The State Department came under fire in the Senate today on charges by Sen. Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut, Democrat, that the Department had inadequately responded to Soviet anti-Semitism.
Reviewing increased evidence of anti-Jewish tendencies in the Soviet Union, Sen. Dodd said the facts clearly revealed “Prime Minister Khrushchev, himself, as the chief condoner, if not the chief instigator, of the persecution of the Soviet Jews.”
The Senator referred to recent developments in Russia in commenting on an exchange he had with the State Department last summer on the Soviet Jewish question. In reply to the Senator’s recommendation for increased United States diplomatic activity on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Assistant Secretary of State Frederick G. Dutton wrote that it was “not possible to determine whether Soviet Jews are deliberately being singled out as Jews for a disproportionate amount of condemnation and victimization.”
Sen. Dodd said he “found it difficult to understand Mr. Dutton’s uncertainty, because it seemed to me at the time that there was overwhelming evidence that the Soviet Jews were, in fact, the victims of special persecution.”
The Senator recalled that, as far back as 1954, a Congressional Select Committee to investigate Communist aggression concluded that the official and deliberate policy of Communism was aimed directly at forced assimilation of the Jews as the preferred technique for exterminating the Jews as a people. ” He said “continuing Soviet racism reveals not only to the world, but also to the Soviet people, that Communist deeds do not match Communist words.”
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