[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 200 (Friday, December 15, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18684-S18686]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   REFUGEES FROM FORMER SOVIET UNION

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, yesterday, the distinguished chairman of 
the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, spoke against the Lautenberg 
amendment which assists refugees from the former Soviet Union and which 
is reauthorized under the House version of the State Department 
reauthorization bill.
  I support the amendment because it works. It has facilitated the 
rescue of more than 250,000 persecuted Jews and other minorities from 
the former Soviet Union since Congress adopted it in 1989. For decades, 
the United States led the world in seeking the release of the 
refuseniks and urging freedom of emigration under the Jackson-Vanik 
amendment. Having come this far, we should not abandon this historic 
commitment by bringing this humanitarian program to a premature end.
  Clearly, major political changes have occurred in the region. The 
Soviet Union is now the former Soviet Union. And most people there 
enjoy greater freedom today than they did a decade ago.
  But we only need to read the headlines to know that the region 
continues to face great upheaval. Jews and other minorities in the 
former Soviet Union are still the victims of persecution and deep-
seated hatred and antisemitism.
  When Senator Simpson and I met with the U.N. High Commissioner for 
Refugees earlier this year, she said she considered the former Soviet 
Union to be the most explosive part of the world for refugees. And 
visitors to the region over the past year have discovered alarming 
levels of anitsemitic persecution.
  An American delegation to the Ukraine in March found that Jews were 
victims of an organized harassment campaign. Many Ukrainian Jews 
received anonymous notices that read, 

[[Page S18685]]
``We give you the last opportunity to leave our Ukraine. Get out if you 
don't want to die.'' The fact that Jewish families in the former Soviet 
Union can be threatened repeatedly, denied employment, have their 
children mocked and beaten in school, and receive death notices like 
this one--all because they are Jews and all with the authorities 
standing idle--is ample evidence that these families need America's 
continuing support to provide a lifeline. That is what the Lautenberg 
amendment does.
  If there are abuses in the program, as Simpson states, we are 
prepared to work with him to address them, and I know that Senator 
Lautenberg joins in that commitment.
  Those who come to the United States under this program are checked 
against lookout lists and criminal databases, as are others who seek to 
enter the United States. As in all immigration programs, we deny entry 
to known criminals and any others excludable under the law. The numbers 
requiring help and rescue under the Lautenberg amendment are declining. 
But we must not bring this historic help to a hasty and premature end.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two articles which 
describe some of the problems facing Jews in the former Soviet Union be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the articles are ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

          [From the Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 27, 1995]

            Liberators of Auschwitz Yet To Learn Its Lesson

                           (By Wendy Sloane)

       In the last few years, Alexander Kleiman has witnessed a 
     series of attacks on the Moscow Choral Synagogue, one of only 
     two synagogues left in the capital after a third burned down 
     in unexplained circumstances.
       Two years ago, vandals smashed several windows of the 
     dilapidated building in central Moscow. This winter, ``Save 
     Russia, Kill the Zhids [a derogatory word for Jews]'' was 
     scrawled in bright paint across the building. A week later, 
     the front facade was shot up with bullets.
       ``Russians learn to call a Jew a zhid from the moment 
     they're born. Anti-Semitism is in their blood,'' says Mr. 
     Kleiman, the synagogue's chief administrator.
       ``If the American president and Congress allowed all 
     [Russian] Jews to immigrate,'' he says, ``I can guarantee 
     that 90 percent would leave.''
       As the world commemorates the 50th anniversary of the 
     Soviet Army's liberation of the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp 
     in Poland today, anti-Semitic sentiments are increasingly 
     common in Russia, and the government is doing little to stem 
     the tide.


                            scant attention

       While Russians have complained that the world community has 
     made little mention of the fact that it was largely Russians 
     who liberated the camp, they have done little to commemorate 
     the event themselves.
       Alla Gerber, a Jewish deputy to the State Duma (lower house 
     of parliament), said no ceremony would have been held in 
     Russia had she not organized an event. Neither President 
     Boris Yeltsin nor his closest aides will attend the 
     ceremonies in Poland.
       ``The current period of economic crisis, combined with an 
     absence of real power and a spiritual vacuum, is giving rise 
     to fascism and anti-Semitism here,'' says Ms. Gerber, who 
     represents the liberal Russia's Choice parliamentary faction 
     and is one of the few deputies--who are both Jewish and non-
     Jewish--to speak out against anti-Semitism.
       ``What will happen depends on how the government decides to 
     use the idea of Russian nationalism, either as a patriotic 
     idea or as a totalitarian fascist one,'' she says.
       President Yeltsin marked the anniversary Wednesday by 
     rehabilitating millions of gulag prisoners who were 
     imprisoned by Josef Stalin after World War II for suspected 
     collaboration with Nazis. But he did not mention that most of 
     the estimated 1.5 million people who died in the Auschwitz-
     Birkenau death factory were Jews.
       In a speech to the United Nations last September, Yeltsin 
     officially condemned anti-Semitism. But he has yet to do so 
     on Russian soil.
       ``Both the authorities as well as leaders of democratic 
     parties presume that if they make an official statement it 
     will reduce their authority in the eyes of their 
     electorate,'' says Mikhail Chlenov, chairman of the Vaad, an 
     umbrella organization that brings roughly 275 Jewish groups 
     together.
       ``I would say that anti-Semitism has become an integral 
     part of Russian politics,'' he adds.
       Politicians ranging from local deputies to ultranationalist 
     Vladimir Zhirinovsky have risen to prominence on anti-Semitic 
     platforms, and some senior bishops in the Russian Orthodox 
     Church routinely accuse Jews of exerting undue influence.
       Some Jewish leaders have received death threats, and 
     members of anti-Semitic groups are often seen at public 
     rallies, holding placards accusing Zionists of ruining the 
     country as part of a ``Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.''


                            a step backward

       Russia has ``returned to a period of anti-Semitism, 
     ultrareactionary [attitudes], and chauvinism, patronized by 
     law-enforcement bodies,'' said Sergei Gryzunov, chairman of 
     Russia's State Press Committee, at an international 
     antifascist forum last week.
       He referred in particular to the ``huge number'' of legally 
     issued nationalist and chauvinist publications that have 
     sprung up since the Soviet collapse.
       But Viktor Korchagin, director of the Russian Patriot's 
     Library publishing house, says he has a simple solution to 
     what he terms the ``Jewish question.'' To rid Russia of anti-
     Semitism, he says, Russia must simply rid itself of its 
     estimated 750,000 Jews.
       ``We're not advocating the return of pogroms,'' he says, 
     referring to the organized persecution and massacre of Jews 
     in czarist Russia. ``We just want President Yeltsin to decree 
     that all Jews be deported.''
       Mr. Korchagin insists that he is targeting the ``Jewish 
     mafia''--which in his view includes all government ministers, 
     all of Yelstin's aides, and all the top editors of Russia's 
     major newspapers--not the Jewish people.
       ``The most powerful mafia in Russia is the Jewish mafia. 
     They steal from the people, but the editors don't write about 
     it because they themselves are all Jews,'' he says. ``If we 
     don't want anti-Semitism to exist in Russia, then all Jews 
     should leave.''
       According to a poll conducted by the respected National 
     Center For Opinion Research, 45 percent of Russians believe 
     that other nationalities should be expelled, while another 31 
     percent spoke out against equal rights for other races.
                                                                    ____


              [From the Jewish Advocate, May 12-18, 1995]

                 Synagogue Bombing Rocks Riga Community

                       (By Debra Nussbaum Cohen)

       New York (JTA).--One day before Riga's Jewish community 
     celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II 
     and the Holocaust, a bomber planted explosives at the Latvian 
     city's sole remaining synagogue.
       The bomb exploded at 4 a.m. local time in the early hours 
     of the Sabbath day, shattering the Peitavas Synagogue's glass 
     windows and light fixtures and ruining its basement 
     sanctuary, according to Mordechai Glazman, one of two 
     Lubavitch rabbis at the synagogue. There were no injuries.
       Most of the community's Jewish residents, who number 
     between 14,500 and 20,000, think that the bombing is related 
     to what is known in Latvia as the Day of Freedom, which marks 
     the end of the war, Glazman said in a telephone interview 
     from Riga.
       It is considered an especially significant holiday in the 
     Jewish community, he said.
       In the wake of the attack, Latvia's president and prime 
     minister made unscheduled visits to the synagogue and Riga's 
     Jewish cemetery to mark the holiday Monday.
       The officials had originally planned to honor the Latvian, 
     Russian and German soldiers who died in the war at their 
     respective cemeteries, Glazman said.
       They joined the Jewish community's leaders, Holocaust 
     survivors and Jewish army veterans in a ceremony to honor the 
     dead.
       Latvia's president, Guntis Ulmanis, put flowers on a mass 
     grave of Jewish soldiers, in the cemeteries and told the 
     hundreds of people gathered that the government would do 
     everything it can to apprehend and punish the perpetrators, 
     Glazman said.
       ``The prime minister said that it's probably people with an 
     interest in making a bad name for Latvia in the world who did 
     this,'' he said.
       There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Riga, 
     the rabbi said.
       Last week, the police confiscated 1,000 copies of Mein 
     Kampf and arrested the printer, who had produced Adolf 
     Hitler's autobiography in Latvian. Four thousand copies had 
     already been sold, said Glazman, and 5,000 more were 
     scheduled to be printed.
       Hundreds of the city's Jewish residents visited the 
     synagogue Sunday to witness the damage for themselves.
       The blast left the first-floor sanctuary, used for worship 
     twice a day, unusable, said the rabbi's wife, Rivki Glazman.
                                                                    ____


                [From the Jewish World, Mar. 3-9, 1995]

                 Freedom To Hate Jews in Today's Russia

                            (By Walter Ruby)

       A top leader of ex-Soviet Jews in the United States 
     believes that Jews in Russia face greater peril from an 
     explosion of anti-Semitic violence today than at any time in 
     memory.
       Leonid Stonov, a longtime refusenik who emigrated to the 
     U.S. in 1990 and today serves as president of the American 
     Association of Russian Jews, told members of the Long Island 
     Committee for Soviet Jewry (LICSJ) that he returned from a 
     recent visit to Moscow fearful that a fascist takeover of 
     Russia may be only weeks or months away.
       Stonov, a leading representative of the Union of Councils 
     for Soviet Jews, spoke recently by telephone from his home in 
     Chicago with LICSJ members gathered at the North Woodmere 
     home of Murray and Rhoda Dorfman.
       ``Russia is moving rapidly toward fascism in the same way 
     that Germany did in the 1930s,'' said Stonov, ``and, as in 
     Germany, anti-Semitism is an integral part of the fascist 
     movement.''
     
[[Page S18686]]

       According to Stonov, when the Russian State Duma--the lower 
     house of Parliament--held hearings on fascism, 
     ``[ultranationalist leader Vladimir] Zhirinovsky said that 
     the real danger to Russia came from `democratic fascism,' 
     while others spoke of the perils of `Masonic fascism.' Never 
     before in Russia--even during Czarist time--had there been 
     such open, animal expressions of anti-Semitism during 
     parliamentary discussions.''
       Stonov was speaking to LICSJ members who had gathered to 
     view a screening of Freedom To Hate on WLIW-TV (Channel 21), 
     together with the film's director, Ray Errol Fox. The hour-
     long documentary, narrated by Dan Rather and introduced by 
     Jack Lemmon, explores the upsurge of anti-Semitism in the 
     former Soviet Union.
       Freedom To Hate includes extensive interviews with leaders 
     of the neo-Nazi Pamyat movement, discussions of fascism and 
     anti-Semitism with such prominent Russians as poet Yevgeny 
     Yevtushenko and commentator Vladimir Posner, and interviews 
     with Russian Jews victimized by anti-Semitic violence.
       Though filmed mainly in 1990 and 1991, the documentary 
     closes with a recent scene of Zhirinovsky delivering a 
     menacing speech, showing that the conditions portrayed in the 
     film still exist.
       Although Stonov noted that the fear of imminent pogroms in 
     1990-1991 has largely abated, he said that ``the situation is 
     far more dangerous for Jews today than it was when this film 
     was being made. In those days, it was only Pamyat . . . a 
     relatively small organization . . . that was openly espousing 
     anti-Semitism. Today in Russia, there are 137 open anti-
     Semitic newspapers being sold on the streets . . . and the 
     influence of the anti-Semitic organization is growing 
     rapidly.''
       He added, ``The danger is not only from Zhirinovsky. There 
     is Alexander Barkashov, who heads his own growing anti-
     Semitic organization with its own private army. Another 
     prominent anti-Semite is Nikolai Lysenko, who argues that 
     Russians should be particularly afraid of Jews who forego 
     involvement in Jewish affairs, but instead are active in 
     Russian politics, business and cultural life.''
       Lysenko is a former Pamyat member now in the Duma. 
     Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democratic party won about 25 percent 
     of the vote in the parliamentary elections of 1992.
       Stonov said he is concerned that with the collapsing 
     popularity of President Boris Yeltsin in the wake of the 
     brutal war in Chechnya, the heir apparent may be former vice 
     president Alexander Rutskoi. Rutskoi was jailed by Yeltsin in 
     October 1993 for inciting to rebellion, but the nationalist-
     dominated Parliament ordered him set free in early 1994.
       Stonov noted that Rutskoi, formerly considered sympathetic 
     to Israel and Russian Jewry, has in the past several years 
     forged close political ties with the coalition of former 
     Communists and Russian nationalists who believe Jews are 
     responsible for many of Russia's ills.
       Asked about Rutskoi's declaration during a 1992 visit to 
     Israel that his mother was Jewish, Stonoff wryly noted that 
     during a visit to Warsaw, the former vice president had also 
     declared his mother to have been Polish, In any event, said 
     Stonov, Rutskoi's comments in Israel were barely mentioned in 
     the Russian media.
       Queried as to why Russian emigration to Israel has dropped 
     to one third the level of 1990-1991 if the peril to Jews has 
     increased, Stonov responded. ``One might also ask why, after 
     the Los Angeles earthquake, people began rebuilding their 
     houses.
       ``Many of the Jews who have remained in Russia have deep 
     psychological roots there. Others have gone into business in 
     Russia. They don't want to believe the situation there will 
     end like it did in Germany. Still, with the rapid worsening 
     of the situation, I am expecting a major new wave of 
     emigration.''
       In the wake of Yeltsin's Chechnya misadventure and 
     increasing movement toward the right, Stonov contended that 
     ``the political situation in Russia is dramatically changing 
     for the worse and the West seems to be unaware of what is 
     happening. America doesn't seem to understand that the 
     democratic order in Russia is again under threat.
       ``I think the Clinton administration should be pressing the 
     Russian government to move faster toward a market economy,'' 
     continued Stonov. ``Credits should be given to Russia only if 
     real privatization is carried out there. When the West gives 
     credits without privatization, all the money just ends up in 
     Swiss bank accounts.''
       While attending an anti-fascist forum during his Moscow 
     visit, Stonov found that all the democratic leaders feel 
     extremely threatened by what is happening. ``[Human Rights 
     Commissioner] Sergei Kovalyov had very sad words. He said, 
     `We Russians are ruled by scum and we are scum for allowing 
     that to happen.' ''
       Noting that Yeltsin has never directly denounced anti-
     Semitism in Russia, Stonov said, ``Anti-Semitism is 
     flourishing as never before, in part because there are no 
     official constraints.'' He added, ``If there were free 
     elections tomorrow, the fascists would probably not win in 
     Moscow, but they would do very well in provincial areas like 
     the Urals, parts of Siberia, and Krasnodar in southern 
     Russia. The political position of the fascists is very 
     strong, and they are now in a position to stimulate a pogrom 
     from the podium in the State Duma.''
       Stonov praised Freedom to Hate as ``a very important work 
     that will hopefully help to get across the message of how 
     perilous the situation of Jews in the former Soviet Union 
     really is.''
       But, he said to the LICSJ group, he has had a hard time 
     getting the film screened. ``Many people, including prominent 
     Jews, have accused me of exaggerating the situation.
       ``Despite everything that has happened recently, there is 
     still a kind of euphoria in this country among American Jews 
     about the situation in Russia.
       ``The way that I present the situation is intense,'' said 
     Fox, ``but everything I show is true. I don't know how else 
     to show the situation in order to get the message across.''
       Lynn Singer, longtime executive director of LICSJ, 
     remarked, ``All people of good will need to redouble our 
     efforts to get out the word about the deadly peril facing 
     Jews in the former Soviet Union.''

  Mr. DORGAN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.

                          ____________________