The president of the World Jewish Congress said today that the position of Czechoslovakian Jewry has not deteriorated since the Warsaw Pact invasion and that Jewish communities in the occupied country can continue their normal activities. Dr. Nahum Goldmann told a meeting of the WJ Congress’ American Section, however, that there was good reason to be worried about the consequences for the Jews of a change of policy of the Dubcek Government or of a change in the Government itself.
He called upon the international public to protest renewed anti-Semitism in Poland which he called crude and contrasted with Poland’s “very good record of only two years ago of fostering Jewish culture and life.”
He called the “governmentally-organized persecution” of Polish Jews a “tragic situation” and said that the regime’s anti-Jewish and anti-“Zionist” crusade stemmed from an internal power struggle in which Jews were being used as a ‘scapegoat.” The principals in the struggle he identified as Communist Party First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka and Gen. Mieczyslaw Moczar, former Interior Minister.
“It is incomprehensible that the great Polish people are not ashamed to accuse the tiny Polish community of not more than 25,000 of undermining the country and demoralizing the population. The Polish Government and Communist Party should be ashamed of daring to take such a position.” World public opinion, Dr. Goldmann declared, should be mobilized “in order to put an end to this demagoguery and to prevent the Polish Government from preparing show-trials to justify their immoral anti-Jewish policy.”
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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.
