Soviet Papers Hit Polish Plea to Roosevelt

The Moscow Yiddish press today sharply atacked the Polish agudath Israel, orthodox Jewish organization, which at its recent conference appealed to President Roosevelt to intervene with the Soviet government against alleged religious persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. The Moscow Yiddish papers also criticized the attmeps by various Jewish organizations abroad to raise funds for Jewish relief in the Soviet Union.

Admitting that foreign money helped Jews in the Soviet union to the Soviet, which sell only for foreign meoney, the Yiddish papers declared that the Jews in the Soviet Union, almost without exception, are working and earning monyey. The situation is much defferent than it was seven or eight years ago when large number of Jews in the soviet Union were declassed; that is denied all rights of citizens, and they refused to enter the Soviet scheme of things.

The Yiddish Soviet press pointed out that during the last eight years more than 200,000 Jews have settled on the land; 300,000 are working in light and heavy families make a living through artisa# work, and altogeter Jews are represented in every barnch of industry, the government sevices and the Soviet army and navy. The number of declassed Jews has been reduced to a mininum and only those who obstinately refuse to give up trading in the market are suffering to any etent. Even the Jewish clergy, the papers pointed out, if they are registered in connection with one of the existing Jewish communites, are granted residence passports and no one prevents them from earning a living in any fashion they choose.

“The Jewish population of the Soviet Union needs more cuitural knowledged, but does not lack food,” one of the paers said. All the Soviet papers vehemently denied reports spread at the Agudath Israel conference in Warsaw that fifteen hundred Polish Jewsih settlers in the Bureaya autonomous region in Siberia, set aside for Jewish colonizaion starved or fled to Poland.