U.S. Warns Soviet Anti-jewish Propaganda is Pre-conditioning to Mass Murder

The United States representative on the United Nations Human Rights Committee told the Soviet Union today that anti-Jewish propaganda material of the nature of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was “the most spectacularly successful of all the instruments preconditioning to mass murder.” He warned that “at all costs, no matter what temporary political advantages the Soviets may gain from this line, it must be avoided.”

The American representative, Morris B. Abram, spoke in the continuing debate in the Commission opened by the Israeli representative Friday when he condemned the rehabilitation by the Soviet authorities of Trofim Kichko, the Ukrainian author of the anti-Jewish book, “Judaism Without Embellishment.” Mr. Abram reminded the Commission that four years ago he had declared that “this book, issued by an official organ of Soviet society, is a damnable instance of religious bate-mongering, a vicious piece of anti-Semitic literature, reminiscent of Hitler, Goebbels, Streicher and other depraved Nazi authors.”

He recalled the world-wide protest against “this recrudescence of anti-Semitism in the Ukraine where some of Hitler’s worst anti-Jewish policies found fertile and long cultivated soil during the German occupation” and said the result had been that the “Soviet Union, under the force of world opinion, retreated from its support of the book.”

But Kichko, Mr. Abram reported, is now “actually back at work” and last October wrote an article in the official publication of the Young Communist League of the Ukraine alleging a mythical world-Jewish conspiracy. Further, the American representative told the Commission, Kichko was honored by the Supreme Soviet last January.

The Soviet record regarding the Jews “is not by any means all black,” Mr. Abram said, but political policy considerations joined with an aversion to religion, has produced a crisis within Soviet society of which the Kichko phenomenon is a symptom.” He said that “history tells us that if the Jewish religious group is not safe, none other is; that if one Christian may be burned as a witch, another may be declared to be one.”

The Austrian representative, Felix Ermacroa, supported the position taken Friday by the Israel representative. Petr E. Nedbailo, the Ukrainian representative, assailed the Israeli statement and said it had been made to divert attention from Israel’s treatment of the Arabs. He accused Israel of “continuing interference in the internal affairs of the Ukraine.”