Soviet Ban on Matzoh Assailed in Congress; U.S. Intervention Urged

Congressional concern and demands for U.S. intervention on behalf of Soviet Jewry mounted here today in the wake of published reports from Moscow that no matzoh will be available for Russian Jews this Passover.

In the Senate, Republican Senator Kenneth Keating of New York said he has dispatched a telegram to U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in the United Nations urging him to call on the United Nations Human Rights Commission to undertake an immediate study of what can be done to reverse the Soviet decision prohibiting the baking of matzohs. Keating told the Senate that the Soviet action was “a deliberate affront to the Jewish people” and that it was “clearly part of a Government-directed campaign” of persecution against all religion within the Soviet Union.

On the House side, Democratic Congressman Leonard Farbstein of New York called on Secretary of State Dean Rusk to appeal to the Russian leader “on humane grounds through appropriate diplomatic channels both here and abroad, to permit the importation of a supply of American-baked matzohs.” In a letter to Rusk, the New York lawmaker said that such an appeal “could in no sense be construed as an attempt at intervention on behalf of Soviet citizens.” The reference was to the State Department’s repeatedly stated Soviet position that it would be “difficult” for this Government to protest Soviet actions against Soviet citizens.

In a speech on the House floor, Rep. Farbstein labeled the reported Moscow ban on matzohs “the cruelest act of all.” Rep. Farbstein said that denial of matzoh for Soviet Jews is another step in the process of deculturization which is aimed at the destruction of all things Jewish within the Soviet Union.”

In still another development, New York Democratic Congressman Jacob Gilbert dispatched a telegram to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in which he said that denial of “such a simple and staple commodity is uncalled for and can only be looked upon as one more harassment and bitter blow inflicted upon the Jews in Russia.” Rep. Gilbert’s telegram said that “one can only assume that the increasing reports of persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union must be true.”

Another protest over the matzoh ban was voiced by Republican Congressman Steven Derounian of New York who called it “a real tragedy and shows up the Russian system for what it is.” Rep. Derounian said the order is further evidence be saw on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1955 that “there is really no freedom of worship.”

The New York legislator’s telegram, a copy of which was sent to Secretary of State Dean Rusk urging an immediate protest be filed with the Soviet Union “in an effort to prevent this latest blow against religious freedom,” asked the Soviet envoy to do what he can “to bring about a reversal of the order.”