, on purely humanitarian grounds.”