Word: rabbis
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...What I heard the Rabbi say, through the din of protest, was what I know to be a fact: That Jews suffer no greater restrictions on their religious life than do others in Russia who still believe in God. Great numbers of Baptists and Orthodox Christians are no more, no less persecuted for their faith than Jews. Why must the American Jew assume he has a priority on suffering...
...Your article on the visit of Moscow's Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin [June 28] contained a number of misleading points. The American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry is not an "antiCommunist" group. It is ideologically neutral, being concerned solely with the ame- lioration of the condition of Jews in the Soviet Union. Most unfortunate was the juxtaposing of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and other nations. They are by no means similar. In the U.S.S.R. the government itself is responsible for a program aimed at the religious and cultural restriction of Jews. Indeed, so extensive is this...
Cynical Act. Whatever the merits of Levin's arguments, he was given little chance to present them. The American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, an anti-Communist organization that specializes in publicizing evidence of Russian antiSemitism, warned Jews not to be taken in by anything that the Moscow rabbi had to say. Conference officials proclaimed his visit "another cynical act on the part of the Soviet Union to hamper relationships between Soviet and American Jews." Levin's first press conference was turned into a shambles by two rival spokesmen of the crowd that had come to greet...
...nights later, the rabbi appeared in the assembly hall of Manhattan's Hunter College to deliver the major speech of his two-week tour. He found a picket line of Jewish university students outside the hall, had to enter through the back door. Inside, loud and strident objectors in the audience of 1,700 repeatedly interrupted his speech, which he delivered in Yiddish, with catcalls and jeers. Levin was booed when he reported that there was a kosher slaughterhouse in Moscow, booed again when he said Jews were admitted freely into Russian schools and had no trouble getting jobs...
...worship. Many U.S. Jewish observers are convinced that their Russian brothers are suffering persecution, or at least discrimination. Underlying this conviction is bitterness about Soviet Russia's anti-Zionist foreign policy and refusal to allow Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel. The very fact that the Moscow rabbi was in the U.S. trying to "establish contact" with U.S. Jewry suggests that some of the charges of anti-Semitism were beginning to bother the Russians. As he held court in his suite in Manhattan's medium-posh Essex House, the rabbi reiterated two basic arguments, both undeniable...