Approximately two-thirds of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing all 50 states of the Union, joined this weekend in a Passover eve appeal to the Soviet Union to ease religious and cultural restrictions on Jews. Passover begins tomorrow at sundown.
A total of 282 Congressmen signed a joint statement initiated by Rep. Jonathan B. Bingham, New York Democrat. Signatories included Speaker of the House John McCormack, Massachusetts Democrat; Chairman Thomas Morgan, Pennsylvania Democrat, of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs; House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan and House Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma.
The joint statement condemned “the suppression of Jewish spiritual and cultural life in the USSR,” Last year 90 of the 100 members of the Senate signed a similar statement. This year’s statement charged that “The Government of the USSR continues to pursue a program calculated to destroy the means of Jewish cultural and spiritual survival, and to break the will of Soviet Jewry to live as Jews.”
The signatories called for emigration of Jews who want to leave the Soviet Union. The statement cited the expression of Premier Alexei Kosygin in which the Russian leader said Jews were free to depart from his country to join relatives abroad. The Congressmen said “We await translation of those words into deeds.”
The Congressional expression charged that Russia has singled Jews out from other minority groups by denying schools, federations, contacts with Jews abroad, and by inhibiting Jews from protesting by “a systematic campaign of intimidation.”
(A display advertisement in today’s New York Times, signed by Jewish survivors from Nazi concentration camps, appealed to Soviet Prime Minister Alexei N. Kosygin to make good on the pledge he made in Paris last December to permit Soviet Jews to emigrate for reunification with their families abroad.)
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