New Persecution of Zicnists in Russia: Fresh Arrests Being Made According to Reports Reaching Palest

A new wave of political arrests has been sweeping over Soviet Russia for the past few months, says a report received by the “Mogen”, a society for the succour of Russian Zionists, and many Zionists are among those who have been imprisoned. The authorities seem to be anxious, the report says, to keep the exiles under the thumb of the G.P.U. as long as possible, and with that end in view the G.P.U. is planning to prepare new changes to enable them to continue to keep imprisoned such exiles whose term of “minus” is draeing to an end, so that they shall not regain their liberty. By far the greater number of arrests end in sentences of further exile and imprisonment in politisolators. Each of the new arrestees has six to eight years of imprisonment and banishment behind him.

At the beginning of September, the report says, there were arrests at Samarkand, Ashkhabad (Central Asia) and Great Ostiug (North Russia). Zionist, Social-Democratic and Social-Republican exiles were arrested. The names are not yet known. Recently three Zionist women exiles were stopping temporarily at Krasnoiarsk on their way to the place of banishment designated for them by the authorities, a place called Torokhensk, one of the very worst places of banishment. These unfortunates were palutzoth from the agricultural settlements of the illegal Hehalutz Organisation. One of the exiles applied to the labour exchange for work that would be a little easier for her, because she is physically weak, and she was told that exiles ought to be glad to have work no harder than hers.

The mail of the exiles is held up for a long time and sometimes never delivered. The officials of the Passport Department, it is stated, tried to dissuade one of the women who had received a permit to enter Palestine as a political refugee from going there on the ground that “people are starving in Palestine”.