William Korey’s “The Right to Leave for Soviet Jews: The Legal and Moral Aspects”

Abstract

This article was published in the first volume of East European Jewish Affairs in early 1971, when tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were pondering the subversive possibility of emigration to Israel. The upsurge in the Jewish national consciousness and nascent movement for the right to emigrate to Israel in the late 1960s and 1970s was inspired by the impressive victory of the Jewish State in the Six-Day War of June 1967. The historical moment when Korey was writing about the right of Soviet Jews to leave was marked by constant embarrassment of the Soviet government that, on the one hand, was signatory to several international human rights conventions that stipulated this universal right, but on the other hand detested the idea of lifting the Iron Curtain for thousands of potential émigrés. Korey reviews the previous decades of the relations between the Soviet and international legal system, mostly within the United Nations-based initiatives, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 from which USSR had abstained. On the other hand, Soviet authorities actively campaigned for repatriation to the USSR of the pre-World War I émigrés and resettled close to 100,000 Armenians from France, Turkey and the Middle East in Soviet Armenia. As far as Jews were concerned, during the 1950s the Soviet government allowed repatriation of about 200,000 Polish citizens (including many Jews) to Poland, realizing that many of them would move on to Israel. However, by the late 1960s, Nikita Khrushev’s Thaw had ended and Leonid Brezhnev’s government took a more conservative turn. It resealed the few holes in the Iron Curtain, so that after 1965, just a few hundred Soviet Jews were allowed to travel to the United States or Israel for humanitarian or family-related reasons. Korey’s article cites several curious responses of the high Soviet officials (Khrushev himself, Gromyko and Kosygin) to the questions posed by Western journalists and human rights activists – to the effect that while their Israeli relatives were pressing for family reunification, no Soviet Jews were actually interested in joining their brethren in Israel. The Foreign Ministry asserted that there were no requests for emigration from Soviet Jews in the late 1960s, while it was known from independent sources (like Western journalists and Zionist emissaries visiting USSR undercover) that about 10,000 of such applications for exit visas were pending. The number of applicants went up every year starting from 1968, and by 1970 reached tens of thousands. Soviet authorities were stunned by this unexpected manifestation of resistance and free will by Soviet Jews