As chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. I wish to announce that I will very soon resume hearings begun last spring on the denial of human rights to Jews in the Soviet Union. Our hearings in May revealed the suffering of a people forbidden to teach or fully practice their religion. a people kept virtual prisoners in the Soviet Union. unable to emigrate to the land of their choiceall in contravention of the United Nations Charter. the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and. indeed. Soviet law itself. The focus of these new hearings will be the AndersonONeill resolution. sponsored by more than 100 Congressmen from both parties. urging the State Department to raise the issue in the U.N. General Assembly of the Soviet violation of the Declaration of Human Rights. It also requests the President to demand of the Soviet Government that it permit Jews and all other citizens to emigrate freely. In recent days there have been indications out of the Soviet Union that the glare of adverse world publicity over that governments treatment of its Jewish citizens may be having some effect. This. hopefully. will result in removal of some barriers to Jewish emigration from Russia. I applaud the courage of those prominent Soviet citizens who could no longer ignore the constant injustices they witnessed and have publicly expressed their abhorrence of the official policy. Perhaps it is too much to hope that hearings and protests will overnight work a change in years of calculated harassment and persecution. but I do know that we must continue to avail ourselves of whatever methods of influence we have at our disposal until this blot on the freedom of all the worlds peoples is erased.
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emigrate emigration