Play down the contemplated anti-Passover and anti-Easter campaigns, urges a remarkable article entitled “No Noise,” that appears in today’s issue of the “Bezbozhnik,” the organ of the League of the Godless. The article asks the local atheists to refrain from the carnivals, demonstrations and meetings that had been planned to take place in front of synagogues and churches during Easter and Passover.
Pointing out that a few weeks ago the Soviet masses demonstrated against the Pope’s Crusade and that on May 1 they will demonstrate with anti-religious slogans, the “Bezbozhnik” asks whether under such circumstances “it is necessary to squeeze in another anti-religious demonstration on Passover and Easter.” Answering its own question, the atheist paper says “it is not necessary and is not practical.”
The “Bezbozhnik’s” article indicating that Passover and Easter are likely to pass very quietly coincides with increasing reports from the small Jewish towns saying that the local Jewish Communists have discarded their anti-Passover plans, many of them openly stating that “fighting religion nowadays in the Soviet is wasting energy, since life itself leads numbers of religious people to become less so each year.”
The White Russian commissariat of education has issued instructions not to abuse any religious feelings during Passover or Easter. The Jewish Communist press, while not as active in the anti-Passover campaign as in previous years, reports that the matzoth bakeries are more busy this year than ever before and calls for anti-religious “red” seders, meetings, lectures and concerts on the eve of Passover to counteract the traditional seders.
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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.
