U.S. Jewish Leaders Will Go to Iceland

The government of Iceland, stung by criticism that it is anti-Jewish, Tuesday granted permission for a handful of American Jewish leaders to fly here on the eve of the superpower conference for a few hours of quiet protest against the Kremlin’s treatment of Soviet Jews.

Prime Minister Steingrimur Hermannsson made it clear, however, that his government will continue to bar other protests at the meeting this weekend between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and will do everything it can to keep everyone else except government officials and journalists from reaching Iceland.

“Our very small police force can not take care of all the groups that want to come,” Hermannsson said on Icelandic radio. “But this group (of Jewish leaders) was very cooperative.”

Jerry Strober, a spokesman for the New York-based National Conference on Soviet Jewry, said the Icelandic government has accepted his compromise proposal that it allow a scaled-down delegation of no more than 10 Jewish leaders to come for six hours on Friday to hold a news conference in Reykjavik. He said the group has chartered an executive jet to fly in eight people--the maximum number the jet could accommodate.

Originally Aimed for 50

Although always intending to spend no more than a few hours in Iceland, Strober said, his organization had originally planned to send a group of 50 for a protest vigil as well as a news conference.

Strober also said the Jewish delegates will be gone before the Gorbachev-Reagan meeting opens Saturday morning. The group will hold its press conference on the plight of Soviet Jewry and leave in time to be home for the Jewish Sabbath, which starts at sundown Friday.

The delegation will be led by Morris B. Abram, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

The reluctant Icelandic decision to accept the visit of the Jewish leaders obviously had less to do with their offered compromise than with the furor provoked by the original ban on protests and the prime minister’s remarks about it.

‘Just Stay at Home’

After his government rejected the Jewish organization’s request to come, Hermannsson was quoted as telling journalists last weekend, “Frankly, I hope that those Jewish people will just stay at home, because I want to avoid any demonstrations.”

Annoyed by what sounded like an order to keep Jews out of Iceland, Strober, interviewed on Icelandic television, asked sarcastically if this little North Atlantic island nation of 240,000 intended to keep itself judenrein --the word used by Nazi Germany to describe a country emptied of Jews.

Obviously upset by this criticism and suggestions that Iceland was abandoning its own traditions of liberty, Hermannsson and other officials quickly insisted that he had been misunderstood. They said he was not singling out the Jews but wanted all protest organizations to keep out of Iceland until the summit is over.

“We want everything to be as calm and quiet and respectable as possible,” Helgi Agustsson, the Icelandic government spokesman for the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting, told a small group of American reporters. “The Icelandic government since the beginning has been a strong supporter of the state of Israel.”

But the explanations did not satisfy everyone, not even in Iceland.

In an editorial Tuesday, Morgunbladid, the nation’s largest newspaper, commented sharply: “We must welcome all those who come to Iceland in peace. Iceland has supported Israel very firmly in the United Nations, and Israel has the sympathy of Icelanders. There is no change in that, and it is unwise and a mistake for our leaders to make declarations that can be understood otherwise.”

The controversy clearly stemmed from the anxious concern of the Icelandic government that the summit conference--the most spectacular and complex international event ever staged in the capital of Reykjavik--be free from disturbances.

Hermannsson told his people, when the meeting was announced a week ago, that Iceland had no choice but to accept its role as conference host. It simply could not refuse, the prime minister said, to host an event that could prove so important for the world.

When Icelanders first heard the news, they were shocked. “Everyone said, ‘Can we do this?’ ” Agnes Bragadottir, a reporter for Morgunbladid, explained Tuesday. “ ‘Is it too big for us?’ ”

Gradually, their anxiety lessened, but one problem still remains on everyone’s mind. “The big question is security,” said Bragadottir.

The Icelandic journalist said that this issue is made more complex because “we Icelanders think that the main reason the Soviets wanted to meet here was that they believed there would be no demonstrations.”