Trial of Nine Soviet Jews Fails to Resume; No Indication when or if It Will Resume

The scheduled trial this week of nine Jews charged by Soviet authorities with having known about the alleged hijack plot last June 15 and not reporting it to Soviet officials failed to reopen. The trial was tentatively due to continue yesterday or today in Leningrad after being recessed last week due, according to reports, to the illness of one of the defendants. There was some speculation then that the sudden recess 10 minutes after the trial opened in Leningrad indicated that the Soviet authorities had either decided to cancel the trial entirely or to conduct the trial “underground” that is, in even greater secrecy than the trial last month of the Leningrad II. The worldwide outcry against death sentences handed down in the case of two Jews in the Leningrad II trial forced the Soviets to commute the sentences to severe prison terms similar to those meted out to the other nine co-defendants.

There was no immediate word today from the usually reliable sources as to whether or not the trial against the latest group of nine Jews or the trials scheduled in Kishinev and Riga had been postponed indefinitely or cancelled. The commutation of the two death sentences and the release of Maj. Grischa Feigin from a mental institution to which he had been committed for returning his war-time medals in protest against Soviet anti-Jewish policy, gave rise to the hope that the Soviet authorities were responding to world pressure. Meanwhile, 65 Jews in Moscow signed and circulated an open letter demanding that the trial of the Leningrad Nine, it held, be open to the public and foreign newsmen unlike the earlier trial which was secret.