The State Department has released a report which it said “details a deliberate and on-going campaign of arrests and intimidation targeted at the activist Jewish community in the Soviet Union by Soviet authorities.”
The report charged that “a major, sustained crackdown on Hebrew teachers and other Jewish cultural activists,” began last August which, by the end of January, resulted in 11 activists, four of them Hebrew teachers, being arrested. Four of those arrested have already been sentenced to labor camps.
“The arrests were accompanied by a series of searches, beatings and threats which have sent shock waves through the Soviet Jewish community,” the report said.
Entitled, “The Soviet Crackdown on Jewish Cultural Activities,” the report was presented last Friday by Richard Burt, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, to Morris Abram, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Abram was at the State Department on the eve of a day-long NCSJ “Emergency Action for Soviet Jews,” gathering at Capitol Hill.
HARASSMENT OF SOVIET JEWS IS DEPLORED
The report noted that the State Department has been monitoring the situation since the “disturbing developments” began. “There can be no doubt that the campaign has been consciously directed by Soviet authorities to discredit and destroy the revival of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union,” the report said.
“The methods used — arrests, beatings, the planting of evidence, and the use of the media to slander refusenik activists — have created a renewed atmosphere of crisis in the Soviet Jewish community and heightened international concern about what may next lie in store for Soviet Jewry,” the report said. “The United States Government deplores this accelerating campaign in the strongest possible terms, calls on the Soviet authorities to end it immediately and urges them to live up to the commitments to respect individual human rights that they have solemnly undertaken in a whole series of international accords, from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights through the Helsinki Final Act and the Concluding Document agreed to in 1983 at Madrid.”
CRACKDOWN BEGAN LAST JULY
The report noted that the crackdown began July 26 when Moscow Hebrew teacher Aleksandr Kholmiansky was arrested in Estonia on charges of hooliganism. Police later claimed they found a pistol and ammunition in his parents’ apartment. His trial was scheduled for January 31.
In September, another Moscow Hebrew teacher, Yuly Edelshtein, was arrested after police claimed they found narcotics in his apartment. In December, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp.
In Odessa, Yaacov Levin, a Jewish cultural activist, was sentenced to three years in prison November 19 for anti-Soviet slander because he circulated religious material. His future father-in-law, Mark Netomnyashchiy, was also scheduled to go on trial January 29 after being arrested for anti-Soviet slander. Their friend, Yaakov Mesh, a refusenik, was arrested for resisting arrest but released because he sustained life-threatening injuries.
The report continued with the arrest of losif Berenshtein, a Kiev Hebrew teacher, who was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for allegedly resisting the police. After his conviction, he was beaten and stabbed, suffering deep facial wounds and losing his sight in one eye, with the possibility he may lose his sight in the other.
Two Ukrainian Jewish activists, Leonid Schreier and Yaakov Rosenberg, both of Chernovtsiy, were charged in October with anti-Soviet slander. Schreier was sentenced to three years in a labor camp. Rosenberg remains in prison, pending trial.
The report noted that after the arrests stopped in December, they picked up again in January. Vladimir Frankel, a Jewish cultural activist in Riga, was arrested for anti-Soviet slander January 15. Dean Shapiro, a prominent Moscow activist, was arrested January 22 for anti-Soviet slander and, according to the report, two of his colleagues, Dmitry Khazankin and lgor Kharach, reportedly may be next.
“The crackdown on Hebrew teachers and Jewish cultural activists has been accompanied by a stepped-up anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet media,” the State Department report said. The Department pledged to continue monitoring the situation, particularly the trials of Jewish activists.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
