Leaders of major American Jewish organizations declared in a statement today that the “purge” trial in Czechoslovakia incontrovertibly reveals that the Communist-dominated regimes of Eastern Europe have resorted to the stimulation of anti-Semitism “as a propaganda device for justifying and defending their regimes and as a means of diverting their enslaved peoples from the contemplation of their slavery.”
The trials and their handling in the controlled Communist press, the Jewish organizations said, provided final evidence giving the lie to any claims of the Communists that they are concerned about the equal protection of minorities and are opposed to racism. The Jewish leaders expressed anxiety “about the fate of the two and a half million Eastern European Jews who managed to survive the Hitler holocaust who are now sealed behind the Iron Curtain.”
Signing the statement were: Rabbi Israel Goldstein, president of the American Jewish Congress; Adolph Held, chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee; Jesse Moss, national commander of the Jewish War Veterans; Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations; and Irving Kane, chairman of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, coordinating body for these groups and for twenty-eight local Jewish community councils throughout the United States; and by Rabbi Simon G. Kramer, president of the Synagogue Council of America.
“Throughout the free world,” the statement said, “free men will condemn and recoil from the newest evidence of that Communist cynicism and duplicity which had led the Kremlin to embrace the most revolting of the policies of the Nazis–with whom, when it suits their purposes, they make common cause.”
Sharply revealing “that Communism cannot tolerate the democratic spirit, ” the Jewish leaders said, is “its baseless attack on that newest outpost of democracy in the Near East, the young state of Israel.”
VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS JEWISH VIEWS ON PRAGUE TRIAL
The Voice of America today broadcast a statement by Frank Goldman, president of B’nai B’rith, declaring that the Prague “purge” trial means that ” anti-Semitism, under Communism, has openly emerged as an instrument of totalitarian state policy.” Mr. Goldman pointed out that the men convicted at Prague as ” Zionist plotters” never had any appreciation of Jewish traditions, culture and religion, nor any relationship to Jewish life “other than to participate actively in smashing in Czechoslovakia those very things for which Jewish ideals strive.”
The prediction that the Prague trial will create a split in the pro-Soviet Mapam Party in Israel was made here today at a press conference by Dr. James Heller, president of the Labor Zionist Organization of America. The Pioneer Women, women’s Labor Zionist group in the United States, issued a statement condemning the Prague trial and emphasizing that the hatred displayed against Jews and Israel by the Czechoslovak satellite of Soviet Russia resembles the anti-Semitism of Czarism and Hiterlism, in that it is based upon the ancient and discredited libel of “international Jewish conspiracy.”
A “deep sense of revulsion” at the “obviously anti-Semitic conduct” of the Prague trial was expressed today in Montreal in a joint statement by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the United Zionist Council of Canada. Samuel Bronfman of Montreal, president of the Congress, and Edward E.Gelber of Toronto, president of the Council, said that the trial “must mean the beginning of a new era of anxiety and repression” for Jews in Communist countries.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
