Growing Economic Antisemitism in Russian Factories Impels Soviet Government to Take Drastic Measures

Drastic measures for curbing the rising economic antisemitism resulting from the influx of young Jews into the big industries and the training schools attached to these industries have been taken by the Soviet Government in two widely divergent parts of the Soviet Union. In the Ural Mines, where 19 Jewish pupils attending the Kiesel Mining School have been tormented and humiliated by the non-Jewish pupils at the school, a number of young antisemites have been put on trial and two of them have been sent to prison for three years, the Principal of the School, too, being sent to prison for two years for encouraging the antisemitic activities of the pupils under his charge.

At the same time, the Soviet Court at Kertch, in the Crimea, has sentenced to two years’ imprisonment to be followed by two years’ banishment two young antisemites, who have been found guilty of maltreating a number of Jewish workers in the Kertch factories.

The trial of the antisemites at the Kiesel Mining School in the Urals was held in the presence of 7,000 workmen, in order to impart to the trial a propaganda character by expounding to the workmen the injustice of antisemitism and making them aware of the fact that it is regarded as a punishable of final offence by the State. Many workers who had antisemitic leanings pledged themselves at the trial, it is stated, to abandon these antisemitic views of theirs for the future.

These antisemitic outbreaks, the “Tribuns”, the organ of the Jewish Settlement Society (Ozet) says in commenting on these two trials, show us that we must look not only to the physical welfare of the young Jews who are sent out of their homes in the ghettoes into the distant industrial centres of the Soviet Union, but that we must also pay attention to the character and the atmosphere of the places to which these youths are sent.