Speech #920077240

In Moscow with a Jewish population of 500.000 there is only one rabbi and he is 78 years old and ailing. In the city of Leningrad with a Jewish population of 300.000 there is only one rabbi and he is over 80 years of age. The Jews are among the few dissenters willing to publicly stand up in the Soviet Union and ask that the Soviet Union honor its own constitution and treaty commitments with the United Nations which provide that Soviet citizens shall have the right to freely emigrate. Tens of thousands of Jews desire to leave the Soviet Union and most of them desire to go to the State of Israel which welcomes them. Recently 45 Georgian Jews engaged in a fast in Moscow in support of their wish to emigrate and were given 15 days in jail sentences. The Soviet Unions campaign to stamp out these efforts to call the worlds attention to the Soviet Unions barbarism leveled against the Jews most recently resulted in three trials in which 34 Jews were sentenced to penal camps. Basically the charges against most of them were that they had sought to teach their children in the Yiddish and Hebrew languages and to do so they had translated and published books for that purpose.