Toasted Matzoth

It all began one morning before Passover. Soviet embassy officials in Washington found in their mail a number of boxes of matzoth, the traditional unleavened wafers used to celebrate the Jewish holiday. There were more matzoth the next day, and more the next--literally tons of them. Soviet diplomats, by now well-accustomed to confrontations with Jewish organizations over the treatment of Soviet Jews, quickly devised a counterploy: they refused to accept delivery and dumped the matzoth into the laps of the U.S. Postal Service.

Postal authorities were baffled; rarely had they encountered a logistics problem of this scope. Finally, with ten tons of matzoth spilling over five postal substations, officials called the Sanitary Engineering department and requested that it cart the matzoth off and burn them.

The Anti-Defamation Leagues of Philadelphia and Newark, which had sponsored the mail-in, were incensed. Said New Jersey League Official Robert Kohler: "It is the sin of waste in the face of hunger. It was wanton, cynical destruction of good food." Kohler and others claimed that many of the packages were marked with return addresses, but postal authorities insisted that only a handful were thus labeled, and that anyway, they feared a contamination hazard. Undeterred, the A.D.L. protesters intend to keep up their mail-a-matzo pressure on the Soviets.

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