A dramatic increase in the pride and self respect of many Russian Jews in spite of enormous recent pressures on them arising from last month’s Middle East war has been found by the expert on Russian affairs of the Christian Science Monitor.
In a lengthy analysis of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, Paul Wohl, who spent many years living and working in Russia, said that while Russian Jews have ample grounds for worry over the fact that Israel has become a hostile country in the eyes of the Kremlin, “they have not demeaned themselves.”
In spite of an intensive campaign against Jews. Mr. Wohl declared, “Soviet officials still have not been able to produce a declaration of rabbis and Jewish intellectuals condemning Israel.” The writer noted that since last March, officials of the few remaining synagogues in the Soviet Union were urged by state security organs to start a letter-writing campaign denouncing Israel, but that such a campaign had not come off.
“Only in Dushambe, Tadjikistan, did a Jewish congregation — a congregation without a rabbi — issue an anti-Israel statement. The large Jewish communities of Moscow (285,000), Leningrad (165,000), Kiev (220,000) and Odessa (250,000) remained silent,” Mr. Wohl declared.
In an effort to explain the phenomenon of Soviet failure to elicit the cooperation of Russian Jewry in condemning Israel, Mr. Wohl speculated that: “Either the Kremlin has not used its enormous powers or Soviet Jews have gained a measure of self respect which is something new in the history of the complex relations between the Jews and Russian and Soviet society.”
As further evidence of a growing trend of self-respect on the part of Jews, the author cited the fact that many children of Jewish mixed marriages who have the option of registering as an adherent of the faith or nationality of either parent, now choose to label themselves as Jews on their identity papers.
He also cited the repeated demonstration of identity by many Jews who have no religious connections, yet who manage to appear at synagogues and join in the festivities on Simhat Torah.
The writer raised the possibility that “the Kremlin neither wants to give further cause to those Western Communists and Communist sympathizers who have publicly accused the Soviet Union of anti-Semitism nor does it want to exasperate its already stirred up Jews. This may explain,” the article declared, “why the pressure on Soviet Jews to come out against Israel was not so strong as to break every resistance, as would have been the case in former years.”
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.
