Faced with a tightened U.S. immigration policy while massive numbers of Jews continue to pour out of the Soviet Union, Jewish aid organizations are making a new, concerted effort to get the Soviets to go to Israel.
The new policy includes educating the Soviets about Israel and the drastic step of cutting off funds to Soviet Jews deemed unlikely ever to receive refugee visas to the United States.
Separate delegations from U.S. Jewish organizations were in Rome this week, and both left convinced of the importance of promoting Soviet Jewish aliyah.
“It’s a serious dilemma,” said one member of the United Jewish Appeal’s Prime Minister’s Mission, which arrived here Monday. The mission included donors who had committed an annual gift of $100,000 or more to the UJA.
“People say, ‘I worked for 40 years to support a haven for Jews — Israel. I don’t want to create another such haven for Jews” in the United States, he said.
“There are big problems,” agreed Sylvia Hassenfeld, president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, visiting here with JDC Executive Vice President Michael Schneider.
“For all their lives these people wanted to go to the United States — it’s their life’s dream. They have absolutely no knowledge of Israel. Any knowledge is negative through the propaganda that’s been fed to them,” Hassenfeld said.
About 20 percent of exiting Soviet Jews go directly from Moscow to Israel via Bucharest. The rest are determined to go to the United States and end up in temporary accommodations at seaside towns near Rome, where they must wait weeks for U.S. refugee visas.
13,000 NOW IN ITALY
Under tightened U.S. immigration procedures, about 17 percent of applicants are being rejected for visas, unable to prove “a well-founded fear of persecution.”
Today, about 13,000 Soviet transmigrants are living in crowded conditions in Ladispoli, Santa Marinella and a handful of other towns.
JDC, which provides the emigres with medical, social and educational services while in Italy, is leading the effort to get many of the Soviets to change their minds and head for Israel.
At the JDC-operated schools in Ladispoli, educational programs run in conjunction with the Jewish Agency put the emphasis on Israel. The JDC also tries to explain why not all applicants will get visas.
But beyond what Hassenfeld calls “indoctrination,” there is frank, and unavoidable, financial coercion.
Tight funds are squeezing JDC operations in Ladispoli, staff members say. Last year, JDC’s costs for transmigrants amounted to between $14 million and $15 million.
This year, costs will run at about $54 million. Daily stipends given by JDC to each transmigrant have already been slashed from $8 to $6 per person — about the price of four cans of tuna fish here — and further cuts are not ruled out, depending on funds.
More dramatically, the organization has decided to cut off funds completely to Soviet Jews who are rejected twice for refugee visas by the U.S. Immigration Service.
According to JDC figures, about 3,000 Soviet Jews have been denied a refugee visa once and about 400 have also had a second application rejected.
The changes have not been met without protests from the rejected emigres. Loath to go to Israel, unlikely to be allowed into the United States as refugees, some emigrants have begun to stage protests.
According to Hassenfeld, one group of emigrants demonstrated at the U.S. Embassy in Rome several weeks ago. JDC met with the American ambassador to Italy, Peter Secchia, who seemed “very disturbed by the picketing, first as an American and also as a U.S. ambassador to Rome wanting good relations here.”
During the UJA delegation’s visit to Ladispoli, the leaders were greeted by a young man who had been rejected, bearing a placard saying JDC and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “betray Jews. Children have schools but parents have no money to live.”
A little girl in the JDC-run nursery school was also seen with a sign hung around her neck saying, “America doesn’t want me. I am refusal.”
Sam Grand, a UJA mission member from Detroit, said emigres told him, “If things are so great there in Israel, why don’t you live there?”
JDC said that its new push to get the Soviet Jews to go to Israel has begun to have some positive results. Since January, some 250 Soviet Jews who originally wanted to go to the United States have instead opted for Israel, including some who already had received U.S. visas.
Aid officials say new legislation pending in Washington, which would increase the number of refugee slots available to Eastern bloc countries, may ease the immigration crisis.
There is also talk in Washington of eventually handling all processing of Soviet Jews in Moscow, avoiding the backlog in Vienna and Rome.
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.
