Jewish Communists in U.S. Protest Khrushchev’s Anti-jewish Views

Jewish Communists in the United States voiced a protest against the anti-Jewish views expressed by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in his interview in the French newspaper Le Figaro.

A lengthy editorial in the “Morning Freiheit,” the pro-Moscow Jewish organ, takes issue with Mr. Khrushchev’s views and terms them “mistaken and harmful.” The editorial stresses that anti-Jewish allegations by the Soviet Premier “cannot and must not be passed unchallenged.”

It declared that “one can hardly understand” how the head of the Soviet Union could have made such “astonishing” statements as– Jews are individualists and have a “distaste” for collectivism. The Morning Freiheit says “Soviet leadership now lacks a basic approach to the Jewish question.” It stresses that “the injustices committed against the Jewish people during the last years of the Stalin regime have been only partly corrected, “and that the liquidated Jewish cultural institutions have still not been reopened by the Soviet authorities.

REFUTE KHRUSHCHEV’S ALLEGATIONS; CHARGE MOSCOW WITH PERSECUTING JEWS

Refuting Mr. Khrushchev’s charges that the Jews in the Soviet Union did not develop Birobidjan because they are “essentially intellectuals” and are opposed to group discipline, the Morning Freiheit cites the fact that Jews developed large Jewish agricultural regions in the Ukraine and in the Crimea under the Soviet regime and had participated as workers in Soviet heavy industry. They were also the pioneers in Birobidjan until the time when Soviet authorities started “to persecute their leaders and builders there” and liquidated the region’s Jewish cultural life.

To further refute Mr. Khrushchev’s anti-Jewish allegations, the pro-Soviet Jewish organ cites the fact that Jews are now proving their “collectivity” by building Israel, and that they have proven it by building up the labor unions in the United States and in the heroic uprisings against the Nazi armies in the Warsaw ghetto and in other ghettos, not to speak of the heroism which many of them displayed in developing Birobidjan and in building the Soviet system in the USSR.

“It is clear,” the editorial says, “that the Khrushchev statement places before Soviet leadership the Jewish nationality question in the U. S. S. R. even more urgently than ever before.” It draws attention to the fact that the Jews in the Soviet Union are recognized in their passports and other official documents and statistics as a nationality. “The regrettable interview given by Khrushchev proves how urgent this question is. The progressive Jewish elements, who appreciate the role of the Soviet Union in the fight for peace, wait for the moment when this question will be solved, and the moment cannot come too soon — it is already over-late, ” the editorial concludes