U.S. Observer Reports on Calculated Campaigns Against Jews in USSR

The first eye-witness report of the anti-Jewish campaign conducted in the Soviet Union under the Stalin regime and its effect on the Jewish population there is published today in the New York Times by its Moscow correspondent Harrison E. Salisbury, who just returned to the United States after spending five years in the USSR.

“There have been three serious anti-Semitic drives in the Soviet Union in the last 15 years, each of which was government-inspired and government-instigated,” Mr. Salisbury reports. “Two of those drives occurred within the last five years. The third was a war-time phenomenon. “These calculated campaigns against the Jews, together with the horrible exterminations carried out on Russian territory during World War II by the Germans, have virtually wiped out Jewish communal and cultural life in the Soviet Union, where, in the early days of the revolution, it had received considerable encouragement.

“Synagogues remain in only a few of the largest cities. In Moscow, with a population of several hundred thousand Jews, there is only one small synagogue, which is terribly overcrowded at the time of the Jewish holidays. In the former Jewish center of Minsk, there is a single synagogue. The same is true of Odessa, where many Jews still reside, although numbers were deported to the East during the anti-Jewish campaign of 1948-49. One of the oldest Jewish communities, that of Bukhara that dates from the sixth or seventh century, still manages to survive. Services are still held in the ancient synagogue on the Street of the Jews.”

The N. Y. Times correspondent says that “it seems highly unlikely” that anti-Semitism will be resorted to in the foreseeable future by the Malenkov regime which acted to end “the most vicious machinations that had been instigated in Russia in recent times” – the “doctors plot” in which a group of Jewish doctors were accused of conspiring against the Kremlin.

SEES NO REVIVAL OF JEWISH TRADITIONS AND CULTURE FEASIBLE

However, as far as Jewish religion and Jewish culture is concerned, the present government’s benign policy toward Jews comes almost too late, ” Mr. Salisbury reports. “There is little left to preserve. The Jews have been too widely scattered and too harshly persecuted, simply because of the fact that they are Jews, to make any early revival of either custom or religion likely or even feasible. “

The first recent anti-Semitic outbreak in the Soviet Union took place shortly after the beginning of World War II. Mr. Salisbury writes. Its most spectacular manifestation was the circulation in Moscow of rumors that “the Jews are deserting Moscow.” It was said that rich Jews had bought places on the evacuation trains and fled to the East.

“the truth was that the government itself had evacuated a number of ‘rich Jews’–artists, singers and writers–in a general organized movement of certain classes of intelligentsia,” the N. Y. Times correspondent states. “The rumors actually had been started by the government in order to divert the resentment of the vast majority of Muscovites, who were being left behind. Possibly to the surprise of the government, the anti-Semitic reports snowballed to such an extent that many department chiefs began to discharge all Jews from their staffs. Professors were relieved of their university posts. Many Jews lost their deferred status and were inducted into the Soviet Army.”

JEWISH LIFE “CRIPPLED IRREPARABLY”; ORGANIZATIONS DISSOLVED

A more serious government-inspired campaign against Jews started seven years later, in 1948-49, under the mask of “cosmopolitanism,” the correspondent relates. This campaign, he reports virtually brought to an end in Russia organized Jewish communities and crippled Jewish cultural life irreparably. The Jewish language publishing house in Moscow was dissolved, as were Yiddish newspapers in Moscow and Minsk. Jewish theatres in Moscow, Minsk and Birobidzhan were closed. Jewish

“In Moscow, many Jews lost their posts in theatres and universities and publishing enterprises. Many government departments quietly introduced regulations against hiring Jews,” Mr. Salisbury writes. He reveals that “the heaviest blows fell on the great Jewish center of Minsk and in the already largely moribund Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan which at this time largely lost its Jewish character. All Jewish cultural activities were wiped out. About the only vestige that remained, aside from the name of the oblast, were Yiddish street signs, a tiny synagogue (probably organized by the M. V. D. in order to keep a closer watch on religionists), and a Yiddish paper that appeared intermittently with a few hundred copies,” he reports.

“The reason for this tempest against the Jews apparently was fear that “they were not completely loyal to the Soviet Union and constituted a security risk, ” Mr. Salisbury assumes. “The fear probably had its foundation in the demonstrations given by Moscow Jews to the first Minister from Israel, Mrs. Golda Myerson, on her arrival in Moscow. Jews by the hundreds queued up at her office in the Metropole Hotel. They blocked the streets outside Moscow’s synagogue when she went to services there, ” he says.

Mr. Salisbury reveals in his article that many Jews from the Ukraine and Byelorussia have been sent to far northern Yakutia, with its permanently frozen subsoil and its dark and frigid winters, while Tartars are being exiled to Birobidzhan. He says he saw many Jews in the city of Yakutsk during his recent visit there and that some of them have found work in small factories and service industries there.