Washington Council Executive Foresees Possible Disappearance of Russian Jews

Dr. Isaac Franck, executive vice-president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, has returned to Washington from a visit to the Jewish community of the Soviet Union with a report that overt anti-Semitism has been added to “the government-directed program of suppressing and strangulating Jewish religion and cultural life.” He said that “if this process continues for the next decade or two, there is a real danger that the three million Jews of the Soviet Union will be a disappearing people.”

Dr. Franck reported “a feeling that most of the non-Jews in the Soviet Union don’t know what is happening to the Jewish community and don’t care, and the Jewish community itself is terrified by Communist informers right within its synagogues and doesn’t dare speak out.”

A paradox found by Dr. Franck was that the young generation of Jews, although brought up in ignorance of their heritage, today “somehow are seeking their way back to some kind of Jewish identification.” Dr. Franck heard frequent accounts of how respected professors and government officials unexpectedly found themselves out of work once it was learned that they claimed to be Jewish. He said 95 percent of Jewish families were now frightened about having sons circumcised.

He said that the Kremlin is slowly changing history to let the Russians forget that one of the main evils of Nazism was the liquidation of Jews. Jews in Russia felt that protests against Soviet policies by Jews in the United States might help alleviate their plight. Dr. Franck visited Moscow, Leningrad and Vilna.