Militant Soviet Jewish Youth Unafraid to Speak Their Minds Publicly, Says Smolar

The “courage” of today’s militant Soviet youth “is the difference between them and the other generations of (Soviet) Jews,” according to Boris Smolar, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “They don’t mince words,” he continues. “They say what’s on their mind, and they say it very courageously, and they say it in the presence of non-Jewish colleagues–who, by the way, sympathize with them.” The aim of Soviet Jewish youth, notes Smolar, is simply to discover “Who are we?” The JTA Editor Emeritus makes these comments in an interview to be telecast Wednesday morning on WPIX’s “Jewish Dimension” program. Smolar tells host Jerry Goodman, executive director of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, that anti-Semitism in the USSR is “very strong” and is “encouraged” by the government, but that it is not the “physical” kind of anti-Semitism practised by the Nazis.

It is strongest, he says, in the Ukraine, which is a “special situation” because it has long been known as “the breadbasket of Russia.” There, he says, the secessionists who had freedom of operation under the Polish regime are “masking their secessionist ambitions with intensified anti-Semitism.” Smolar is the author of “Soviet Jewry: Today and Tomorrow,” just published by Macmillan and scheduled for release Sept. 16. The other guest on the program, presented by the American Jewish Committee, is Richard Maass, chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry. He says of Soviet militants: “In this country they would not be considered militant at all. They would simply be on the lower end of the spectrum of the civil rights demonstrator.” They are not anti-Soviet, he contends, and do not condemn “the Russian system as such.” They want only one thing: “They want out.” The Soviet Jewish protest movement, Maass continues, has “grown to rather large proportion” and is still growing, and increased anti-Semitism has in fact “caused it to rise up and to assert itself.”