The Soviet policy of Jewish “cultural extinction,” highlighted during the Stalin regime by the execution of 24 Jewish intellectual leaders just 10 years ago, “remains essentially unaltered” under Khrushchev, a statement issued here today by seven major Jewish organizations charged.
The statement was made public today in commemoration of the mass executions of Soviet Jewish writers, poets and theatre figures, who were executed on August 12, 1952. Those killed included the famous Yiddish writers David Bergelson, Peretz Markish and Itzik Feffer. Previously, Shlomo Mikhoels, head of the prewar Yiddish State Theatre in Moscow, and chairman of the Soviet-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, had been assassinated.
Recalling the executions, and the imprisonment and assassination of “hundreds of other leading Jewish writers, actors, scientists and community leaders, ” the seven-member statement issued today declared that the anti-Jewish persecutions “coincided with the physical liquidation of all Jewish cultural institutions, a process of cultural obliteration to which no other minority in the USSR had been subjected.”
“Under Premier Khrushchev,” the statement continued, “the policy of cultural extinction remains essentially unaltered. There is no school, nor even a classroom where a Jewish child may learn something of Yiddish or Hebrew language and literature. There does not even exist the opportunity for Jewish parents to have their children instructed in Jewish history and culture through the medium of the Russian language.
CHARGE KRUSHCHEV WITH PERPETUATING STALIN’S POLICY
“Official Soviet practice today perpetuates the Stalin policy of depriving Soviet Jewry of continuity with its past and of free expression in the present. Without a past and a present, the future is precarious. The terror is gone, but the policy of extinguishing every spark of Jewish consciousness and identity continues.
“Ten years after their execution, there is no way, except for public apology and full rehabilitation, that reparation can be made to the slain writers. But there is a way for the Soviet government to rectify its crime against Soviet Jewry: To reverse this policy and to restore to Soviet Jews the full right to their own cultural life.”
The seven organizations that issued the memorial statement, and the officers who signed the statement, were: Dr. Joachim Prinz, president, American Jewish Congress; Label Katz, president, B’nai B’rith; Adolph Held, national chairman, Jewish Labor Committee; Theodore Brooks, national commander, Jewish War Veterans; Lewis Weinstein, chairman, National Community Relations Advisory Council; Rabbi David Hill, president, National Council of Young Israel; and Rabbi Israel Moshowitz, president, New York Board of Rabbis.
Another statement memorializing the Jewish martyrs of the Stalin era, and pointing out that “the climate for Jewish life, Yiddish writers and Judaism has hardly improved under Khrushchev” was issued today by the national executive office of the Workmen’s Circle, which has 560 branches in 31 states. This statement expressed the hope “that the future of Jewish life in Russia be relieved of anti-Semitic repression under Communism, and ultimately achieve the genuine freedom which only a change to democracy can bring.”
An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune also condemned the Khrushchev policy of anti-Semitism. “Nikita Khrushchev,” stated the editorial, “has denounced many of the barbarisms of Joseph Stalin, but there is one that he has adopted for himself — anti-Semitism. However intense Khrushchev’s anti-Semitic policy may become, it will exorcise neither the mentality nor the continued physical existence of the Jews. He can hope for a solution through a voluntary emigration or assimilation, but never through persecution.”
(A dispatch received in London from Moscow this weekend reported that Literaturnaya Gazetta, leading publication of the Soviet Writers Union, has published translations of six Yiddish poems by four Jewish writers, Moisei Teif, Matvei Grubian, Ovsei Driz and Mendel Lifshitz. One of the poems, by Moisei Teif, recalled prewar pogroms in Minsk, linking his childhood fears of anti-Semitism with the present by stating: “I still am trembling when I wander about a non-Jewish quarter.”)
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