Moscow Jewish Prayer Book Permitted Only After Translated for Censor

Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin told American correspondents yesterday that it took him two years to translate into Russian, for the Soviet censors, the Jewish prayer book which will soon be published in Hebrew in the Soviet Union with the approval of The Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults which is in charge of religious affairs.

The Chief Rabbi said he did not know exactly when the three-volume prayer book would be ready. He said that a printing of 10,000 copies had been authorized but added that “even if the books are given to the printer tomorrow, it would take two or three months before they appear.” He expressed hope that they may be ready in time for distribution during the next High Holy Days. In the meantime he has not announced the event to his congregations. “Until I have the books, I have nothing to announce,” he said.

Rabbi Levin also told the American correspondents he expects to have an enrollment of 30 students in his yeshiva next fall, 20 of them to be from areas outside Moscow. He said he expects to start classes at the yeshiva immediately after the High Holy Days. He and Menasha Mikhailovich, president of Moscow’s Central Synagogue, told the correspondents that American Jews, either as individuals or in groups, are welcome to visit “if they come in a spirit of peace and unity” and not for the purpose of “writing slanders about our country.”

The New York Times reported from Vilna, the leading Jewish cultural center in Eastern Europe before World War II, that the city has today a Jewish population of about 15,000 as compared with the 80,000 Jews who lived there before the Nazis occupied the city which is now the Soviet Lithuanian capital. The report noted that the “Biro-Bidjaner Shtern”–the only Yiddish newspaper in the Soviet Union, published three times a week in Biro-Bidjan–is being sold on the newsstands in Vilna.