The Russian newspaper Pravda has published an official apology last week for an anti-Semitic article that was printed in its pages in early May, the World Jewish Congress reported.
Editors ran a retraction last week on Page 2 of statements made in the May 5 article that charged that Jews engage in ritual murders, a trumped-up charge that often led to pogroms in czarist Russia.
The article also linked the murders of three Russian Orthodox priests to the long-standing efforts by American members of the Lubavitch movement to gain the release of their religious texts held at the Lenin Library in Moscow.
The apology was published by the editors in reaction to a letter to the editor, signed by Leonid Goldin, which said the article, “discredits the socialist movement, which has entered a difficult period.
“How can you provoke a further round of suspicions and witch hunts?” Goldin asked.
The editors acknowledged that “L. Goldin is right.
“Untested, unjustified statements occurred in the article ‘Satan’s Tribe’ through the author’s fault,” they wrote.
The editors then wrote that they “offered their apologies to the readers.”
They added, “At the same time, we think it is necessary to underline that our newspaper, as before, stands on positions of internationalism and is opposed to inciting hatred.”
Both the U.S. State Department and the Russian government have condemned the article.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has also issued a full retraction of the article, according to Mark Levin, executive director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
