Speech #1020081465

Mr. President. I would like to speak today about Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. This issue has tremendous personal meaning to me. since my father. Leon Wellstone. fled prerevolutionary Russla to escape the pogroms and other forms of discrimination against Jews. I will never forget how grateful my father. who is no longer alive. was to live in our country. I know if he were alive today. he would insist that I do all that I can as a U.S. Senator to help others emigrate to the United States. When my father lived in Russia. the country was in upheaval. Once again. the Soviet Union is in upheaval. and this time I hope it will turn out well for the people. And during this time of transformationand I hope avid pray it will be a democratic transformationone manifestation of the changes initiated by President Gorbachev is the Governments willingness to grant Jewish people permission to emigrate. Last year alone. 180.000 Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union as compared to 1.000 allowed to emigrate in 1986. This spring. the Soviet Parliament passed a -ew emigration law which codified t? ianges and established this as a hu. Ight in the law of the land. I welco... is initiative and all the democratization that has taken place in the Soviet Union and. once again. hope that it will turn out well for the people. However. despite the progress. there are mary Jews who are refused the right to emigrate because they know alleged "state secrets." These secrecy refusniks. as they are known. range from engineers to musicians. Many of them had only limited access to classified information. and in other cases. the "secrets of the state" which they knew are now public information and really have become obsolete. A decade of reform makes it crystal clear that todays refusniks represent a historic relic of past Soviet repressive policies and could not and must not be an intended outcome of current policy. But the result. Mr. President. is that all too many families are still torn apart. and many lives have been placed on hold by unreasonable refusals of permission to emigrate. I recently met the wife. son. and the father of one man caught in the Soviet emigration bureaucratic quagmire. That man is Ovsey Sady. Ovsey Sady currently lives in the Soviet Union. anxiously waiting to join his family in Minnesota.