Soviet Press Reported Showing No Relaxation on Anti-jewish Defamation

There is no relaxation in the Soviet press tendency to emphasize the Jewishness of various “criminals,” it was reported here today on the basis of a study made of Soviet newspapers reaching London. The newspapers included the Moskovsky Komsomoletz, organ of the Young Communists in Moscow; Bakinsky Rabotchy, a daily published in Baku; and Pravda Ukrainy, official organ of the Ukrainian Communist Party; published in Kiev.

Pravda Ukrainy carried a report about a girl student at the Khmelnitsky Technical School, convicted of theft and expelled from the school. After the newspaper revealed that one of the judges in the girl’s trial was a Jew, named Oksman, she was given a new trial and reinstated. Oksman, however, was dismissed from his job as a member of the school’s administration.

The same Kiev newspaper reported also that a man named Mikhail Yakovlevich Veizer, manager of the railroad depot at Dzhanskoye, in the Crimea, and a member of that town’s municipal council, had been sentenced “to a long term of imprisonment.” The man, whose name as spelled out is obviously Jewish, was accused of having forged documents concerning the educational qualifications of railroad employees, for bribes. A director of the high school was accused of having shared the bribes with Veizer, and also was sentenced.

At Baku, the “criminal” was named as Izrail (Israel) Semenovich Bilmes. An electrical engineer, he was accused of having changed jobs nine times in 13 years, of having been “incompetent in his work” and of being “rude to his colleagues.” A local court acquitted him of the charges, but Bakinsky Rabetchy demanded that he be fireo.

The Moskovsky Komsomolets carried a number of reports on Jewish youths allegedly involved with “gangs of speculators and swindlers. “It also reported that a 19-years old boy, Boris Churgin, was charged in the Sverdlovsk region with speculating in foreign postage stamps and with “an attempt to go abroad illegally.”