An American Orthodox rabbi said today a story out of Jerusalem on Sunday that the KGB (Soviet secret police) would appoint Rabbi Israel Schwartzblat of Odessa as rabbi of Moscow’s Choral Synagogue was “not true.” At a news conference Sunday, three men identified as rabbis who had left the Soviet Union within the past two years. Dr. Gevarinou Pacharsky, former chairman of the Jewish community in Leningrad, Israel Bronfman of Odessa and Yaacob Alishevitz of Moscow, claimed that Rabbi Schwartzblat was the Soviet government’s candidate for the position because he was a KGB agent.
In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Rabbi Pinchas M. Teitz, Rosh Yeshiva (head) of the Jewish Education Center of Elizabeth, former presidium member of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, denounced the story as “a lie.” Rabbi Teitz, who just returned Thursday from a 10-day visit (his sixth) to the Soviet Union, said the three men named in Sunday’s story were not even rabbis. “They are shoctim (kosher slaughterers) who have been out of the Soviet Union for between five and eight years and have no knowledge of what is happening in that country,” he said.
During his just concluded visit to the Soviet Union he told the JTA, he met with the chairman and deputy chairman of the Ministry of Religion surnamed Mekartzez and Kudnikoff respectively, to discuss various candidates for the position of rabbi of the Choral Synagogue and Rabbi Schwartzblat’s name “was not even mentioned.” The three men in Jerusalem do a disservice to the cause of Soviet Jewry when they make that kind of unfounded or exaggerated statement, Rabbi Teitz said.
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