Author of New Anti-zionist Book Published in Russia Had Visited Israel, Officials Said

Israeli officials have identified the author of a newly published anti-Zionist book in Russia as a Soviet publicist who visited Israel in 1965 as a delegate with a Soviet sports team but who was refused a visa this year to attend a convention of the Moscow-oriented faction of the Israel Communist Party. They said that Yuri Ivanov, author of “Danger: Zionism.” met with a number of Israeli Communist leaders when he was here four years ago.

His book, the first one wholly devoted to Zionism to be published in the Soviet Union in many years, received a favorable review in the Soviet youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. But the paper thought it did not go far enough in exposing “Zionism’s participation in ideological diversions against our country and the other Socialist countries.” The paper claimed that Zionist intrigues were behind counter-revolutionary forces in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Hadassah Magazine, published in New York, featured an article in its February issue by Dr. William Korey charging the Moscow regine with reviving the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 19th century forgery that was used by the Czarist authorities to generate anti-Semitism for political purposes. According to Dr. Korey, the Jewish “underground government” described in the original Protocols “has now, in paranoiac Communist minds, been replaced by a global “Zionist corporation’ which serves the vast monopolies of the West in an attempt to ‘establish control of the whole world.'” Dr. Korey said one purpose of this propaganda “is to set the stage for the ‘show trials’ of Jews in Prague and Warsaw, such as the Slansky trial in 1953 in the former city.”

(Metropolitan Nikodim, a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, denied at a New York press conference that anti-Semitism exists in the Soviet Union. He claimed that all religions were treated equally and that concern in the U.S. about Russian anti-Semitism was a result of “misunderstanding.” He refused to say whether he thought American Jewish leaders had been misled on the subject.)