Jew Denounces ‘reactionary’ Judaism at Ukrainian Academy Symposium

The House of Science in Kiev recently held a symposium on “The Ideology of Judaism,” in which a Jewish member of the Ukrainian Academy of Science denounced “the ethics of Judaism and its reactionary essence,” according to information received here today from the Ukrainian capital. The Ukrainian Academy of Science is the organization which, two years ago, published a violently anti-Semitic book, “Judaism Without Embellishment,” by a Prof. T.K. Kitchko. His thesis was subsequently rejected by some top Communist leaders in Moscow.

The speaker who attacked Judaism most forcefully, according to the atheist Ukrainian monthly magazine Liudina I Svit (Men and Enlightenment) which reported the symposium, was a well-known writer on atheism, Shakhnovich, a Jew. He denounced “bourgeois philosophers who identify Judaism with Jewish culture.” He declared: “Foreign defenders of religion are trying to represent atheist propaganda against Judaism as the persecution of Jewish believers. They are deliberately confusing religion, politics and ethnography, claiming that every Jew is a follower of the Jewish faith or a Judaist, and that every Jew is an Israelite.”