Allon: USSR Inciting Anti-semitism

Foreign Minister Yigal Allon accused Soviet authorities today of “unleashing the latent–and perhaps not so latent–sentiments of anti-Semitism which exist in large parts of Soviet society.”

Speaking from the Knesset rostrum, Allon referred to “scurrilous attacks” on emigration activists published in the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia, specifically a March 4 article alleging that Anatoly Sharansky, who was arrested yesterday, Prof. Alexander Lerner and Vladimir Slepak and others were in the pay of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Izvestia also accused Prof. Vitaly Rubin and Dr. Alexander Luntz, who are in Israel, and Prof. David Azbel, now in the U.S. Allon said that those not yet arrested were being subjected to “demonstrative tailing” by the KGB.

The Foreign Minister declared that “There is no need for imagination to understand what effect such anti-Jewish allegations have, especially when they are printed in a publication like Izvestia which reaches every corner of the Soviet Union. Such allegations are tantamount to unleashing the latent–and perhaps not so latent–sentiments of anti-Semitism which exist in large parts of Soviet society.” he said.

Allon described a Soviet-Jewish physician, identified as Dr. Sanya Lipavsky, who signed the Izvestia article which appeared in the form of an open letter as a “police informer” who had insinuated himself into the aliya movement by pretending to be a “refusnik” when he was, in fact, an agent provocateur.

(Jewish groups in London who had maintained telephone contact with Lipavsky and other activists, have described Lipavsky as a bona-fide “refusnik” who was fired from his medical job when he applied for a visa but buckled under pressure out of fear for himself and his family. They said Lipavsky could not have deceived the aliya activists during the long period he was associated with them. His where-abouts have been unknown since the Izvestia article appeared.)

All Knesset factions except the Rakah Communists joined in an expression of “solidarity” with the aliya activists in the USSR and called on “all the parliaments of the world” to protest their treatment. The Knesset urged the Soviet authorities to abide by its undertaking at Helsinki to permit all Jews so desiring to reunite with their families abroad. (By David Landau)