Warsaw Jewish Organ Scores Moscow; Refutes Assimilation Claim

Soviet leaders explanations that Jewish culture disappeared in the USSR because the Jews wanted to be assimilated was scored in the latest issue of Folkstimme, Polish Jewish Communist newspaper, which arrived here today. The Yiddish newspaper, which is published in Warsaw, also criticized the Soviet authorities for their slowness in rehabilitating Jewish cultural institutions, and professed ignorance of why the situation of Soviet Jews had been passed over in silence at the recent 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow.

Commenting on letters from its readers, Folkstimme said that one group of readers questioned Nikita Khrushchev’s silence on the “tremendous sufferings of the many millions of Jews in the Soviet Union” and the failure of the congress to discuss the disappearance of the Yiddish literature; press and theatre as well as other Jewish social and cultural institutions. “We don’t know the causes” for the silence at the Moscow congress, Folkstimme admitted.

A second question posed by its readers, Folkstimme said, was: Why had the Soviet Union failed to fully rehabilitate or revive Jewish cultural and social life in the Soviet Union? “There can be no doubt,” said Folkstimme, “that the attempt to explain this by the so-called full assimilation of millions of Jews in the Soviet Union in Justification for failure to revive their cultural and social life cannot stand up to any criticism and does not correspond to reality.

“Our readers are absolutely right when they say to us that recent experience blatantly demonstrates how incorrect this argument is. This is shown by the fact that Yiddish concerts and recitals in Moscow and other places have attracted large audiences and the theatres could not absorb all those Jews in the Soviet Union who were eager to hear artistic Yiddish expressions of Yiddish literature and theatre, and to see again the Yiddish press, “Folkstimme concluded.