Congressional Record Reprints JTA Analysis of Plight of Soviet Jews

An editorial on the significance of the Leningrad trial by Murray Zuckoff, news editor of the JTA Daily News Bulletin, has been placed in the Congressional Record by Rep. Bertram L. Podell, Democrat of New York. The editorial, “Soviet Trial Is Warning To All Opponents Of The Regime.” appeared in the Dec. 18, 1970 JTA Bulletin as a “Special News Analysis” and was additionally syndicated by the JTA. Podell placed it in the Congressional Record of Feb. 4 “to demonstrate that their (Soviet Jews’) plight has grown more serious.” He remarked: “Jews in Russia have been subject to overt persecution and yet have not been granted the right to emigrate by Soviet officials. The injustices that have been committed against the Jews have now become public knowledge. One article that documents the seriousness of the problem is one by Murray Zuckoff, editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.” Zuckoff wrote that the Leningrad trial and the expected additional trials were “in effect a warning to all those in the Soviet Union and its east European satellites that any opposition to the regime will be unmercifully crushed.” He added: “The trial reveals that Jews are in the dock as scapegoats because they are in the forefront of the struggle against the criminal rule of the Russian oligarchs…In the last analysis, the struggle to free the Soviet people from the shackles of enslavement–mental and physical–will be attributed to the heroism of those who dared to defy.”