Soviet Authorities Designate Day of Protest Against ‘israeli Aggression’

Soviet authorities have designated tomorrow as a day of protest against “Israeli aggression” in the Soviet Union. The announcement climaxed a mounting anti-Israel campaign in which some Soviet Jews, including Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin, of Moscow’s Choral Synagogue, have denounced Israel and assailed reports that Soviet Jews want to emigrate there as “Zionist propaganda.” The campaign, started some weeks ago with official encouragement, is being conducted mainly in the press. Newspapers have published anti-Israel letters from persons with obviously Jewish names. Two Soviet generals, both Jewish, have added their voices to the campaign with statements of support for the Arabs and warnings that Israel might one day find its army in retreat.

The officially sanctioned campaign is apparently Moscow’s counter-attack against claims made in Israel and by Jews in western countries that there is a rising Zionist or pro-Israel movement among Jews in the USSR. In recent months, letters purportedly written by Jews in Moscow, the Georgian Republic, Riga and other centers which assail Soviet treatment of Jews, have found their way into Israeli and Western hands. The Soviet authorities are obviously concerned over the impression these letters and charges of Soviet anti-Semitism are making abroad. The anti-Israel campaign has received tremendous publicity in the two main Soviet organs widely read abroad–the Government newspaper Izvestia and the Communist Party organ, Pravda. The papers have urged Soviet Jews to speak out against Israel and Zionism. The United States has been attacked as Israel’s chief supporter.

One prominent Russian Jew to speak out was Aron Vergelis, editor of the Soviet Union’s only Yiddish language journal, Sovietish Heimland. Mr. Vergelis called Zionism “the enemy of the Jews” because it creates “friction between them.” Lt. Gen. David A. Dragunsky, chief of the Soviet military school, said in a Pravda article Saturday that “From the bottom of my heart I protest against the policy of the Israeli aggressors, against the imperialist, predatory designs, against the activity of those who are dragging the people of Israel into the abyss of war.” Gen. Dragunsky, a distinguished tank commander whose family was tortured and killed by the Nazis in World War II, warned Israeli Premier Golda Meir that she was “playing with fire” and Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that his armies might be defeated. “I should like to remind him (Dayan) that the military dictionary…knows such words as defense, retreat and flight. It might well be that the Israeli Army will have to use them some time,” he wrote.

SOVIET RABBI ACCUSES JEWISH CAPITALISTS IN U.S. AND ISRAEL OF HIDING TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET JEWS

Col. Gen. Aleksandr Tsirlin, a doctor of military science, apparently Jewish, wrote in Izvestia that “The claims of Zionist leaders, holding power in Tel Aviv, to represent Jews of the whole world, is a mean ideological subversion.” He attacked the theory of the “exclusiveness of the Jewish nation advocated by Zionists” which he likened to Hitler’s racist concepts. He pledged unswerving Soviet support to the Arab peoples “in their just fight against Israeli aggression.”

Rabbi Levin, who visited the United States with official permission in 1968, was quoted by Izvestia as accusing Jewish capitalists in Israel and the U.S. of trying to keep the truth about the Soviet Union from Jewish workers. While he did not deny outright that anti-Semitism existed in the USSR, Rabbi Levin said “Only the revolution in Russia, only Soviet power opened to them (the Jews) all roads to happiness equal to citizens of any other nationality of our country.” Referring to his American visit, Rabbi Levin said according to Izvestia that “There is no doubt that in certain circles in the U.S.A. mainly among big capitalists and rich Jews, it would be disadvantageous if the Jewish workers in America knew the truth about the Soviet Union.”