Hungarian Zionists Say Government Denies Them Permission to Publish Newspaper

The Jews of the Soviet Union, “who showed the world that they could shoot and defend themselves,” are now returning to their devastated cities and towns and beginning to rebuild their lives, Ilya Ehranburg, Russian war correspondent and author, said last night at a reception arranged by the American Birobidjan Committee for him and for Kenstantin Simonov, also a Soviet war reporter and writer.

Ehrenburg said he regretted that he had “no good news” for the crowds of people who have surrounded him at various Jewish functions he has attended since arriving in the United States several weeks age, asking for information concerning relatives in Russian territory which was occupied by the Germans. “Don’t try to forget what has happened,” he told the 1,200 persons present, “it is worse than you were told. I walked two miles in Kiev in places where the sand was soaked with Jewish blood and mixed with Jewish bones.” Declaring that the fate of world civilization and that of the Jews was closely linked, Ehrenburg urged an unceasing fight against the forces of Fascism, which he said were not dead.

Simonor described the close bonds between all the peoples of the Soviet Union and the Jews. “The most penetrating words of the Russian people during the war,” he said, “were uttered by the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg.” He told the story of a Russian woman in Kharkov married to a Jew who refused a Nazi offer to spare her life and perished with a group of Jewish women with whom she had been rounded up, insisting that she was Jewish.

The American Birobidjan Committee is a national organization engaged in extending material and moral aid in the building of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidjan in the Soviet Far East. The 1946 budget of the committee calls for $2,000,000 which will be need to help maintain Jewish refugee war orphans in Birobidjan.