Louis A. Pincus, chairman of the World Zionist Organization Executive has disputed the contention by Michael Fidler, chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, that no pertinent passages were deleted from the transcript of a controversial speech by Dr. Nahum Goldmann in London last Dec, 19 and released subsequently by the World Jewish Congress.
In a letter published in the Jerusalem Post, Pincus contended that a “nasty joke” related by Dr. Goldmann did indeed set the tone for his remarks on Soviet Jewry which caused the WZO Executive to withdraw its invitation to Dr. Goldmann to address the recent 28th World Zionist Congress.
Pincus stated in his letter that he would let the readers judge the story he said was related by Dr. Goldmann: “A Soviet diplomat once on the joking side said to me (Dr. Goldmann), ‘You know our policy in Stalin’s day–we would have shot those people, they would not have opened their mouths,’ which is true, they didn’t. ‘In Khruschev’s days we would have sent them to Siberia. Today we sent them to so-called sanatoria, what you call insane asylums. For us Israel is an insane asylum. Let them go there.'”
Pincus claimed in his letter that this deleted portion was a “repulsive and scandalous story… which out savagely into the sinews of our people in the Soviet Union who are engaged in a daily struggle for freedom as they see it, joining their people in their historic homeland.”
Fidler, who attended the Congress as an observer, was sharply critical at the time of the WZO’s treatment of Dr. Goldmann. He claimed in a letter published in the Jerusalem Post Jan. 26 that only incidental and anecdotal material was deleted from the transcript of Dr. Goldmann’s speech and claimed that the speech as a whole reflected the position on Soviet Jews taken by the World Conference on Soviet Jewry held in Brussels in Feb. 1971.
(Responding to Pincus’ letter, Fidler, who is back in London, said: “I regret that the chairman of the Executive has found it necessary to give wide currency to what seemed to the listeners an insignificant joke in parenthesis. But I think it is time to conclude this debate and get on to other things. All I would like to say is that the impact of the Goldmannesque anecdotes was not what Mr. Pincus makes it out to have been.”)
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