“forward” Ridicules Charge Rabbis Contra-revolutionary; N. Y. “world” Asks Caution

Cautioning that it is necessary now “to maintain sanity in a crisis of fanatical intensity,” the New York “World,” liberal newspaper, in an editorial on Saturday, discussing the present religious persecutions in Soviet Russia, declares that nothing should be done in that matter by people abroad which might give the Soviet leaders a “shadow of excuse for crying out that a world-wide conspiracy is being formed against them.”

“All the available evidence of the Moscow press points to the conclusion that there is no distinction in the Communist mind between the interests of the Kulaks and the interests of the churches, and that they are treating a defence of religious institutional liberty as a defense of the social order which they are bent on destroying,” says the editorial. “It is this fact which makes the responsibility of outsiders so awful. They are faced with the horrible possibility that in threatening to intervene they will incite the dictatorship to swifter and greater measures of violence, and that they will encourage the devout peasants to count upon a kind of assistance from the outer world which the outside world cannot give them.”

The “Jewish Daily Forward,” Socialist organ, in its issue of Saturday, makes fun of the Soviet accusation that the Minsk rabbis and other religious Jews are counter-revolutionaries, saying: “Their only barricade is the desk in the synagogue at which they stand and pray. And it is this barricade that has suddenly scared to death the Soviet power, so that it is thinking of inflicting heavy punishment upon the awful ‘counter-revolutionaries.’

“Nobody will believe this story about the ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity of these persecuted religious people. But the whole world will now see what the whole fight for a supposedly ‘Socialist’ regime in Russia consists of.”