Controlled USSR Press Seen Stepping Up Drives Against Jews and Israel

The bitter anti-Israel campaign which had been stepped up in the Soviet press right after last June’s Six-Day War is not abating but, in fact, growing more virulent and taking on unmistakable tones of racial anti-Semitism, with the approval if not the outright collusion of the highest Soviet authorities.

This was the consensus today of various organizations and groups here which have made a detailed study of the Soviet Government-controlled press. They expressed particular alarm over a recent spate of articles which appear to be nothing less than an up-dating of the long discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery that originated in Czarist Russia. The Protocols alleged a global Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

This is the tone of “Zionism, a Tool of Imperialism”, an article by Trofin Kichko that appeared in the October 4 edition of Komsomolskaye Znamaya, official publication of the Young Communist League of the Ukraine. Kichko, the American Jewish Committee pointed out in a report on the article, was the author of a viciously anti-Semitic book, “Judaism Without Embellishment,” which was published in 1963 but withdrawn by Soviet authorities after it aroused a world-wide storm of protest.

The selection of October 4, Rosh Hashana, for publication of the article appears to have been no coincidence. Another newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, daily organ of the Communist Youth League in Moscow, selected the same date for publication of an article called “Lackeys at Beck and Call,” by Ye. Yevseyev. The article was a 3,000 word denunciation of American Jewry as part of “an international Zionist Conspiracy.” Jewish Minorities Research, which, among other things, monitors the Soviet press, pointed out that Komsomolskaya Pravda is one of the most authoritative and influential Soviet newspapers, ranking behind only Pravda, Izvestia and possibly Trud.”

Rabbi Israel Miller, chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, a coalition of 25 major American Jewish organizations, saw in this and similar articles an attempt “to terrorize the Soviet Jews to avoid any signs of affinity with Jews outside the Soviet Union, and serve as a warning to the young Soviet Jews who seek distinctively Jewish means of expression.”