“Appeal to Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin” Ad in the New York Times from the Academic Committee on Soviet Jewry

December 3 1970

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In the Soviet Union today, tens of thousands of Jews have applied for exit permits to reunite with the dispersed remnants of their families in Israel. With few exceptions, their applications have been turned down time and again. Several hundred rejections, have written individual and collective open letters and appeals to you and your colleagues, to the United Nations Commission on Human Right, to Secretary-General U Thant, to Premier Golda Meir, to world public opinion.

The burden of their appeals is simple and clear; it is impossible to live with pride and dignity as Jews in the USSR. As human beings and as Jews, they seek fulfillment and family reunion in Israel, which they regard as their ancestral homeland.

Thirty-five of them have been arrested and held incommunicado, or have been tried and jailed, for their daring persistence. These Jewish political prisoners, and the hundreds of their fellows, have done nothing more than rely on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the USSR has repeatedly endorsed, and which categorically assures everyone of the “right to leave an country, including his own…” (Article 13/2).

They even rely upon, Premier Kosygin. For you yourself, in response to a question on whether the USSR would allow emigration of Soviet Jews in order to be reunited with their families in Israel said in Paris exactly four years ago today on December 3, 1966:

AS REGARDS THE REUNION OF FAMILIES, SHOULD ANYONE WANT TO BE REUNITED WITH THEIR FAMILIES, OR WANT TO LEAVE THE SOVIET UNION, THE ROAD IS OPEN AND NO PROBLEM EXISTS HERE.
(Izvestia, December 5, 1956)