Soviet Embassy in Mexico Holds Press Conference on Jews in Russia

An illustration of Soviet sensitivity to foreign criticism regarding anti-Semitism in the USSR was noted here today when Nikolay S. Leonoff, press attache of the USSR Embassy in Mexico, called a press conference to deny that the Soviet Government has failed to give Russian Jews equal religious and cultural rights.

Taking issue with a petition to the Kremlin published here two weeks ago by some of the most prominent Mexican artists, writers and political leaders, requesting a change in Moscow’s anti-Semitic policies, Mr. Leonoff declared: “It is to be regretted that so many intellectuals have found it possible to act mistakenly on so many errors.”

He cited as examples of the lack of anti-Semitism the monthly issuance of the Moscow magazine, Sovietisch Heimland, in Yiddish; the existence in Moscow of a yeshiva; and the claim that 8,000,000 copies of the poetry of the late Leib Kvitko, a Yiddish poet, had been circulated in the USSR. He did not mention the fact that Kvitko had been murdered in the Stalin purges of Jewish intellectuals, or the fact that the publication of the Kvitko works had been issued in Russian translation, not in Yiddish.

Mr. Leonoff also insisted that the existence of few synagogues in the USSR does not denote anti-Jewish persecution. He said that all houses of worship in his country, Christian as well as Jewish, are fewer now by comparison with the number open prior to the Bolshevik revolution. “Jews, like many other Russians, are leaving their religion,” he said. He accused the Jewish Committee on the Rights of Soviet Jewry of carrying on anti-Soviet propaganda in this country.

Replying to Mr. Leonoff, Jacobo Mondlak, chairman of the Jewish Committee, told the influential newspaper, El Universal, that the Soviet diplomat’s claims about the lack of official sanction of Soviet anti-Semitism are “false.”