150 Attend Rally for Refuseniks

About 150 people, many of them carrying signs saying “Free Soviet Jews,” attended a noon rally Thursday outside the county Hall of Administration in support of a long list of “refuseniks”--Jews whose applications to leave the Soviet Union have been denied.

Local religious leaders read the names of 160 refuseniks at the Santa Ana rally. The names were taken from a book by the B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League that contains the names of 12,000 Soviet Jews whose emigration applications have been denied.

Excerpts from the rolls of refuseniks whose names appear in the ADL’s “A Uniquely Jewish List” were read aloud at about 100 different community rallies throughout the country and in 42 other countries Thursday. In Santa Ana, city, county and state resolutions proclaiming the day Soviet Jewry Day were read.

B’nai B’rith representative Bea Lewiston told the audience, “We are here to remind the world and particularly the Soviets that we have not forgotten the 12,000, nor have we forgotten the other hundreds of thousands who wish to leave.”

The National Conference on Soviet Jewry estimates that about 400,000 Jews would leave the Soviet Union if emigration restrictions, which require invitations from nuclear families living abroad, were lifted.

Lewiston described refuseniks as Soviet Jews “whose lives have been shattered as a result of their applying to leave and who’ve become pariahs, forced to live in a state-imposed no man’s land.”

Support for the refuseniks was enthusiastic at the Santa Ana rally.

Many people sang along with about 60 children from the Jewish Studies Institute in Anaheim who performed songs dubbed “the anthems of refuseniks” in Hebrew. The songs included one entitled “The Nation of Israel Lives.”

Irwin Brenstock, 49, a member of Temple B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley, said in an interview that he believed that recent decisions to allow several prominent Soviet dissenters to emigrate was a public relations ploy by the Soviet Union.

Brenstock said it was necessary for people to continue “to put pressure” on the Soviet Union to allow refuseniks to immigrate to Israel or anywhere else where they could freely practice their religion.

Michael Hedved, 23, who came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1980, said people were becoming too “complacent” because of the recent release of a few dissidents.