THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Zionist Organization of America
Metropolitan Detroit District
NEWS
Changes For
Soviet Jews?
invites "lovers of Zion" to
participate in 3 exhilarating,
"behind the scene" Israel experiences.
BY ARTHUR J. MAGIDA
Special to The Jewish News
New Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev is a cipher to Ameri-
can observers of Soviet Jewry.
Since Gorbachev, who succeeded
Konstantin Chernenko as head of
the USSR on Monday, has said lit-
tle publicly about Soviet policies
toward Jews, there is no sign that
he will either continue — or
change — current emigration re-
strictions or repression of Jews by
the Soviet government.
Jerry Goodman, director of the
National Conference on Soviet
Jewry in New • York cautioned
that "Gorbachev is part of the
Soviet system. He rose through a
very limiting and, sometimes, a
very brutal bureaucracy. He is
shrewd and not to be considered
lightly. Anyone who thinks this
guy is a patsy is euphoric and
overly naive.
"My guess is that Gorbachev
was already in place when Cher-
nenko died," continued Goodman.
"They had known for over two
months that Chernenko was dy-
ing. So Gorbachev probably made
the major Soviet decisions of the
last few months. Essentially,
what we'll have from Gorbachev
is what we've had."
Virtually the only public
statement that Gorbachev, 54,
has made about Soviet Jews oc-
curred during his trip last De-
cember to London, where he and
his wife, Raisa, generally got rave
reviews from journalists and
politicians. Confronted almost
everywhere he went by questions
about Soviet policies toward its
Jews, Gorbachev finally an-
swered irritably that this "was an
internal matter." For years, this
has been the standard answer of
Soviet officials to questions about
their government's Jewish
policies. But, as one Soviet spe-
cialist said, "This was Gor-
bachev's first trip out of his coun-
try and maybe he was trying to
send a message back home."
Noting the tendency of Ameri-
can and European journalists to
tout the relatively young Gor-
bachev as a "refreshing" change
from the elderly and frail Cher-
nenko, Mark A. Epstein, execu-
tive director of the Union of Coun-
cils for Soviet Jews said, "There is
a strong tendency for Western
journalists to see Soviet politics in
terms of Western reference
points. Journalists like to say that
the younger_generation of Soviet
leaders is more 'liberal' than the
older leaders. But this isn't neces-
sarily so.
"Radical change is relatively
slow in any society," said Epstein.
"It's even slower in the Soviet
Union. The Soviet bureaucracy is
a very large and slow moving one.
It took Brezhnev over a decade to
make some important changes. It
took Andropov much shorter than
that, but he had been the head of
the KGB and had the residual
power that comes with that type of
position. Who knows how long it
will take Gorbachev to fully take
power? And to learn how to use
it?"
"Of course, we hope that Gor-
bachev will have a more
enlightened policy toward Jews
than his predecessors," said Eps-
tein. "But I have some deep skep-
ticism about him."
Friday, March 15, 1985
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