Dr. Nahum Goldmann, in a “solemn appeal” keyed to the 20th anniversary of the execution of 24 Soviet Jewish intellectuals on Aug. 12, 1952, urged the Soviet government today to “recall these fatal circumstances” and act to “put an end to the suffering and difficulties presently encountered by the Soviet Jews.”
The victims of “a frantic anti-Jewish persecution which prevailed in Soviet Russia in the late years of the Stalin regime” had “not only enriched our Yiddish literature and poetry, but also greatly contributed to the national culture of the Soviet Union,” the president of the World Jewish Congress said in a statement. “These men had made an essential contribution to the cultural and national heritage of the Jewish people,” he continued. “This coldly perpetrated assassination annihilated a group of men who were rightly considered as the flower of the Jewish intellectual elite.”
Dr. Goldmann, who became WJC president the year after the executions, said of the 24 martyrs on this Saturday’s anniversary “Soviet Jewry and the entire Jewish people will devotedly recollect their memory.” It would be “appropriate,” he said, for the Soviet government at this time “to grant Soviet Jews the right of emigration to Israel If they wish to be either reunited with their family or to resettle in the country of their ancestors; to stop the harassment and halt further detention of Soviet Jews whose only crime is to claim the right of emigration and release those who are presently held in various detention camps for similar motives; to give Soviet Jews who wish to remain in the Soviet Union the possibility of leading a full Jewish life with all the appropriate institutions pertaining to their traditions, in conformity with the Constitution of Soviet Russia.”
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.
