The World - News from April 4, 1989

The Soviet Union permitted 4,240 Jews to emigrate in March, the largest monthly total since the benchmark set a decade ago, a leading American Jewish group said. This was up from 2,425 in February, when the encouraging trend set throughout 1988 and in January showed a drop, and nearly as high as the 4,746 Jews allowed to emigrate in October, 1979, said a spokesman for the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. That last year of the ‘70s, in which 51,370 Jews left the Soviet Union, is the standard for judging emigration rates. It compares to 896 in all of 1984 before President Mikhail S. Gorbachev took office, and 18,965 in 1988.