Soviet News Agency Attempts to Refute Dr. Decter’s Series on Jews in Russia

Novosti, the Soviet news agency, has issued a reply to a series of Jewish Telegraphic Agency articles by Dr. Moshe Decter on the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. Dr. Decter, head of the Jewish Minorities Research Organization in New York, wrote the three-part series for JTA last January to answer a previously circulated Novosti article titled “Soviet Jews as They Are” which depicted the life of Russian Jewry as “happy.” The Novosti reply was written by one of its staff writers, Ruvim Groyer. Novosti, regarded as an external propaganda agency, circulates its dispatches abroad but not within the USSR. The main point the Novosti writer sought to prove was that anti-Semitism was more prevalent in the United States than in the Soviet Union and that American Jews were no better off culturally, if not worse off, than Soviet Jews. “Dr. Decter mentions the absence of Jewish ‘educational institutions’ in the USSR,” Mr. Groyer wrote. “May I ask him what percentage of Jewish boys and girls get ‘Jewish education’ in the USA and what aim, apart from Zionist and Jewish nationalist indoctrination it pursues?” Mr. Groyer rejected Dr. Decter’s claim that Soviet Jews were left to fend for themselves during the Nazi onslaught against Russia in June, 1941. In his January series, Dr. Decter described the Novosti version of Jewish life in Russia as “a tired rehash of old lies, half truths and distortions. Even as propaganda it is pathetically incompetent.”