Labor Meeting Assails Anti-semitic Tone of Prague Trial

Some 2,000 persons attending a rally here to protest the anti-Jewish aspects of the Prague “purge” trial today adopted a resolution calling on the United Nations and the governments of the world to call on the Soviet Union to “unlock the doors and permit the remnants of the Jewish populations to find refuge with their brothers and sisters in other lands.”

The resolution was adopted by the Joint Labor Rally to Protest Soviet Anti-Semitism, under the chairmanship of Adolph Held. The meeting was sponsored by the Jewish Labor Committee. Speakers included leaders of the American labor movement as well as Alice Masaryk, daughter of the late founder of the Czechoslovak Republic.

A message by President Truman to the conference asserted that “the tragic fate of six million Jews at the hands of other totalitarian regimes does not permit us to witness the use of anti-Semitism without protest. The Jewish people are not alone in their concern over the implications of the Prague trials for the Jewish communities in Czechoslovakia and in the other Soviet satellite areas in Eastern Europe,” the President stressed. “Decent men everywhere are disturbed by the revelations of the Prague trials. We Americans cannot condemn these procedures too forcefully.”

President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenho0wer, in his message, declared that “the communists, like the Russian Czars and the German Nazis, are using the Jews as scapegoats for the failure to their regime. I am honored to take my stand with American Jewry, the trade unionists, and all the other men and women of decent instincts who are participating in your meeting,” the message added.

At the United Nations yesterday, Secretary General Trygve Lie received a protest against the Prague trial from Alfred Kohlberg, national chairman of the American Jewish League Against Communism, which urged the U. N. to probe the trial the “Reichstage Fire of 1952” and predicted that it would lead to Communistled pogroms.