President. of show trials. and effectively illustrate the antiSemitism practiced in the Soviet Union. The harsh sentencesincluding two death sentencesimposed upon 11 citizens of the Soviet Union last week. nine of them of the Jewish faith. on charges of planning an airplane hijacking have aroused a broad spectrum of world protest and concern. including a most important protest from the Vatican and even from some European Communist Parties. The events of last weekand the prospect of a further trialone to have started tomorrow but postponed to January 6. of nine defendants who sought permission to emigrate to Israel. are seen by world opinion as much more than a domestic criminal trial in the U.S.S.R. Rather. these events are viewed as an intensification to a more active level of a Soviet campaign of thinly veiled antiSemitism that has been building over recent years. These events raise a specter of the pastthe widely publicized conspiracy charges. the detailed "confessions" and the subsequent harsh sentences. all part of the panoply employed by the Soviets to score propaganda points for either home or foreign consumption.
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emigrate