Reagan Challenges Soviets at Holocaust Memorial Site

President Reagan today unveiled the cornerstone of the Holocaust Memorial Museum near the Washington Monument and renewed his challenge to the Soviet Union to relax restrictions on Jewish emigration.

“I want to ask the Soviet leaders a question: ‘Where are those exit visas? Where are they?’ ” Reagan said in his speech to about 1,500 people at the museum site.

The museum, being built with private funds on land donated by the federal government, is expected to open late in 1990 to commemorate the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and other persecuted people were killed by Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Reagan pulled a gold cord to unveil a chunk of pink North Carolina granite that will stand at the corner of the museum.

He said the museum “will examine the nature and meaning of the continuing curse that is anti-Semitism.”

“I think all of us here are aware of those, even among our own countrymen, who have dedicated themselves to the disgusting task of minimizing or even denying the truth of the Holocaust,” Reagan said.

“This act of intellectual genocide must not go unchallenged and those who advance these views must be held up to the scorn and wrath of all good and thinking people,” he said.

“We know that the United Nations, whose peacekeepers were honored only last week for their service to the world, has yet to repeal its infamous resolution equating Zionism and racism,” the President added. “We know where such intellectual infamy can lead.

“In these days of glasnost , we hear talk of liberalizing attitudes toward Judaism in the Soviet Union,” he said.

But, he said, “there are still tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Soviet Jews who wait to leave the Soviet Union. And here, as we lay this cornerstone and vow that the Jewish people will never stand alone against tyranny, I want to ask the Soviet leaders a question: ‘Where are those exit visas? Where are they?’ ”