Tass Attacks Israel, U.s.a., Goldmann; Jewish Victimization Confirmed

While Western sources in Moscow confirmed today the arrest and imprisonment of three leaders of the Jews in Moscow, in addition to the previous imprisonment of three Leningrad Jewish leaders, the Soviet Government’s news agency, Tass, has bitterly attacked the world-wide protests against Russia’s new series of anti-Jewish manifestations.

An English-language commentary by a Tass writer, Igor Orlov, distributed only to foreign correspondents in Moscow, charged that the recent conviction of the three Leningrad Jewish leaders was the signal for the start of a campaign about “a wave of victimization of Soviet Jews.”

Charging that the “episode” would have been ignored by the Western press, “if the defendants had not been Jews,” Orlov bracketed in his statement the Israel Government, the Jewish press, the Administration in Washington, Arthur J. Goldberg, U.S. Secretary of Labor, and Dr. Nahum Goldman, president of the World Jewish Congress. (See Dr. Goldmann’s reply below.)

Orlov said that Israel “agents” had “involved some Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality into their espionage activities,” who had “sold themselves to the foreign intelligence.” Denying they were leaders of the Jewish community, he maintained they represent “nothing and no one.” He attacked “the Zionist press in Israel, the Ministers in Premier David Ben-Gurion’s Government, who want to make a good impression on Washington.” claimed the “attackers were joined by Secretary of Labor Goldberg, and accused Dr. Goldmann of “taking the same line.”

Orlov denied that Jews as individuals are subjected to persecution and quoted Dr. Goldmann as having stated: “The Jews as individuals are not subject to any kind of racial discrimination in the USSR.”

(In New York, the Day-Jewish Journal, a Yiddish newspaper, reported that a number of prominent Jews in the Soviet military service, as well as well-known Russian-Jewish army veterans, appealed to USSR Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, during the recent Communist Congress in Moscow, for restoration of full rights to Soviet Jews. The Jewish-Russian army men reportedly presented a memorandum which was signed among others, by Gen. Jacob Kreiser, head of Soviet forces in the Far East; Maj. Gen. David L. Nemstov; Vladimir A. Duchni; an officer named Pinhatze, and others.)