The annual war against the observance of the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur, has been opened by the Yiddish Communist daily, Emess, in a two-column article decrying the present practice of making the anti-religious war a seasonal affair and urging that it be carried on all year round.
“We have done a great deal,” the article states, “to exterminate religion. A new generation has grown up which knows nothing of religion.
“There are towns with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants where there is no church, no synagogue, no mosque. There is a Jewish autonomous region being built now where there is not and never will be a single synagogue, beth hamedresh or cheder.
“At the same time, the fight against religion is more difficult now,” Emess confesses, “because it (religion) conducts its fight under concealment. For instance, last Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur collective farmers decided that they must have rest some time and found these days on which to rest. Many artisans did the same. And many Communists do not realize the importance of the fight against religion, and fail to react to the danger of this disguised religiousness. Even the Yiddish writers, whose work is among the Jewish masses, fail to attend to this most important task. The recent conference of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union did not have one word to say about liberating the masses from the bondage of religion. Not a single speaker mentioned the subject.”
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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.
