“Further deterioration in the position of the Jews in the Soviet Union” was reported here last night by Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, addressing a dinner of the Czechoslovak National Council, which represents about 300,000 Czechs and Slovaks in this country.
“The present Soviet regime has not relaxed its harsh policies toward Jews, and still seeks to isolate them, encouraging their displacement from all major sectors of public life throughout the USSR,” Mr. Epstein said. “This official policy is being implemented by a virulent and widespread anti-Semitic campaign in the press, which is inciting the public against Soviet Jews, who are being made to feel that they are living in an alien courtyard.”
Mr. Epstein addressed the Council after accepting its Jan Masaryk Award to the Anti-Defamation League “for its fight against bigotry and discrimination and its work in behalf of American democracy and human freedom.” He paid tribute to Thomas Masaryk, founder of the republic of Czechoslovakia as “one of the foremost champions of human rights in modern history,” and to his son, Jan, “a constant fighter for freedom against Nazi and Communist tyranny.”
The ADL leader said “the present Soviet regime has taken over intact the essential features of Stalin’s irrational policy toward Jews, who continue to be officially deprived of major cultural and religious rights granted to other religious groups and discriminated against in education and employment.” A full report on the subject, called “Anti-Jewish Propaganda in the Soviet Union.” will be published by the ADL soon, he said. The report is being prepared under the supervision of Arnold Forster, the League’s general counsel.
Anti-Jewish articles in the central and provincial newspapers of the USSR have increased in 1959 and 1960, according to Mr. Epstein. In these articles, he said, “Judaism as a religion is denigrated and vilified, its clerical and lay leadership portrayed as swindlers, alcoholics, brawlers and immoralists.” This press campaign has led to the distribution of crackpot and violent anti-Semitic pamphlets and handbills in Moscow. Kharkov, Kiev, Vinnitsa and other cities and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and physical assaults on individual Jews, Mr. Epstein stated.
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