Reports in the Soviet press today laud many Jewish officers and men who have distinguished themselves in the bloody battle for Stalingrad which entered its thirty-eighth day today.
Sergeant Kosik and Private Berkovitz were given the assignment of cleaning out a squad of Germans who were entrenched in hidden pits and ditches along a road on the outskirts of the city. As they approached the road, a group of German tanks appeared. Although their company was badly outnumbered, Kosik and Berkovitz threw scores of “Molotov cocktails,” setting the tanks afire and forcing their occupants to flee, making the Nazis easy targets for the Russian riflemen.
Another exploit reported in the press is that of a Jewish private, Bernstein, who led a group of thirteen trucks bearing ammunition through burning streets, under heavy aerial bombing and artillery fire, to relieve a Russian regiment that had been surrounded by the Germans during a night surprise attack. Other heresies mentioned are Sergeant Leib Fischman, who led his unit against 100 Nazi tanks, destroying fifteen and forcing the others to retreat; Lieut. Shoichet, whose platoon lured eighty-five Nazis into a trap and killed thirty-five of them; and nineteen-year-old cavalryman Abraham Resnitsky, attached to a Cossaek regiment, who made a perilous gallop across no-man’s land to restore communications between two Soviet regiments.
A Jewish doctor, Simon Rafalowich, and his staff, are praised for continuing to work in their Red Cross hospital although a Nazi bomb scored a direct hit, killing six members of the staff.
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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.
