The U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was urged by the Jewish Labor Committee today to place the subject of Soviet anti-Semitism on the agenda of the United Nations.
In a communication from Adolph Held, national chairman of the JLC, and Nathan Chanin, chairman of its administrative committee, Ambassador Lodge was told that the statement made last Thursday by several American Rabbis who had just returned from a visit to the USSR confirms what the Jewish Labor Committee has been saying for the past eight years.
“There has been no marked let-up in the anti-Semitic campaign engaged in by the Soviet dictatorship, ” the Jewish labor leaders wrote Ambassador Lodge. “The Yiddish press, schools, and institutions have been obliterated. There exists, and admittedly so, a quota system for Jews in government service. The ethnic affinities of Soviet citizens are carried prominently in their identification papers, particularly aimed at Jews. There are other inequities perpetrated against Jews in the Soviet Union.”
Ambassador Lodge was reminded that the JLC had furnished both the U. S. delegation and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights “with voluminous material showing that the campaign of vilification and cultural genocide engaged in by a member nation of the United Nations against its Jewish citizens has kept on unabated.
“The time has come for a full and open hearing on the question before the tribunal of the United Nations,” the JLC suggested. There is a calculated plan on the part of the Soviets to finish the job begun by their predecessors the Czars–and their former allies the Nazis. The wiping out of a whole people by strangling their cultural ties, by liquidation of their cultural leaders, decimation of their press, is not an internal problem but is one with which the free world must be concerned.
“There exists now the threat of pogroms against Jews in Poland, a Soviet satellite. Confirmed reports of assaults on Jews in other Soviet-dominated nations give added fears that the Soviets are preparing a major campaign to destroy the remaining vestiges of East European Jewry. There must be a voice raised now before it becomes too late. That voice must be that of the United States at the United Nations,” the appeal concluded.
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