The American Jewish Committee today denounced current anti-Jewish activities in Poland as an effort to blame the country’s Jews for “the recent wave of protests against the rigid control of cultural affairs by the ruling United Worker’s (Communist) Party.” Bertrand H, Gold, executive director, equated the events of the last few days with the “anti-Semitic Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe in the 1950’s.” He characterized reprisals against the fathers of sons allegedly involved in student protests as “Nazi-like outrages.”
The American Jewish Congress, in a statement by Dr. Joachim Prinz, chairman of its commission on international affairs, demanded that the Polish Government “repudiate the incitement to primitive racial and religious hatred and halt their scurrilous and racist appeals to latent anti-Semitism.” It said that “the world must not allow the Polish regime to use anti-Jewish incitement in Poland as a weapon to terrorize and silence those who dare speak out for freedom.”
In Washington, B’nai B’rith charged the Polish Government with exploiting “the divisive tactic of anti-Semitism” to explain away the anti-Government riots. Dr. William A, Wexler, president of B’nai B’rith, said that the singling out of Jewish intellectuals and youth leaders as organizers of the protests was “a grim echo of the Czarist device when the Russian autocracy was confronted with a popular upsurge for freedom and democracy.” Noting that the Polish Government was planning to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, Dr. Wexler said the attempt to “use Jews as scapegoats in a campaign to suppress freedom is a cruel mockery of the Warsaw martyrs.”
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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.
