Two Philadelphia residents refused comment today on charges by the Soviet press that they helped to liquidate a Jewish ghetto while serving in the German police during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine.
The charge was made in the trade union newspaper, Trud, which called yesterday for the prosecution of Serhij Kowalczuk, 44, and his brother Mykola, 37. The newspaper charged that the brothers took part in liquidating the Jewish ghetto in Lyumboml, their home town, and in seizing the property of the 5,000 Jews in the ghetto.
Trud asserted that the brothers fled from the Ukraine with the retreating German forces in 1944 when the Russians re-took the area. The Soviet paper said that residents in Lyumboml had identified Serhij as the man who transported Jews to an execution site and confiscated their property. The brothers, Trud added, had started a correspondence recently with their parents, who live in Kremenets, in the Ukraine, and have been sending them gift parcels.
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.
