Burton Levinson, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), has called upon Soviet officials to release all Jewish Prisoners of Conscience in commemoration of the forthcoming 27th anniversary of what has come to be known as the “Night of the Murdered Poets.”
On Aug. 12, 1952, 24 of the Soviet. Union’s leading Jewish writers, poets, artists, musicians and actors were executed at Moscow’s notorious Lubianka Prison. Some of those executed were among the more than 400 outstanding Jewish artists who were rounded up in the winter of 1948-1949 and exiled, with their families and in-laws–to Siberia. Although most died in the labor camps, the Soviet policy culminated on that summer night in 1952 and left three million Jews without teachers, creative leaders and communal institutions, Levinson noted.
“There have been many dark days in the struggle for Jewish freedom in the Soviet-Union,” he said, “but the ‘Night of the Murdered Poets’ was the darkest. We can only be reminded that there are many in the Soviet Union who are still suffering, still being oppressed and enslaved because they are Jews, and anti-Semitism in many guises is increasingly pervasive.”
The present Soviet regime, Levinson observed, “is, of course, not responsible for the terrible treatment of the Jews in Stalin’s time, but Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev can act decisively by freeing the POCs. He can prove to the rest of the world his contention that Jews in the USSR have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities as everyone else. To pardon or commute the sentences in commemoration of the ‘Night of the Murdered Poets’ would be a courageous act by President Brezhnev, since Soviet leaders have never acknowledged, let alone denounced, that barbarous affair.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
