Eight noted physicists, including Nobel Prize winner Felix Bloch, expressed doubts today that Prof. Lev Landau, the Soviet Jewish scientist, “willingly and wittingly” took part in a letter to the New York Times denying the existence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Nobel Prize laureate joined with economist Yevsei Liberman in protesting a mass rally in Madison Square Garden on June 3, asserting that “no one has been given a right to act as unbidden lawyers to intrude in our life and slander our motherland.” The letter, published June 2. declared “to the Americans, including the American Jews, that all the problems that may arise here, we decide ourselves in the fraternal family of the USSR peoples.”
The eight physicists referred to the letter as one “sternly forbidding Americans to take any interest in the conditions of Jews under Soviet rule.” They made their comment in a letter to the Times in which they stressed that “the use of Landau’s name in this connection would have been more convincing if the Soviet Government had permitted him to attend a single one of the innumerable scientific meetings outside the USSR to which he has been invited in the past quarter of a century.”
The signers included Yuval Ne’eman of Israel. The other signatories were S. Chandrase-Khar, Freeman H. Dixon, Ivor Robinson, Edwin E. Salpeter, Alfred Scrild and E.L. Schucking.
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