Lucius D. Battle, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, has charged the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization with distributing a booklet misrepresenting the status of Jews in the Soviet Union, and cited false statements in the UNESCO publication. Mr. Battle’s testimony was revealed today by the publication of hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on international Organisation Affairs.
Attacking the accuracy of the booklet, “Equality of Rights Between Races and Nationalities in the USSR, ” the State Department official pointed out that it had been distributed to many American libraries by UNESCO. He cited “the UNESCC publication’s assertion on the “rights and liberties” of Jews and emphasized that only recently, the Soviet regime banned the baking of Passover matnohs in Moscow.
The UNESCO booklet said that “account has to be taken of a natural process which has greatly developed during the last 20 years, the voluntary assimilation of the Jewish population.” But the fact is, said Mr. Battle, “in the USSR census of 1959, 2,268,000 registered as Jews.” He stressed that “the idea of assimilation is in conflict with the requirement that each Jew must be so designated in the internal passport. “
He posted cut that although UNESCO states that “the vast majority of Jews of the new generation have freely adopted the language and culture of other peoples of the USSR, ” the fact is that since the second World War no Soviet schools have taught Yiddish. In 1933, he said, there were 800 such schools, with more than 120, 000 students.
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