The World Union of French Students, following a mass meeting held here with the co-sponsorship of the Union of French Jewish Students, sent a cable today to the Soviet poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, extending “admiration and friendly greetings” for his recent poem, “Babi Yar.”
Many non-Jewish intellectuals and students, some of them known for their pro-Soviet sentiments, attended the rally here in praise of Yevtushenko. In his poem, Yevtushenko denounced anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and memorialized the victims of a massacre at Babi Yar, near Kiev, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered and buried in a mass grave in 1944.
The message to Yevtushenko was formulated while a dispatch was received here from Moscow, reporting that the Russian has written another poem, replying to Soviet critics who had assailed him for writing “Babi Yar.” In his second poem, Yevtushenko declared “posterity will burn with shame” because the present generation had called him courageous for expressing “common honesty.”
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.
