U.S. Government is Asked to Protest Polish Anti-semitism, Admit Jewish Victims

National and local agencies affiliated with the National Community Relations Advisory Council called today on the United States Government to protest through official and unofficial channels against the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland and to permit Jews seeking to emigrate from Poland to be admitted to this country. The nine national organizations and 81 local community relations councils that comprise the NCRAC also called on Jewish communities throughout the country to combine their observance of the 25th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with protest and demonstrations against the anti-Semitic policies of the Polish regime.

The statement reported indignantly that the memory of the martyrs of the Ghetto uprising “is not glorified but slandered” in Poland today and that “step by step, the campaign against Poland’s fewer than 30,000 Jews has been escalated day after day,” the statement charged also that “the official Party press has blared forth charges reminiscent of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of the Zion of Czarist Russia. Chilling echoes of the paranoia of 1952 in Eastern Europe are heard.”

The statement gave details of the anti-Semitic proceedings in Poland and noted that “the campaign has gained, not lessened, since the self-styled moderating speech of Wladyslaw Gomulka on March 19.” A memorandum to the community relations councils stressed that despite assurances recently given by the Polish Ambassador in Washington, the anti-Semitic campaign has not only continued unabated but has grown in intensity.

The statement affirmed that “we cannot permit Polish Jews to stand alone. The frenzied anti- Semitism of the Polish Government must not be met by silence.” It declared that “we call upon our government to protest officially and unofficially, publicly and privately, this new expression of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. We call upon our government to take whatever measures are necessary to enable those who would seek to avoid this new oppression to emigrate to the United States and other lands which will receive them.

“We call upon Jewish communities throughout the United States,” it continued, “to mark the 25th observance of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising by voicing aloud our anger and our anxiety in public forms. We call upon all men of conscience- clergy, labor, civil rights leaders, students, academicians, artists, political activists — to join our protests.”