‘vitriolic’ Statement in Soviet Press Marks Anti-zionist Committee’s Return

Rumored to have been withered by the winds of glasnost, the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee has re-emerged with a vengeance.

Jewish groups in the United States have denounced a recent statement by the Jewish-led committee which equated Zionism with racism and claimed that Zionist activity in the Soviet Union could only lead to “anti-Jewish sentiments in this country.”

The statement was carried in the official Soviet news agency Tass, giving it a sheen of government approval that worries U.S. Soviet Jewry activists.

In a joint statement, two Jewish groups said they were “outraged” that the committee was given a “media platform for its vitriolic, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

The statement was signed by Shoshana Cardin, chairwoman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, and Seymour Reich, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

“We seek assurances that the ‘spirit of glasnost’ will not be used as an excuse for encouraging the baiting of Soviet Jews as being ‘anti-Soviet,’ and that such an attitude will never reflect official policy,” they said.

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose liberalization policies known as glasnost have seen a limited rebirth of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, to “forcefully denounce” the statement.

“Government-sanctioned anti-Zionism is contrary to the letter and spirit of recent Soviet commitments in the field of human rights,” said Burton Levinson, ADL’s national chairman, and Abraham Foxman, its national director, in a statement.

Jewish groups have denounced the Anti-Zionist Committee since it was formed six years ago — before Gorbachev came to power — ostensibly as the voice of anti-Zionist Judaism in the Soviet Union.

The committee’s few visible members have said the group was meant to show not that Zionism is evil, but that a viable Jewish life is possible in the Soviet Union and that not all Jews were seeking to emigrate.

Last year, Soviet officials and committee cofounder Samuel Zivs assured American Jewish leaders that the committee was being disbanded. Zivs said he had resigned his leadership.

The Aug. 8 Tass report, however, follows by one week the first meeting of a Soviet Zionist organization founded by activist and Hebrew teacher Arye (Lev) Gorodetsky.

According to Tass’ paraphrase, the “presidium” of the Anti-Zionist Committee said the activities of the Zionist group “would only result in kindling anti-Jewish sentiments in the country” and represented a “deliberate stoking up of tension in inter-ethnic relations.”

Describing Zionism as “warlike,” the “presidium” repeats the U.N. General Assembly’s 1975 assertion that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination, and says Zionism “is used against the interest of the Jewish working people and in practice joins ranks with rabid anti-Semitism.”