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Yiddish Scientific Institute a “fascist” Organisation for Affiliation with Which Jewish Professor in

February 23, 1931
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Professor Israel Sossis, of Minsk, a member of the White Russian Academy of Science and instructor in the history of the Jewish Working Class at the White Russian University, has been expelled from the Communist Party on the charge of being an “incorrigible national opportunist”, the “Pravda” states, complaining at the same time that the Party in Minsk did not make a sufficiently strong expression of disapproval of Professor Sossis’ ideas, in its decision to expel him.

The article is written by Ch. Dunets, editor of the “Oktiabr”, the Yiddish Communist daily in Minsk, which has for a long time carried on a campaign to have Sossis ejected from the Party. The charges against Professor Sossis were that he idealised “the Menshevik counter-revolutionary organisation, the Bund, in his lectures and writings; that he stood in friendly relation with the Yiddish Scientific Institute of Vilna, ‘a Jewish national-Fascist organisation’; that he praised Jewish historians of bourgeois tendencies, like Dubnov, and that he had invited bourgeois Jewish savants living abroad to contribute to Jewish historical publications in the Soviet Union, and that he developed a theory that Jewish nationality has not the class divisions common to other nationalities”.

Sossis is an old member of the Bund and was several times imprisoned for Bundist activity. He joined the Communist Bund in 1921, when he became head of the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Nationalities in Leningrad, and Lecturer at Leningrad University. On the establishment of the White Russian University in 1924 he became head of the Jewish Department. He has published a large number of works on Jewish history and literature. In November 1929 there was a report that he was to be dismissed from his post because he was in relations with the O.P.E. (Society for Spreading Enlightenment Among the Jews) in Leningrad, which was suppressed at that time.

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