The Soviet press was reported here today as intensifying its campaign to combat the sentiments prevailing among Jews in the Soviet Union.
Newspapers arriving here from the Soviet Union all indicate that the campaign to stem Jewish feelings on emigration to Israel is assuming an organized character. The newspapers carry numerous letters, purported to be written by new Israeli settlers, describing the “awful conditions” in which the immigrants live and their “great longing” to return to their native country, that is, the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainskaya Pravda published a lengthy article based on “scores of letters” from new immigrants in Israel to friends and relatives in the Ukraine, complaining about shortages of food, housing and jobs. The author of the article stresses that such conditions were customary in capitalist countries and that in Israel “the ruling classes are regularly exploiting the new immigrants.”
The appearance of such articles also in Komsolskaya Pravda, the Communist youth newspaper, indicates that the Soviet rulers had decided that the desire to emigrate existed not only in the older generation but also among the younger Russian Jews born and raised under the Soviet regime.
Israel observers said today these articles were no surprise and that they confirmed the undiminished desire among Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel. The anti-immigration campaign in the Soviet press started immediately after the Moscow Youth Festival last year when thousands of Russian Jews came hundreds of miles to see and meet the Israel delegates to the Festival.
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