Anti-religious Campaign Was a Dismal Failure Says Jewish Communist Organ “emess”.

The anti-religious campaign against the Jewish “days of awe”, was a dismal and a disgraceful failure, the “Emess” complains in a long article, full of resentment at the indifference which was shown everywhere to the anti-religious work. The “Emess”, the atheist “Apikoires” and other papers, it says, started months ago calling upon the workers everywhere to mobilise their forces, and pointing out how the anti-religious work had been neglected and sabotaged. Yet no real changes were made, and the result is that the anti-religious campaign this year, too, has been a lamentable failure.

Speaking of the conditions in the Jewish region of Freidorf, in the Crimea, the “Emess” says that there was no attempt at an anti-religious campaign there. There was not one collective farm in the region which did not have services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The number of workers who went into the fields on these days was negligible. The only ones who were at work were school children and very young people. Even chairmen of village Soviets and of collective farm administrations stayed away from their work, and even members of the Young Communist Party did not go out into the fields. In the collective farm “Golde”, the entire administration was at the religious services, including the chairman of the Soviet.

The shepherd did not take his sheep to pasture, it says, the cattle went all day hungry and thirsty. Zangen looked on Rosh Hashanah like a cemetery. Not one farmer was at work. In Smidovitch a group of Freethinkers held a meeting on Kol Nidrei night, and the others attacked the meeting and bombarded it with stones.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now over, the paper concludes. The anti-religious campaign has failed lamentably, and there seems no sign of anyone being concerned about it and taking steps to remedy things in the future. The anti-religious campaign is looked upon as a burden of cultural enlightenment among the masses, whereas in reality it should be a political fight against counter-revolutionary religionism. There is a tendency to obscure the entire anti-religious issue, it says, and we refuse to allow it.