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Senator Delivers Passionate Speech in Senate on Jews in Russia

October 16, 1963
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Senator Herman Talmadge, Georgia Democrat, today delivered in the Senate a passionate speech deploring “religious persecution against the Jews in the Soviet Union.”

The Southern Democrat said he was “distressed and disturbed” about anti-Jewish events in the Soviet Union. He warned that “the world did not heed the anguished cries of the Jews in Germany in the 1930’s and the madman Hitler was allowed to set out on the most vile, the most inhuman policy of extermination ever conceived by civilized man.”

“This ghastly lesson in history still sticks in our throats, and we must never forget it or permit it to happen again, ” said Sen. Talmadge. He told the Senate that Jews in Russia were “systematically victimized, ” stripped of their religion and culture, made objects of vilification, and even executed as alleged “economic criminals.”

“We cannot in good conscience look the other way. We must mount a mighty wave of protest until an overwhelming tide of world indignation forces the government of the Soviet Union to recognize the error of its ways,” the Senator stated.

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