The Soviet Government does not intend to change anything in the present status of the Jewish minority in the USSR, a United Nations conference dealing with human rights was told today by Soviet delegate G.O. Arkadyev. He spoke at the meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council during a general debate on human rights at which the Israeli delegate, Ambassador Moshe Bartur, raised in problem of Soviet Jews.
“There seems no reason, in general, to question the performance of the Soviet Union for cultural and linguistic rights of national, cultural and ethnic groups,” the Israel representative said. “However, there is the striking, puzzling and extremely moving exception of its large Jewish minority. May I illustrate by some facts.
“In 1962, 109 books were published in the Soviet Union in the Yakuts language, a linguistic group of 236,000 persons; 116 books in the Bashkir language, an ethnic group of 989,000 persons. There is not one single daily journal in Yiddish or Hebrew. There are no textbooks at all available either in Yiddish or Hebrew, nor even in Russian, on subjects of Jewish history, culture or religion; and, obviously, such books are prevented from being published. No school, not a single class in which Yiddish or Hebrew is or can be taught. This, in spite of the fact that about 500,000 Jews, according to the Soviet Union’s census of 1959, declared that Yiddish was their mother tongue.”
SOVIET DELEGATE TAKES ISSUE WITH ISRAELI REPRESENTATIVE
Soviet delegate Arkadyev accused the Israeli Ambassador of being the representative of the world Zionist movement and of the enemies of the Soviet Union. He stated that the Israeli delegate’s speech was full of distortions. “Why shouldn’t we speak about the situation of the Arabs in Israel, without mentioning even the 1,200,000 Arab refugees that were thrown out of the country by the Zionists.”
The Egyptian, Algerian and Iraqi representatives spoke briefly, stating that, without trying to justify or excuse the Soviet Union, they insist on discussing the situation of the Arab refugees and of the Arabs living in Israel.
Using his right of reply, Ambassador Bartur answered the Arab delegates by quoting numbers of Arab pupils in the Israel State school system. Addressing himself to the Soviet delegate, he said that he would be glad to hear a denial of the Soviet Government to any one of the facts he referred to in his statement, which he stressed, were “unfortunately true.”
The Soviet deletate then said that his Government was not going to change anything in the status of its Jewish minority. The issue may come up again in the debate at the Social Commission of the Economic and Social Council.
(In New York, the Herald Tribune reported today in a dispatch from Birobidjan that the Jewish population of that area is now less than 15,000, or about 10 percent of the total population, that Yiddish appears only on the railroad station sign, that a Yiddish newspaper there is published three times a week, and that there are no schools in the area teaching Yiddish.)
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.
