“A heavy cloud of foreboding hangs over the Jews in the Soviet Union,” the United Nations Economic and Social Council was told today by Mordechai Kidron, Israel’s representative to the U.N. headquarters in Geneva. “The anti-Jewish overtones of the unbridled Soviet campaign of incitement against Israel cannot but fill the hearts of men of goodwill everywhere with deep trepidation,” he warned.
Declaring that Soviet Jewry “is also feeling the lash of Moscow’s incitement against Israel,” Ambassador Kidron told the session of the Council: “The venomous campaign was not directed at Israel alone. Another principal target was and still is the long-suffering Jewish community of the Soviet Union.” He added that the Economic and Social Council “was aware of the state of this unfortunate minority, deprived of its national, cultural and religious rights and subject to gross discrimination in many walks of life.”
He told the session that, for many years, the press, radio and television in the Soviet Union had served as a “faithful echo” of Arab propaganda against Israel, and that the campaign of vituperation had reached a peak at the outbreak of the Middle East war on June 5. He said that charges had been made “without limits between the bestial crimes of the Nazis and Zionism, a noble movement of national liberation.”
He accused the Soviet Union of being “gravely implicated” in the Middle East arms race and in the responsibility for the misery and distress caused by “reckless adventures.” He declared that the Soviets had instigated the Middle East arms race in 1955 and that billions of dollars which otherwise might have been invested in economic and social development had been sunk into accumulation of weapons of death and destruction, “a gruesome trade that still goes on.”
The envoy also raised the issue of the treatment last June of Jewish nationals in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Libya where, he said, assaults on Jewish communities had resulted in many deaths, incarceration of Jews in concentration camps. and sacking and pillage of their possessions.
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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.
