Case of Jewish Girl Mistreated by Fellow Worker Rouses Soviet Indignation

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

–The Barshay affair still continues to agitate public opinion in Russia. Further disclosures show that a woman worker aided the tormenters of Miss Barshay in the glass factory Octiabr where she was submitted to indignities at the hands of her fellow workers. The factory Communist committee was dissmissed for failure to protect Miss Barshay.

The “Pravda,” continuing to write on the case, denounces the Bobruisk state attorney for saying “The case shows merely symptoms of anti-Semitism, for which there is no provision in the legal code.”

The workers Potchilin, Tuliakov, Gruz, Diev, Lobkov, Koponin, Natzievskaya, Krasnensky, Pchelnik and Kozlovsky will be tried for their part in the persecutions of Miss Barshay. Their trial is expected to take place in December.

Hundreds of workers meeting throughout Soviet Russia demanded drastic punishment. Due to this case, an anti-Semitic wave has broken out in White Russian factories. In a leather factory in Minsk, hooligans, including a former Polish gendarme, poured boiling lime on a Jewish worker, seriously injuring him.

Startling accusations against the investigation commission of the White Russian Zik was made by the Minsk correspondent of the Moscow official organ, “Isvestiya.”

According to the correspondent an attempt was made to hush up the Barshay affair. At a meeting of the Comsomol, Communist Youth organization, in the factory Octiabr, where the incident occurred, speakers expressed resentment at the efforts to disclose the facts because of the fact that some members of the Comsomol were found to have participated in the persecutions of the Jewish girl.

The correspondent of the Minsk paper, “Rabothchi,” who was present at the meeting, spoke against withholding the report, whereupon he was nearly ousted by the members present. The investigation commission, according to the “Isvestiya” correspondent, secretly telegraphed the “Rabotchi” to withhold the correspondent’s report of the case.

A somewhat similar case is reported from Witebsk, where a Jewish girl worker, Tzirkina, in a factory there complained to the director that she was the object of persecutions. He declared to the workers: “Do as you please with the “Zhidovka (Jewess).”