Soviet newspapers, some of them not generally available in the West, have been continuing all this summer to feature articles and “news” reports, depicting Soviet Jews as “anti- social,” “miserly,” and “plunderers of state funds,” according to a survey of some of those papers compiled here today. The newspapers scanned included the Moscow daily, Leninskoe Znamya; Pravda Ukrainskaya, organ of the Communist Party in the Ukraine; and a number of other journals, some published in Moscow and Kiev, others in more remote provincial centers.
In each case, the survey showed, the men attacked were not described as Jewish, but the names were easily recognizable by all Soviet readers as typically Jewish. Among the men attacked have been Mikhail Nisonovitch Lemberg, charged with being ringleader of a gang that had robbed the state of 22,000 rubles, a gynecologist named Dr, Samuel Chtern; a “grain robber” named Iosif Borisovich Gurevich; a film agent identified as Lev Solodov; an alleged crook named Alexander Naumovitch Gofman; and four men called Frekhtman, Roiz, Tsalkovic and Blithstein.
Most of the cases involved, according to the reports in the controlled press, offenses that were admittedly petty. But, in each instance, the newspaper articles took pains to describe the men in such a manner as to make them seem repulsive to “cultured persons” in the USSR.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
