Ajcommittee Denounces Czech Attack on Its Jewish Population

The American Jewish Committee today denounced a “slanderous attack by the Czechoslovak government on its Jewish population.” The Czech attack, apparently motivated by governmental sensitivity to the human rights issue, the Committee said, had branded Jews as “allies of reactionary forces.”

The AJ Committee’s accusation arose out of a report from its European Office describing Czech efforts to blame Jews and Zionists for the recent manifesto known as “Charter 77.” The “Charter” called on the 35 Czech signatories to the Helsinki agreement to carry out their pledge to uphold human rights.

In recent years, the AJ Committee stated, the Czechs have engaged in persistent thinly-veiled anti-Semitic attacks. Thus, it said, the regime emphasized the Jewish origins of many of the leaders of the Dubcek-led attempt to move out from under Russian domination in 1968. The government, the AJ Committee said, has also engaged in widespread media attacks against the Jewish community’s pre-World War II leadership, alleging cooperation of Zionists and Nazis in the mass deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps.

The government has been particularly virulent, the AJ Committee stated, in attacks on Zionism and on Israel, going far beyond most other Eastern European countries in this respect. It has ordered publication and use in elementary schools of anti-Zionist books, and has organized seminars to demonstrate that Zionist ideology serves anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism.

THE ‘CHARTER 77’ ISSUE

The current campaign against the Jews, the Committee stated, started with a whispering campaign that the majority of those who had signed “Charter 77” were Jews, in addition to being Nazi sympathizers. From there it quickly swung into the familiar line that the manifesto was part of the fight “consistently waged against Socialist Czechoslovakia by Zionism, a revenge after the UN resolution denouncing Zionism as racism.”

Those who signed the manifesto were stigmatized as “paid agents constituting the storm troopers of the counter-revolutionary attack on Czechoslovakia and “paid by Zionists to continue their subversive role inside the country.” Typical of the expressions heard on Radio Prague were “such a Jewish creature… a man of the Jewish Quisling type…a Jewish today of the true Viennese vintage…,” the AJ Committee reported.

Aside from the “Charter 77” furore, the AJ Committee declared, the general news about the Czech Jewish community “continues to be depressing.” The estimated population now is about 6000– divided between Bohemia/Moravia and Slovakia. This is 25 percent less than last year’s estimate.

The liquidation of a yet unspecified number of Jewish cemeteries in Slovakia, the AJ Committee said, has been reported by Julius Ehrenthal, recently elected chairman of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia. Ehrenthal declared that some were “hotbeds of infectious diseases threatening the environment,” a statement considered more political than scientific.

The Slovak Jewish community, the AJ Committee stated, has been re-organized and merged into ten “parent communities,” with other smaller communities being dissolved. The only positive note, it added, “is that for the first time since 1968 the Jewish community in Bohemia/Moravia was granted a license by the authorities to import Passover wine for use at the communal seder in Prague and Erno.”