Jews do not feel as free in the Soviet Union as other citizens, according to C.L. Sulzberger, chief correspondent of the New York Times, who recently visited various parts of the USSR. Presenting his impressions of the status of religion and religious groups in the USSR. Mr. Sulzberger writes:
“No Hebrew Bible has been published since 1917. The few remaining rabbis use pre-revolutionary prayer books-which even include a benediction for the Czar. Hebrew type fonts have been destroyed. A new liturgy is to be published but it will be an electrolytic reproduction of the old version minus prayers for the Romanoffs. The position of Jews differs from that of other believers because of political implications. Bolshevism is anti-Zionist as well as anti-religious. Stalin’s principles of nationality, enunciated in 1930, did not acknowledge the Jews as a minority. The law against religious propaganda restricts the teaching of Hebrew for prayer or secular purposes.”
“Although officially discouraged, anti-Semitism revived in the U. S. S. R. after 1941. German propaganda spread the disease in occupied areas. The deliberate encouragement of Russian nationalism by the Government brought back some of the traditional prejudices of Czarist days. Fewer than 3,000,000 Jews remain in the U. S. S. R. today, including survivors of Nazi ovens in parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania annexed by Moscow.
“Everything in the Soviet never-never land is different-even anti-Semitism. It is formally discountenanced, but Jews do not feel as free as other citizens. Many of the older Yiddish-speaking generation in the Ukraine and White Russia are afraid to use that language in public. There are no Jewish schools, books or newspapers. Even in Birobidzhan, an autonomous region set aside for Jewish colonization, the Jews remain a minority group. Israel itself is regarded with increasing hostility as Moscow promotes its cause among the Arabs. The current Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary calls it a bourgeois republic governed by a dictatorship of capitalists appointed by Washington and London.”
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.
