New Yorkers Urged to Join in Memorial Today at UN Wall

Mayor John V. Lindsay called today upon all New Yorkers to join in a memorial gathering to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of 24 Jewish intellectuals during the Stalin regime. The memorial will be held tomorrow, starting at 3:30 p.m., at the Isaiah Wall opposite the United Nations Secretariat building. In issuing the proclamation, the Mayor cited the continuing oppression of Soviet Jewish writers and leaders and to the ever-present restrictions on the practice of Jewish culture and religion. Tomorrow’s program is being sponsored by the Workmen’s Circle with the participation of other member organizations of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.

Twenty years ago tomorrow night 24 Jewish writers and poets including Peretz Markish, Itzik Fefer, David Bergelson, Shmuel Persov and others were murdered in the Liubianka Prison in a Stalinist purge of intellectuals. Rabbi Gilbert Klaperman, chairman of the Greater New York Conference, said, “twenty years later their grave sites remain unmarked and their families have not been publicly rehabilitated. Esther and David Markish, the wife and son of the murdered poet Peretz Markish, have been denied permission to emigrate to Israel.”

Rabbi Klaperman said that the irony of the 1952 assassinations is that the Soviets did not have the foresight to know that Soviet Jews were to become more determined to dedicate themselves to their history and culture. “We in America,” continued Rabbi Klaperman, “can do no less than reaffirm on this anniversary of that infamous night that we will never abandon our fight to help free Soviet Jews so that they may fulfill themselves as Jews wherever they desire.”

The Greater New York Conference also learned that the Markish home in Moscow is to be the scene on Saturday of a special memorial for the 24 victims. Mrs. Markish and her son David have both been subject to harassment in recent weeks after they were denied visas to emigrate to Israel.

Talking over the telephone to the New York Conference director, Malcolm Hoenlein, David recited a poem he had composed about the 24 martyrs. It was dedicated to his wife Irina, who is now in Israel and has been working feverishly on behalf of her husband and mother-in-law. “It was not for nothing that the poet-dreamer wasted his passion and breath,” David wrote about his father. “I have been ordered to stay. We have been crudely chopped in two. Allow us now to grow together. Save us, the people. Save our souls.”