American Jewish Committee Protests Deportations in East Europe

The American Jewish Committee, in a letter today to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, urged “outspoken public protests by the United States Government against resumption by the Hungarian and Rumanian Governments of mass deportations.”

The letter, signed by Dr. John Slawson, executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee and Dr. Herman A. Gray, chairman of its foreign affairs committee, called attention to the fact that a former public condemnation by the President of the United States of “brutal mass evacuations” being carried out during last summer by the Communist rulers of Hungary, followed by protests of other governments, “had considerably abated the tempo of those deportations.”

“Unfortunately, “the letter adds, “recent reports by responsible press services and newspapers of the free world indicate that the Hungarian Government has resumed these mass deportations and that similar banishments have started on a large scale in Rumania as well.”

The letter charged that “the majority of the Rumanian victims are Jews, “and noted that the Rumanian mass evacuations have coincided with large scale arrests of Zionists.” Recent reports reveal that in the course of the current third round-up of Zionists in Rumania, hundreds of Zionists have been arrested together with their families and that they have disappeared without trace, “the letter said.

The letter also warned “that the adoption by the Rumanian Government of the same method of mass liquidation of the middle-classes as pursued last year by the Hungarian Government, shows that there is a centrally directed policy which is on the way to engulfing all of Eastern Europe. It is our view, therefore, that renewed and even more outspoken public protests by our Government, by other democratic governments and by the United Nations, addressed to both of the totalitarian regimes involved, are urgently called for, “the communication stressed.

Deploring the failure of the sixth session of the U.N. General Assembly to act upon the earlier Hungarian evacuations, the Committee’s letter urged “that our Government take all possible steps to make sure that the fourteenth session of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations scheduled to convene in May, in New York, addresses itself to the situation which has developed in Hungary and in Rumania, and that our Government present to the Secretary General of the United Nations all available evidence on this subject.