Criticism of Soviet Anti-jewish Acts Begin to Show Effect in Russia

Criticisms voiced in the West against Soviet persecutions of Russian Jews have begun to show effects in the Soviet Union, newspaper dispatches received here from Moscow indicated today. The New York Herald Tribune reported that leading organs of the Soviet press have admitted that two Jews convicted under the Khrushchev regime of “economic crimes” had been “framed.” These admissions were printed in Komsomoloskaya Pravda, official organ of the Soviet Young Communist League, and Literaturyniya Gazette, another major Soviet newspaper.

In the first case, the Communist organ admitted that a Jew named Boris Yakobovitch Buchbinder, director of a physical education school at Stavropol, who had been convicted of permitting an employee to embezzle funds, had been “the victim of investigative methods carried over from the days of the Stalin personality cult.”

In the second case, the Communist literary journal reported the “framing” of another Jew, R.A. Frekhtman, convicted a year ago of black marketing operations in Ukrainia. Literaturniya Gazette said Frekhtman was a war hero whose name had been attached to criminal activities by swindlers whom he did not even know. The dispatches from the Soviet Union did not indicate whether Frekhtman has been freed, but it was believed Buchbinder was now out of prison, since his case has been appealed, according to the report, to a high court.