Speech #1000110285

Speaker. the time is ripe for the United States to focus on the rights of Soviet Jews. With the recent completion of meetings between Secretary of State George Schultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and with future United StatesSoviet talks expected. we must continue to emphasize to the Soviet leadership that human rights must be on the agenda for successful negotiations. It is in this context that I bring your attention to the plight of Abram Kagan. a Soviet refusenik who has been denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Abram is an internationally known statistician who has received several invitations to scientific meetings outside the U.S.S.R.. but he has never been able to attend these seminars or to emigrate to Israel. although he and his family have been in refusal for more than 10 years. He has consistently been denied permission to emigrate because of secrecy. despite the fact that his employers at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics have led him to believe that there was no reason for him to be denied permission to emigrate. In actuality. Abram never had any contact with state secrets. having worked only as a theoretical mathematician whose papers have all appeared in the open scientific press. Just recently. the Soviet authorities granted permission to emigrate to everyone in his family. with the exception of Abram. To separate this loving father from his wife and two children is the ultimate cruelty of the Soviet Government. Sometimes the story of a single person or family can tell more about a system of government than all the statistics in the world. Abram Kagan is only one of thousands of people who have been victims of antiSemitism in the Soviet Union. To put the extent of Soviet repression into context. one estimate found as many as 400.000 Jews in the Soviet Union who have indicated a desire to emigrate.