Mikoyan Refuses to See Jewish Delegation; Gets Memo on Anti-semitism

Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan today refused to receive a Jewish delegation seeking his views on the attitude of the Soviet Government toward the question of restoring Jewish cultural life in the Soviet Union. The audience was denied by an official of the Soviet Embassy.

The delegation, representing the Jewish Labor Committee, thereupon left a memorandum at the Soviet United Nations Mission headquarters, addressed to Mr. Mikoyan, citing examples of anti-Jewish abuses and anti-Jewish propaganda under the Moscow regime. The memorandum said that for the past ten years the JLC had “catalogued documented evidence showing that Jews in the Soviet Union were the victims of a cultural pogrom endorsed by both Stalin and Khrushchev.”

The memorandum also cited two broadcasts by Soviet broadcasting facilities in Kirovograd, one on December 17, 1958, and the other on December 23, 1958, in which the commentators “ranted against Jews in language echoing the ghost of Josef Goebbels. “The earlier broadcast, the JLC document said, “echoed the old canards against Jews that incited the Russian people under the Tsars.”

A book recently published in Moscow, entitled, “The State of Israel: Its Position and Policy,” by K. Ivanov and Z. Sheynic was termed, in the memorandum, “A companion piece of the anti-Semitic forgery, ‘The Protocols of Zion,’ which was used by Tsarist secret police and by professional bigots to incite the masses of non-Jews against the Jews.

The Soviet Deputy Premier was asked why the Jewish press, Yiddish literature, Jewish theatre and Jewish cultural institutions were repressed. The memorandum pointed out that to this date the families of scores of Yiddish writers purged and liquidated between 1948-52 have never received a public apology, nor their cases discussed in the Soviet press.