American Jewish Congress Attacks New Policy of Communist Party on Jewish Issues

The American Jewish Congress today issued an attack on a new statement of policy by the Communist Party of the United States with regard to Palestine and other Jewish issues, which was outlined this week in an official 10,000 word resolution on “Communist Work Among American Jewish Masses.”

The attack is made in an unusually long editorial in Congress Weekly, official organ of the American Jewish Congress, which declared that a “widening and formidable gap separates the so-called ‘Jewish’ line of those who follow Communist doctrine and those who worry about the fate of the Jewish people.”

Pointing to the basic differences in approach to the Jewish problem between the Communist Party and the vast majority of Jewish organizations, the editorial stated that the desire among Jews for survival as a people rather than the negative force of “anti-fascist unity” must be the motivating power of Jewish activity.

The editorial referred to the apparent pro-Zionist position of Communist groups during the war and declared that “the ambiguity of this position has now definitely ended and that the party has reverted “to its pre-war position of champion of the Arab people.” It pointed out that the Communist opposition to the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine and their suggestion of making any immigration dependent on “Arab sanction” would doom hundreds of thousands of Jews either to continued confinement in European camps or to harrowing insecurity.

WANTS AMITY BETWEEN SOVIET-U.S. JEWRIES, BUT QUESTIONS COMMUNISTS’ RULE

Apropos the Communist suggestion of closer cultural co-operation between American and Soviet Jewry, the editorial said that “the establishment of close relations between American and Soviet Jewries has long been the hope of all who believe in the unity of the Jewish people,” but “what this program calls for is that American Jews become disciples of Soviet Jewry in cultural “affairs.” The plan, as envisaged by the Communists, it added, “means in effect that American Jewry is to be taught by the American agents of Soviet-Jewish culture – the Jewish Communists.”

Referring to the “tremendous significance” of the Soviet program in eliminating anti-Semitism and solving the Jewish problem through economic reconstruction and equality, the editorial noted that “this process of legal, economic and political restoration has been accompanied by a process of internal disintegration which has rendered the network of Yiddish schools, the Yiddish press and many cultural institutions super fluous,” and that even the “most sympathetic observers have nothing to report on any communal or national Jewish life in the USSR.”

Dealing with the resolution’s reference to the American Jewish scene and its appeal for common action in collaboration with other minority groups in the struggle against anti-Semitism and inequality, the editorial said that while the American Jewish Congress was wholly in agreement with such a program, it felt that “the entire spirit and letter of the resolution casts considerable doubt whether the instructions issued to party members with regard to co-operation with others on these problems are really motivated by a genuine interest and concern for the fulfillment of democracy in this country.”