U.S. Jews to Press Emigration Issue at Meeting

Leaders of major American Jewish organizations said Friday they are planning an airlift of private planes to Iceland, carrying public officials and relatives of Soviet dissidents who will seek to pressure President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to stress human rights during their meeting.

The airlift, together with newspaper advertisements and sermons by rabbis across the country during Rosh Hashanah services this weekend, is part of a larger strategy for a massive presence in Washington by the nation’s Jewish community if the two world leaders agree to a formal summit there.

A representative of the group is in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, seeking an exemption to local policy prohibiting landings by private aircraft during the talks. The organizers hope to use four donated planes to fly to Iceland with a total of about 40 people. If discussions with authorities fail, a smaller number of commercial airline tickets have been purchased to guarantee a lobbying presence in Reykjavik.

“The meeting in Reykjavik has given us the opportunity to do a mini or a trial mobilization for the activities that will occur if there will be a true summit in Washington,” Morris B. Abram, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told a news conference in Manhattan.

Since the first Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Geneva last November, Abram charged, “The Soviet Union has been more repressive toward emigres. Gorbachev is a new face with the old politics.”

Drop in Emigration

Abram, who is also chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, said that since the last summit, emigration had slowed to a trickle.

He said rabbis throughout the nation were being encouraged to speak of the plight of Soviet Jews in their Rosh Hashanah sermons and to urge their congregations to send telegrams to President Reagan wishing him success in his efforts to gain peace and strengthen the cause of human rights.

He said advertisements would appear soon in major newspapers with the theme “Let my people go” and calling on the Soviet Union to establish fair, equitable and published standards for determining who can emigrate.

Abram said that since the talks were announced on Tuesday, he had conferred with Secretary of State George P. Shultz and White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, and both had assured him that Soviet Jewry is a matter of top concern and will be discussed.