The newspaper Pravda, Soviet Communist Party daily assailed Israeli diplomats in Moscow in an article yesterday reviewing the case of Eliahu Chazan, Israeli attache kidnapped and mistreated by Soviet secret agents, according to reports received here today.
In an article by David Zaslavsky, the newspaper’s leading satirist, Israel was accused of sending to the USSR a graduate of the “Lilienblum Street school” for black marketeers, speculators and narcotic dealers. (Lilienblum Street is one of Tel Aviv’s main thoroughfares.) Pravda charged that Mr. Chazan’s account of his ordeal in Odessa was an invention “along the lines of American comics”
It charged further that Mr. Chazan had manufactured the account of his arrest, detention and interrogation to cover his failure to “penetrate the confidence of Soviet citizens and to spread anti-Soviet literature.” Finally, Pravda asserted, it was “convenient for the reactionary press in Israel to present that lie as a true event.”
(In an editorial today entitled “Soviet Anti-Semitism,” the New York Times expressed disquiet over the Chazan incident and asserted that Soviet denials of responsibility “must be treated with great reserve in the light of the past history of the Soviet secret police and Soviet policy toward Israel and toward the Jews of the Soviet Union.” Anti-Semitic attitudes are “strong in the top Soviet leadership, the Times said, warning of the possibility of a “new campaign of terror” against Soviet Jewry.)
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
