No Confirmation That 24-30 Soviet Jews Given Permission to Emigrate

There was no confirmation late this afternoon to reports from Moscow yesterday that two dozen or more Soviet Jewish activists had been granted emigration permission to rid the Kremlin of its most persistent gadflies on the issue. The reports put the number of Jews involved at 24 to 30. They reportedly had sat-in at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet last Wednesday and again on Monday of this week, petitioning for exit visas and demanding to know why they were not more readily available. Reportedly, a delegation of six talked with a high Soviet official and were told by him that permits were waiting for them at the OVIR, the office of visas and registrations. Meanwhile, 17 Soviet Jews have written to the chief of the Interior Ministry, Nikolai V. Shchelokov, charging that petitioners for permission to migrate to Israel have been subjected to insults beatings. “threats of physical reprisal…threatening telephone calls and loud knocks on the door…” The writers demanded “effective measures” against these “provocations,” or else “we will be compelled to defend our lives and human dignity ourselves.”

The Israeli Consulate made available today the text of the lengthy petition from 1,185 Soviet Jewish families totaling 4,056 persons that Ambassador Yosef Tekoah and a recent Soviet emigre, Mrs. Alla Rusinek, presented to United Nations Secretary General U Thant on Feb. 24. The writers complained that they were “at the mercy of arbitrariness and of lawlessness,…groundlessly subjected to oppression and persecution, and not because we have committed any crime.” They continued: “The only thing that we are ‘guilty’ of is of wanting to emigrate to the State of Israel, All of us have relatives and kin in Israel and we wish to reunite with them. We wish to live in our State, in the land of our ancestors, and to be with our own people which, after 2,000 years of wandering, suffering, oppression and homelessness, has at last attained its own homeland in the ancient land of the Jews.” The writers are from Georgian SSR, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moloavia, Bukhara, Tashkent, Leningrad, Moscow, the Ural Mountains and Siberia. Their petition was also sent to the UN’s Commission on Human Rights, the governments of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, and European newspapers.