Commentary on William Korey’s “the ‘Right to Leave’ for Soviet Jews: Legal and Moral Aspects”

Abstract

The first article in the first issue of what was then called Soviet Jewish Affairswas not about Jews in the Soviet Union, per se, but about Jews getting out of the Soviet Union. William Korey’s “The ‘Right to Leave’ for Soviet Jews: Legal andMoral Aspects” framed the question of Jewish emigration from the USSR in the context of international law: “(1) How does international opinion and international law address itself to the issue of the right to leave a country? (2) What legal and moral obligations has the Soviet Union assumed in respect of this right?” Korey’s distinction between opinion and law, legality and morality gives some hint at the context. When a Western human rights campaign for Soviet Jews began emerging in the 1950s and early 1960s, it focused its initial demands on anti-discrimination reforms within the USSR – opening synagogues, allowing religious instruction and ending economic show trials that disproportionately targeted Jews. By 1971 – as a result of pressure from Jews in the Soviet Union, greater Israeli willingness to openly challenge the Kremlin after the latter had severed diplomatic relations in 1967 and jockeying between rival factions in the American movement – the movement shifted emphasis, prioritizing the demand for unfettered Soviet Jewish emigration. To ground that demand in human rights law would confer leverage as well as legitimacy. As it stood, however, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ affirmation of the fundamental right to leave one’s country was only a statement of principle, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which would endow the Declaration with binding legal force, still had not received the requisite thirty-five ratifications to enter into effect. (That happened in 1976). The most elaborated treatment of the right to leave taken up by the United Nations was a 1963 report to a United Nations Economic and Social Council sub-commission examining the situation de jure and de facto, and presenting recommendations, all with the caveat that “The views expressed in this study are those of the author,” Special Rapporteur, Judge Jose D. Ingles, from the Philippines. There is an element of circularity in Korey’s treatment of the Ingles report, as he had been a contributor to it. William Korey (1922–2009) had left his position teaching Russian history at City College of New York in 1954 to take up civil rights work as director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith’s Illinois-Missouri office. The position introduced him to Philip M. Klutznick, a Chicago attorney and real estate developer who also served as president of B’nai B’rith International and as a member of the US delegation to the United Nations, appointed by President Eisenhower. When B’nai B’rith decided to open a United Nations Office in 1960, Klutznick recruited Korey to head it. (In the same year, Korey completed his dissertation, “Zinoviev and the Problem of World Revolution, 1919–1927,” in Columbia University’s history department). B’nai B’rith was one of five diaspora Jewish non-government organizations with consultative status to ECOSOC, and Korey, representing this Coordinating Board of JewishOrganizations, provided testimony and documentation that was incorporated into the Ingles report. Korey’s scholarship, policy work and activism blended seamlessly. The article that he wrote here became the basis of a chapter in his 1973 book, The Soviet Cage, which traced the systemic antisemitism rooted in Soviet law and custom. Moving on to lead B’nai B’rith’s International Council and later its International Policy Research department, and as a consultant to the