French Jewry Reported Outraged with Soviet Maneuver at U.N.

Jewish organizations in France were outraged with the Soviet Union’s efforts to equate Zionism with Nazism at the United Nations, and scheduled today to hold a protest meeting against the U.S.S.R. move, even though the Soviet step at the U.N. has now been cancelled by a vote there to ignore all “isms” in a draft U.N. convention on the elimination of racial discrimination. The protest rally will be held Thursday under the auspices of the French Association of Jewish Societies and the French Zionist Federation.

The protests against the Soviet move were so general that it was joined even by the Yiddish-language Neue Presse, organ of the Jewish section of the French Communist Party. Expressing its “regret” over the Soviet move at the United Nations, Neue Press stated editorially that the U.S.S.R. proposal was “contrary to the Soviet constitution and Soviet policy.” The newspaper opposed the bracketing of “a nationalist movement like Zionism with Nazism and anti-Semitism which has exterminated one third of the Jewish people and millions of other human beings.”

A protest was also voiced by the French Association of Former Deportees, a non-Jewish organization. CRIF, the Representative Council of Jews in France, called the Soviet amendment at the U.N. “a shameless attempt to bring together the executioner and the victim.”