Speech #970203913

For almost 12 years. Ida Nudel has suffered at the hands of her own government to a degree almost unimaginable to us here in the United States and the other democratic countries of the West. Her saga has continued almost as long as the entire Jewish emigration movement. and serves. unfortunately. as a clear illustration of the individuals relation to the government in the Soviet Union. She first applied for her exit visa in May 1971. but was denied it. according to the Soviet Government. because of her knowledge of unspecified "secrets" associated with her work as a costing accountant for the Moscow Institute of Hydrology and Microbiological Synthesis for Planning and Production. Of course. only 8 months later she was dismissed from her job there. As a result of her subsequent tireless work on behalf of certain refuseniks who were at the time worse off than herselfwork which. incidentally earned her the nickname of the "Guardian Angel."-Ida Nudel became the subject of increasing harassment. Her plight was dramatized to the world in 1978 when she bravely hung from her apartment balcony a banner simply reading "KGB. give me my visa." For this act of extreme defiance according to totalitarian standards. and for other trumpedup charges. Ida Nudel was sentenced to serve 4 years of internal exile in Siberia. Since I last spoke of Ida Nudel on March 3. 1982. in support of House Joint Resolution 373 urging the Soviets to cease religious presecution. Ida Nudel has been released and has managed to return to her Moscow apartment. only to face a new round of Government harassment designed to strangle her hope and her spirit. Her new application to emigrate was refused on the pretext that she has no permanent resident status. yet her application for this status was denied because of her "criminal" background. which. of course was made inevitable by her demand that she be granted her right to emigrate. This cruel charade was repeated again upon her application for resident status in Riga. the Capital of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. It is heartbreaking to report that she was last seen sleeping in the train station there before pressing elsewhere for justice. The string of horror stories which have composed Ida Nudels life in the hands of her own Government are all too familiar to those who have monitored Soviet treatment of Jews who seek to emigrate to Israel. The pattern of imprisonment. internal exile. beatings. confinement to mental institutions. isolation from family members. seizure of personal property and a diabolically imaginative variety of forms of physical and psychological harassment is wellestablished. Yet. each new case. each new life spoiled by official Soviet descrimination and persecution of members of religious minorities evokes in me a renewed feeling of contempt and disgust for a government which could behave so inhumanely. The destructiveness of these policies is amplified by the Soviet emigration statistics which show that the number of people having emigration requests granted has come to a virtual halt. thus shutting off the only avenue of hope for the many thousands of Soviet Jews who have requested invitations to emigrate. Such emigrations. which the Soviets pledged to allow in exchange for the acceptance by the West of several objectives very important to them during the Helsinki conference in 1975. has plummeted from 51.320 in 1979 to 9.447 last year to an average of 300 per month from January through April of this year. and now down to 205 in May. the lowest level since the beginning of the emigration movement in 1970. Not only have the number of Jewish emigrations decreased sharply recently. but there are now reports that a new and even more evil. if this is possible. quality to the persecution of Soviet Jews has insinuated itself into the situation. Steady increases in Governmentsponsored and condoned antiSemitism and a dramatic escalation of the KGBs attacks on Jewish culturalists and Hebrew teachers raises the specter of a sustained governmentwide campaign to persecute all Jews. regardless of whether they request emigration visas or not. These ominous developments prompt me to ask how far the Soviet state is willing to go in persecuting these powerless individuals. singled out because they do not conform to the twisted Soviet notion of good citizenship: To what extent of hypocrisy will that Government indulge in refusing to comply with its obligations agreed to under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. the Helsinki Final Act. and the Constitution of the U.S.S.R.? We see in these examples the "mirrorimage" quality of the individuals relation to the State in the United States and in the Soviet Union.