The “evasive answers” given by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to questions about the status of Soviet Jews showed that “his regime persists in the old Russian Government practice of manipulating anti-Semitic prejudice whenever it serves political expediency,” Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said here last night at a dinner honoring Label A. Katz, international B’nai B’rith president.
More than 600 guests attended the dinner which also heard an address by James P. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor, denouncing bigotry. The address was delivered for the Secretary of Labor by his assistant George Lodge, since Secretary Mitchell was detained in Washington by the White House talks on the steel strike.
Mr. Katz said that “positive progress” is being made in inter group relations in the South year after year. The dinner in his honor was tendered in connection with the annual executive committee meeting of the Anti-Defamation League held at the Roosevelt Hotel here. Jewish leaders in the South were told at the meeting that they should not fear taking a “positive stand” on the segregation issue and should not be influenced by “violence against synagogues.”
Mr. Schultz emphasized that anti-Semitic activities “have had little effect upon traditional friendly attitudes toward Jews in the South.” Benjamin R. Epstein, the executive director of the league, predicted that exclusion of Jews by college fraternities “will virtually disappear as an official practice” in two years.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
