The Communist Party newspaper Pravda has published a letter signed by 70 “veteran Bolsheviks of Jewish nationality” denouncing alleged atrocities committed by Israel “as a result of the Zionist-Fascist policy of the bourgeois government of Meir, Dayan, Eban and Shazar.” The English text of the letter and the names of all the signatories along with the year of their admission to the Communist Party was circulated here today in “Review of the Soviet Press,” a news digest published by the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. The letter was apparently prompted by Egyptian claims that Israeli bombers blasted a primary school in the Nile delta April 8, killing 30 children. But the greater portion of its text was devoted to extolling Soviet treatment of its Jewish citizens and recalling the role played by Russian Jewish workers in the bolshevik revolution and in the war against Hitler. Asserting that the Soviet Union has granted all nationalities, including the Jews, the fullest rights and opportunities, the letter continued, “To the Israeli Zionists we say: stop your filthy solicitation. You won’t find a single traitor among the Jewish working people of the Soviet Union.” The dates next to the names of each of the signers indicated that about half of them were admitted to the “Communist Party” between 1903 and 1914. The letter added: “We have not forgotten the fight of our Party against the Zionists, Bundists and other Jewish nationalists…We cannot without the greatest of anger and indignation” hear about “the destruction of Arab cities and other Inhabited points, and the massacre of women, children and aged people.”
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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.
