Israel Judge Blasts Soviet Anti-jewish Discriminations at U.N. Parley

Israel Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen, a member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, outlined at length at the commission’s annual meeting today the discriminations being practiced by Soviet authorities against Russian Jews.

Justice Cohen spoke on the draft before the commission against all forms of religious intolerance. He said the greatest achievement embodied in the draft was that it covered theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs to ensure that disregard of the freedom of religion should never again be allowed to bring suffering to mankind.

Declaring that the Catholic Church had stopped persecuting members of other religions, he said that the highest councils of the church, a reference to the Ecumenical Council, was now formulating principles of tolerance to guide the Catholic Church in the future. He insisted that the intolerance inherent in any religion was also inherent in the belief that no religion can be true. He quoted the Marxist dogma that “religion is the opium of the masses.”

Asserting that the suffering once caused by monopolistic religions was now being caused by reliance on atheistic doctrine, the jurist said that the motivation for intolerance was the same in both cases. He said that it stemmed from the conviction of infallibility in one’s views, as distinguished from those of the next man. If the “next man” is a member of a small minority, the jurist added, he and his views are doomed.

It was a matter of “bitter and fateful tragedy,” he continued, that the Jewish people and the Jewish religion were the main and “quite hopeless” victims of fanatical religious persecution. He said no explanation of this persecution could stand a rational test and that the word “anti-Semitism” was a label not an explanation.

CONTRASTS TREATMENT OF JEWS WITH OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS IN RUSSIA

Focusing on the situation in the Soviet Union, he said that whereas other religious communities there were allowed to some extent to observe and propagate their religions, such facilities which were, at some time or other, granted to Jewish religious communities were being for the greater part gradually and systematically withdrawn.

He said he was “happy” to “report and acknowledge” that the Russian Orthodox version of the Bible had been reprinted in 1957 in an edition of 50,000 copies and that the Protestant version had been reprinted in 1958 in 10,000 volumes. He noted also that in Ufa and Tashkent, the Muslim directorates were allowed to produce three editions of the Arabic Koran between 1959 and 1962. But, he said, no such permission had ever been given for reprinting of the Hebrew Bible.

He added that he was “glad to say” that Muslims were allowed to use Arabic as their holy language in print but that there were no similar facilities in the Soviet Union for Hebrew. He said that for 40,000,000 Russian Orthodox worshipers there were, according to press reports, 20,000 churches, 35,000 priests and 69 monasteries and convents–one place of worship per each 2,000 believers and one priest for each 1,100 believers. For Russia’s 10,000,000 Baptists, there were roughly 6,000 parishes and pastors–one place of worship and one minister for each 500 believers.

He then contrasted these date with the remaining 90 synagogues and about that number of rabbis for nearly 1,000,000 Jewish believers–one synagogue and one rabbi for 15,000 to 16,000. He said the ecclesiastical bodies of other religions in Russia were permitted to produce a variety of ritual objects and that mass sales of such objects, particularly candles, was an important source of income for the church. However, he pointed out, the production of Jewish religious objects, such as prayer shawls or phylacteries, was prohibited.

REPUDIATION OF STALINISM BROUGHT NO RELAXATION IN DISCRIMINATION

He told the UN Commission that still less understandable than this discrimination was the fact that matters had gone from bad to worse since the repudiation of the Stalin era. In 1962, he noted, authorities announced publicly for the first time that Jews could no longer bake matzon for Passover. He said that the Feast of Passover, a remembrance of delivery from bondage, had been branded in Soviet propaganda as “subversive.” He added that, in all fairness, he should report that very limited amounts of matzoh were being baked this year within the precinct of a few synagogues and he expressed the hope that this was a step forward in the right direction.

As other observers have reported, Justice Cohen noted also that the Jewish religion was discriminated against in Russia by a ban on organization on a national basis, and a ban on contact with co-religionists abroad, even in other Communist Countries. By contrast, he stated, the Baptists had a nationwide federation in Russia. “This All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists is a member of the World Council of Baptists and of the European Baptist Federation,” he stressed.

Russian Muslims, he continued, were permitted to send and receive overseas delegation and to undertake the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca. He asked why only Russian Jews were totally isolated from Jewish communities the world over and from all religious life.

The jurist said he was apologizing for taking so much time but that he was doing so “not only to draw the attention of our distinguished colleague from the USSR and his Government to this deplorable state of affairs but also to show that both religious belief and irreligious belief have in common that they are potential breeding places of religious intolerance. The lesson of history is hat true religious freedom needs protection from both.”