An Austrian Communist newspaper has accused the Soviet Government paper Izvestia of anti-Semitic “mud-slinging” in its attack on Czech Foreign Minister Jiri Hajek and claimed that Mr. Hajek is not Jewish.
According to the Communist daily Volkstimme, Izvestia confused the Czech Foreign Minister with another former Czech Communist Party official, Bedrich Hajek, who is Jewish and who was imprisoned for several years after a political purge in 1954. The Foreign Minister “is and was no Jew,” Volkstimme said, quoting “informed sources,” and said his name was at no time Karpeles, as Izvestia asserted in its charge that Mr. Hajek collaborated with the Gestapo in World War II.
Jiri Hajek was a Social Democrat until 1948, belonged to the left wing of the party and helped to engineer the merger with the Communists and an alliance with the Soviet Union, Volkstimme said. Bedrich Hajek, whose name was formerly Karpeles, is Jewish but he never collaborated with the Gestapo, according to the Austrian newspaper. He fled to England when the Nazis occupied Prague in 1939 and returned after the war.
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.
