Dr. Teller Charges Government Policy Designed to Turn Jews Away from Supporting Israel

Dr. Judd L. Teller, the Jewish historian and program coordinator of B’nai B’rith’s International Council, charged here today that certain government officials were stoking a campaign aimed at turning American Jews away from supporting Israel via “leaks to the press.” This campaign, he said, resembled, in intention if not in intensity, the Kremlin intimidation of Soviet Jews. “Some,” he said, referring to the unnamed government sources, “want the Jew to disappear through ‘benign neglect,’ or would use assimilative pressures to achieve their purpose. Such ‘benign neglect’ included, during the Hitler period, callous disregard of appeals for the rescue of European Jewry.” Dr. Teller, who addressed the closing session of a two-day B’nai B’rith community conference on the Mideast and Soviet Jewry, did not identify the government sources. Dr. William Korey, head of B’nai B’rith’s United Nations offices, said the Soviet Union’s Jewish policy “has raised the shadow of Stalinist anti-Semitism.” Although begun as a means of showing the Arabs its solid opposition to Israel, it has “swiftly degenerated into an irrational anti-Semitic campaign into which have been pressed Jews high and low, proclaiming their undying loyalty with pathetic fulsomeness, signing outrageous libels against Israel and world Jewry,” Dr. Korey declared. “But,”he said, “they have no intention of submitting meekly any longer. Scores of them are boldly declaring to the Soviet authorities, and to the UN and the world, that they will not tolerate humiliation and that they demand the right to leave for Israel. No amount of propaganda and pressure is likely to undo such feeling.”