RUMANIA: The Exodus Continued

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Though everyone involved, each for his own reasons, tried to play it down, the steady, almost stealthy, exodus of 17,000 Jews from Communist Rumania to Israel in the past six months (TIME, Jan. 26) was bound to attract the notice of the Arab world. This week the largely ineffectual Arab League is scheduling a protest meeting; Nasser's Cairo and Damascus radios agonized day and night over "the new Zionist plot aided by the imperialists to bring in 3,000,000 Eastern European Jews" to "occupied Palestine."

To quiet the Arabs, Russia's Izvestia declared that the Soviet Union would never think of alienating its Arab friends by permitting the emigration of Russia's 3,000,000 Jews to Israel. The Rumanian Communist government, while denouncing "infamous slanders" by "leading circles in Israel and Zionism" about "a mass migration of Jews" from Rumania, last week officially admitted for the first time that it was permitting Jews to leave for Israel, and would continue "on humanitarian grounds" to allow Jews to "reunite with their relatives in Israel."

Since at least 100.000 more Rumanian Jews are eager to get exit permits, Israel preferred to swallow the "slanders," and to keep discreet silence about the indignities systematically heaped upon departing Jews by the "humanitarian" Rumanians.