Jewish Contributions to Russian Aviation Lauded; Nazi Pogrom in Galicia Reported

The contributions which Jews in Russia are making to the aviation industry there as engineers, factory workers and directors of aviation plants are highly praised in the Soviet press following an interview on the subject given by Alexander Wasserman, chairman of the Central Trade Union Committee for Aviation Industry in the USSR.

The press lists a number of Jews who have been decorated by the Russian Government in recognition of their intensive efforts to speed up the production of engineer who is credited with “Americanizing” the Russian aviation industry after spending some time in the United States studying the methods used in American aviation plants. Schenkman, who was the head of one of the largest aviation factories in Russia and who successfully conducted the evacuation from Moscow of a number of industrial enterprises when the Nazis were close to the gates of the Russian capital, was recently killed in an airplane crash.

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee here today made public a number of eye-witness accounts of Jews who succeeded in escaping from the Nazi-held Ukraine, Galicia and Byelorussia. Describing the Nazi brutalities in the occupied city of Arzenysl, Galicia, one of the reports reveals that the Nazis massacred 508 Jews and their families in that city in one night.

LANDSMANSHAFTEN IN AMERICAN ASKED TO AID RUSSIAN ARMY

A description of Nazi massacres of Jews in the city of Novozibkov, in the Cresine, is given in the report of Abraham Zevelev, a Jewish student at Moscow University who just returned from guerrilla operations in the rear of the German fiest “The Jews in Novozibkov who remained alive were ordered by the Nazis into the ghetto and I saw with my own eyes how they were made to wear on the chests a sign reading ‘Jude.'”

Pointing out that “hardly half of the Jewish population is left in Galicia after the Nazi pogroms in Przemysl, Lwow, Tarnopol and Stanislawow,” the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee today issued an appeal to the Galician Jews in America asking them to urge their Landsmanshaften throughout the United States to respond to the Jewish appeal from Russia for funds to present the Russian Army with a Jewish gift of 1,000 tanks and 500 bombers. The tanks and bombers will carry names of Galician Jews, the appeal said.

Signed by Dr. Elias Wattenberg of Stanislawow who lived in America for many years, the appeal emphasizes that only the Russian Army can save the Jews in Galicia by delivering from the hands of the Nazis “those who did not manage to escape from the Brown pestilence and remained under Nazi rule of terror or under Hitler’s Hungarian henchmen and who are now suffering starvation and disease.” A similar appeal is addressed to the Jews in America who have emigrated from Orsha, Vitebsk, Minks, Mohilev, Homel, Regachev, Bubrovna, Rosnova and other cities in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia. The appeal is signed by Michael Jacob Entin of Rosnova, a Nazi-held city in the Mohilev district.