— Half a dozen top Jewish leaders, including Leon Dulzin, chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Executives, and Charlotte Jacobson, chairman of the WZO-American Section, found themselves accidentally plunged into the center of the attempted insurrection by Spain’s rightist Civil Guards yesterday.
The Jewish leaders, who were in Madrid for a session of the presidium of the Brussels Conference on Soviet Jewry, happened to be staying at the Palace Hotel less than 100 yards from the Parliament building taken over by the rebels. Throughout the night the hotel served as the headquarters for the army general and senior civil servants who negotiated the rebels’ surrender.
Dulzin and the other Jewish leaders left Madrid today safe and well. Other conference participants, Edgar Bronfman president of the World Jewish Congress and Claude Kelman, vice president of France’s Representative Council of Jewish Organizations left Madrid only a few hours before the rebel coup.
Dulzin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency here early this morning in a telephone interview that the conference participants were asked to return to their rooms minutes after they concluded a press conference on the plight of Soviet Jewry. Dulzin said “Spanish security agents told us we would be safer in our rooms. It took us a few minutes to find out what had happened.
“From our fourth floor windows we could see the Civil Guard surround the Parliament building. Cars were driving constantly up to the hotel and late at night the national police started moving into the square which separated us from the Parliament. At no moment was there any panic and at 5 p.m. we even all trooped down into the hotel dining room for dinner.”
Dulzin and the other Jewish leaders told the JTA they heard no shots and saw no special activity within the hotel once they returned to their rooms at 11 p.m. last night.
CABLE TO BREZHNEV
Yesterday, just before the rebels seized the Parliament building and took 348 members of the Lower House hostage, the presidium cabled Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev asking him “to reaffirm that change of policy which you began” in allowing” Jews applying for permission to emigrate to Israel to do so.”
The cable also stated: “We are gratified by the recent release of Iosif Mendelevich and it is our expectation that his release will be followed by the release of all those who have been imprisoned or exiled essentially because they insisted on their right on their right to go to Israel. We hope and urge that Jews will be allowed to emigrate without difficulties and without artificial or arbitrary impediments.
“The teaching of Hebrew, the voluntary study of the Jewish religion, Jewish history and Jewish traditions are not inconsistent with declared Soviet policy and should be allowed as a free expression of the rights of the Jews in the Soviet Union.”
The signers of the cable were: Dulzin, chairman of the presidium of the Brussels Conference; Bronfman; Kelman; Jacobson; David Susskind, president, National Committee for Soviet Jewry, Belgium; Eugene Gold, vice president, National Conference on Soviet Jewry, U.S.; Maurice Sabbah, president, Spanish Council on Soviet Jewry; Bennet Janovitz, chairman, National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, U.S.; Avraham Harman, president, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and Joseph Domberger, president, European B’nai B’rith.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
