U.S. Jewish Groups Condemn Anti-jewish Character of Trial

American Jewish organizations and leading American newspapers today sharply condemned the anti-Semitic tactics at the Prague trial. The Jewish War Veterans of the United States issued a call to its members to boycott goods produced in the Soviet Union or in Soviet-dominated countries.

The American Jewish Committee said in a statement: “The trial of Rudolph Slansky, renegade Jew and his colleagues, who betrayed Judaism in serving the Communist cause, should awaken everyone to the fact that anti-Semitism has become an open instrument of Communist policy. It is ironical that these men who deserted Judaism, which is inimical to Communism, are now being used as an excuse for the Communist-anti-Semitic campaign.”

The New York Times said in an editorial that the anti-Jewish allegations at the Prague trial are a “Stalinist version” of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It points out that the groundwork for this version “was laid four years ago in Soviet Russia’s own campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism,’ a campaign whose victims were predominantly Jews.” The paper said that the Prague trial “may well mark the beginning of a major tragedy as the Kremlin swings further and further toward anti-Semitism marked as anti-Zionism,” adding that “this latest evidence that Stalin can emulate Hitler bodes ill indeed” for well over 2,000,000 Jews living in “Stalin’s empire.”

The New York Herald Tribune editorially comments in a similar vein. The Yiddish newspapers also consider the anti-Jewish trend at the Prague trial as an “open manifestation of Communist anti-Semitism” and as a danger to the several hundred thousand Jews who still reside in “Iron Curtain” countries. The removal of these Jews from Communist countries should become “Problem No.1” of American Jewry, the Jewish press urges.