THE PLIGHT OF SOVIET JEWS-UNLESS OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD APPEAL TO THE KREMLIN ON ITS BEHALF, RUSSIAN JEWRY'S DOOM IS ORDAINED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP66B00403R000200190026-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 4, 2005
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: January 1, 1964
• Content Type: OPEN

196.E
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CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE 9475
bers of the Jewish faith. It is a mean-
ingful appeal by students in the United
States for the principle of religious free-
dom which we cherish.
Mr. President, the continuing evidence
of deliberate Soviet discrimination
against members of the Jewish faith is
a matter of grave concern to the citizens
of free nations throughout the world.
The responsibility for protest and action
against Soviet anti-Semitism should not
rest alone with members of the Jewish
faith, but should be taken up and vigor-
ously supported by representatives of
every religious group. Unless other re-
ligious groups throughout the world
appeal to the Kremlin on its behalf, Rus-
sian Jewry's doom is ordained:
Mr. President, I ask unanimous con-
sent to include following my remarks in
the RECORD the text of an article in the
Christian Century by Dr. S. Andhil Fine-
berg, community relations consultant to
the American Jewish Committee's Insti-
tute of Human Relations, further dis-
cussing this important moral issue.
There being no objection, the article
was ordered to be printed in the RECORD,
as follows:
[Reprinted from the Christian Century]
THE PLIGHT OF SOVIET JEWS-UNLESS OTHER
RELIGIOUS GROUPS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
APPEAL TO THE KREMLIN ON ITS BEHALF,
RUSSIAN JEWRY'S DOOM Is ORDAINED
(By S. Andhil Fineberg)
Whether the calamity that has overtaken
the Soviet Union's 3 million Jews should be
publicly condemned is a momentous ques-
tion. Though many Christian clergymen
have endorsed appeals to Nikita Khrushchev
on behalf of his Jewish subjects, some have
declined on the ground that they see no dif-
ference between the misfortunes of Russian
Jews and those of multitudes of others who
suffer from the U.S.S.R.'s antireligious poli-
cies. "Why," they ask, "single out Soviet
Jews for special concern?"
Many of the protests have been similar
to the "message to Khrushchev" sponsored
by the American Jewish Committee and
signed by 46 leading Protestant, Catholic,
Greek Orthodox, and Jewish religious lead-
ers. It listed limitations imposed with
greater severity on Jews than on others-for
instance, the isolation of Jewish congrega-
tions, which are not permitted to cooperate
with each other or to make contact with
Jewish religious groups in other countries.
The Jews' cultural rights are wholly negated
and their leaders are singled out for excessive
abuse.
AN END TO A CULTURE
Everyone born of Jewish parents in the
U.S.S.R. Is identified throughout life as a
Jew on his identification papers-the in-
ternal passport which all Soviet citizens
must carry. A Jew must become de-Judaized
before he can take the first step on the lad-
der leading to success, even in those fields
wherein Jews may ascend to top posts.(a few
rise very high in medicine, engineering, and
the arts). Whatever may be the experience
of individual Jews, all are aware that the
government frowns on both their religion
and their culture. While helping nearly all
the U.S.S.R.'s other nationalities to preserve
their culture, it has doomed Jewish culture
to extinction.
The many hardships and injustices in-
flicted on Russian Jews in the process of
destroying their religious and cultural moor-
ings have been described in many books and
articles, notably in the summation by Moshe
No. 86-4
Decter in the January 1963 issue of Foreign
Affairs. Unless a tourist can speak secretly
without interpreter to someone who has rea-
son to put confidence in him, he is likely to
be as thoroughly hoodwinked about Jewish
life in Russia as Catherine the Great was by
Potemkin's facade of scenery along the Volga.
But the repressions cannot be concealed from
those who, speaking Russian, have traveled
for many months in the Soviet Union and
who have read Russian official documents
and newspapers. Well informed writers-
John Gunther, Harrison E. Salisbury, Mau-
rice Hindus and others-agree that while.
anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union is not as
open nor as virulent now as it was during
Stalin's last years, the Jewish situation has
been deteriorating since 1958.
DEPRIVED OF THEIR SYNAGOGUES
When Kerensky's democratic government
overthrew the czarist regime, 3,000 syna-
gogues were flourishing in the U.S.S.R.. But
in 1956, according to a report made by the
U.S.S.R. to the United Nations, only 450
synagogues were in existence. In 1959 there
were 150 and since then the number has
been reduced to less than 80. These figures
have never been challenged by the Soviet
propagandists, nor can they deny that syna-
gogues are the only Jewish institutions left
in the nation.
An idea of what is happening to the syn-
agogues can be gained by noting what oc-
curred in Lvov where synagogues had floktr-
ished for over 600 years. In November 1962,
after viciously anti-Semitic newspaper ar-
ticles had published attacks on the syn-
agogue as an alleged black market center, the
local Communist government closed the last
synagogue in the city. In a nation where
the government Is officially antireligious the
temptation to curry political favor by bring-
ing such charges, however false they may be,
is great. In June 1963 the building occu-
pied by the synagogue was demolished, leav-
ing the 30,000 Jews of Lvov with no center
whatsoever.
Answering a letter from Bertrand Russell,
Nikita Khrushchev in February 1962 wrote:
"There is not and never has been a policy
of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union,4because
the very nature of our multinational so-
cialist state excludes the possibility of such
a policy"-a statement whose falsity is dem-
onstrated by the actual situation of Jews
in the U.S.S.R.
Twenty years after the Communist revo-
lution, in 1937, there were in the Soviet
Union hundreds of Yiddish schools and many
Yiddish journals, theaters, clubs and other
Institutions.. To these institutions the Jews,
as one of the hundred or so "nationalities"
within the U.S.S.R., were fully entitled, as
they still are, by the laws to which Khru-
shchev referred. In 1948 Joseph Stalin, by
administrative decrees, sudenly l egan the
final destruction of all Yiddish institutions.
Among them was the world-renowned Yid-
dish Art Treater, whose director, Solomon
Mikhoels, a faithful Communist, was ex-
ecuted along with hundreds of other Yid-
dish men of letters. Only anti-Semitism
can conceivably explain these crimes against
Jews, who were called "cosmopolitans," and
the 5 years of persecution and terror Soviet
Jewry subsequently endured.
Who was Stalin and who were his accom-
plices during the "black years" from 1948
through 1953? They were products of Rus-
sian communism, its exponents and law-
makers; they were the incarnation of Com-
munist doctrines and occupied perfect posi-
tions to put them into practice. In the
light of their performance, what could be
more preposterous than to deny the possi-
bility of a "policy of anti-Semitism" under
Communist rule? Since Stalin's death no
new laws have been adopted nor has any-
thing else been done to make anti-Semitism
any less possible than it was before.
THE SCAPEGOAT AT HAND
it was not the strangulation of the re-
ligious and cultural existence of Soviet Jews
nor the discrimination they must endure
that led Bertrand Russell, Eleanor Roose-
velt, Francois Mauriac, and others in March
1962 to appeal to Khrushchev on behalf of
his Jewish subjects. It was the fact that
on May 5, 1961, the Soviet Union had re-
verted to the criminology of earlier cen-
turies and instituted laws under which the
penalty for "taking property" can be death.
It was not long before it became apparent
that resort was being taken to anti-Semitism
in order to discourage "economic crimes."
Revoltingly severe measures followed, and
a fantastically disproportionate number of
Jews-60 to 1-were sentenced to death by
shooting.
The far greater severity of sentences meted
out to Jews than to others convicted for
similar crimes-in some instances for a
crime committed by Jewish and non-Jewish
accomplices-and the publicity attending
some of the trials indicated that the courts
were using Jews as scapegoats for the re-
gime's failures. "Analysis of reports of trials
reveals an unmistakable pattern of hostility
to Jews," reported Roscoe Drummond in the
New York Herald Tribune.
It is interesting to note that exploitation
of anti-Semitism by the czars had been a
favorite theme of the early communists, who
sought to discredit the predecessor regime.
In one respect Jews were far better off then
in that they were permitted to emigrate to
other lands; today's Russian Jews are as cap-
tive as other people behind the Communists'
Iron Curtain. They cannot live as Jews,
nor can they leave.
When the subject was discussed on Jan-
uary 30, 1963, by the United Nations Sub-
commission on Prevention of Discrimination
and Protection of Minority Rights, Morris B.
Abram, the U.S. member of the Subcom-
mission, said: "I have readily admitted that
American society frequently lapses from the
ideal in the practice of good human rela-
tions, though I take pride in the progress
which is being made here and particularly
in the direction of events. which is unde-
niably forward. My colleague has yet to
admit a single departure in practice in the
U.S.S.R. from the lofty phrases of its con-
stitution and codes."
APOLOGISTS FOR THE REGIME
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has stanch
defenders. Aron Vergelis is editor of the only
Yiddish journal in the Soviet Union, a bi-
monthly literary magazine with a circula-
tion of 25,000 in a nation where 472,000 peo-
ple still name Yiddish as their native tongue.
In September 1963 Vergelis wrote: "We who
are building communism, Marxists in out-
look, atheists and materialists, would never
agree with those who would pull the Jewish
people back to the ghetto, back to the Middle
Ages." Mr. Vergelis qualifies for his job for
the same negative reason that the Ministry
of Cults, which controls religious matters,
is headed by atheists. He spent the period
from November 14 to December 4, 1963, on
a cultural mission to the United States, not
because he speaks for the Jews of the
U.S.S.R. but because he defezcds his govern-
ment's conduct. He and the others who now
find no fault in the Soviet Union's treat-
ment of its Jewish citizens spoke the same
way during the last years of the Stalin era;
at that time they filled the air with shouts
of "liar" when the truth about Stalin's out-
rages was publicly mentioned.
Long after Stalin's atrocities Hayim Sloves,
a Paris attorney who adores the Soviet Union,
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 9476
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CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE May 1
bemoaned those atrocities before an audience
in New York and walled, "We certainly did
not know." He regretted "our silence at a
time we should have been crying aloud."
He and his conferees, who certainly heard the
truth but rejected it. prefer to know nothing
now about Jewish suffering in the workers'
paradise.
"We did not know," Communists insist
when they refer to t:ze past. "We did not
know then," cry the Germane when ques-
tioned about the Nazar. anti-Jewish outrages.
"We did not know that Negroes were being
mistreated," say thousands of American
whites who are now i rusading on behalf of
Negroes but who a few years ago were totally
unconcerned. Let us ;rive these slow learners
the benefit of the doubt; getting people to
recognize mistreatment of the oppressed ap-
parently requires a great deal of dramatic
telling and retelling.
Persuading the Kr' mlin to face specific
facts about the state of Jews in the Soviet
Union will require a meat many public ap-
peals and remonstrances. Although they
are very sensitive on the subject, the Soviet
rulers have evidently not studied the com-
plaints carefully. Otherwise they could not
hope to satisfy the critics by fulminating
denials, by references to Benjamin Demshitz,
the only Jew in high political office, and by
proffering a few statistics which when ana-
lyzed do not support their argument. One
might as well expect those who condemn
anti-Negro prejudice in the United States to
believe that none exists because Robert C.
Weaver is Administrator of the Federal Hous-
ing and Home Finance Agency and 11 of the
12 best batters in -,he National Baseball
League in 1963 were Negroes.
The doom of Soviet Jews and their culture
will be sealed within a decade unless those
who axe free to speak on their behalf do so
vigorously now. Another chapter will be
completed in the martyrdom of a people who
ever Since their ancestors accepted the cove-
nant at Mount Sinai have celebrated an
annual festival of freedom. If the ordeal
of Russian Jewry is overlooked now their
fate will rest all the more heavily on the
conscience of mankind. There are only 10
million Jews outside the Soviet Union;
their appeals will be ineffective unless others
likewise intercede The we of the Soviet
well as to the policies of the administra-
tion, that the economy continues to grow,
and at record-breaking levels.
The first paragraph in the New York
Times article reads:
The U.S. economy quietly set a record
today that many observers consider more
important than the glowing records reported
monthly in the statistics. on output, em-
ployment., and income.
Later in the article appears this para-
graph:
Every sign Indicates that the present ex-
pansion aided by the present tax cut, has
many more months to, go, with both private
and Government economists convinced that
it will last through the rest of this year, at
least.
The article continues:
One remarkable feature of the current ex-
pansion, in the view of most analysts. is that
it has proceeded so long without any notable
Inflation.
Mr. President, I am convinced, because
of the attitude of the administration,
particularly the President, and because of
the policies being pursued, such as the
Investment tax credit, the accelerated
depreciation allowance, and the recent
broad tax cut, both on corporate and per-
sonal income, that the economic expan-
sion is destined to continue for many
more months. It is now literally within
our power to see to it that the wild fluc-
tuations between boom and depression
no longer affect the American economy.
I ask unanimous consent that the en-
tire article may be printed in the RECORD
at this point.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there
objection?
Mr. GORE. Reserving the right to
object-and I shall not object-I arise to
note that the boom conditions and unpre-
cedented profits recorded in the first
quarter of 1964 occurred without benefit
of or without the effect of the tax cut.
Union desperately ne3d the moral support The bulk of the economic effect of the
of the fellowship of all the concerned, the tax reduction will largely be felt in the
vigilant shepherds of all religious groups. ._J months ahead.
i
l
THE GROWTH OF THE ECONOMY
Mr. HUMPHREY. W. President, in
this morning's New York Times, on the
front page-wand I am sure in every other
newspaper across ti a Nation-there ap-
peared a news item. which should be
very encouraging and heartening to the
American people. The headline of the
New York Times art: ale reads: "Economy
Grows for 38th Month, Setting a Rec-
ord." The subheads read: "Expansion
Period Longest for Peacetime-No Sign
of Recession Is Seen-More Gains Indi-
cated."
This feature article speaks of the in-
credible record of economic growth and
expansion and prosperity which have
continued in this country for the last 38
months.
When we consider the many problems
this Nation has faced internationally, as
well as the grave problems which have
beset our country, with the loss of our
late beloved President, John F. Kennedy,
it is a tribute to the American Govern-
ment and to the structure of our Govern-
ment and to our economic system, as
app
aud any of the statements of
the distinguished senior Senator from
Minnesota. Like the senior Senator
from Minnesota, I am proud of the sus-
tained record of economic growth. But
I would not want any false claim that
this is the result the tax reduction bill
to go unchallenged. The tax reduction
may have a stimulating effect to our
economy generally. Indeed, one of the
dangers of the reduction is that it may be
too stimulating. The record of expan-
sion thus far cannot be credited to the
tax reduction bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there
objection to the request of the Senator
from Minnesota?
There being no objection, the article
was ordered to be printed in the RECORD,
as follows:
ECONOMY Grows FOR 38TH MONTH, SETTING
A RECORD--EXPANSION Paxioo LONGEST FOR
PEAcsrusx-No SIGN or RECESSION Is
BEEN-Moss GAINS INDICATXD-SOME
ANALYSTS SEEPTICAL-OTAERS BffiSEvz IN-
CEEASE WILL CONTINUE INDEvINrrE1,T
(By Edwin L. Dale, Jr.)
WASHINGTON, April 80.-The U.S. economy
quietly act a record today that many observ-
era consider more important than the glowing
records reported monthly in the statistics on
output, employment, and Income.
With another month of good business com-
pleted in April the economy today estab-
lished a peactime record in the duration of
a period of expansion without recession.
April was the 38th month of the current ex-
pansion, which began in March 1961, beat-
ing the former record of 37 months In 1945-
48.
Some analysts maintain that the expan-
sion from the bottom of the depression in
1933 to the recession in 1937 was longer, but
this is generally regarded as a special case.
Mass unemployment persisted throughout
the period.
CONTINUED GROWTH INDICATED
Every sign indicates that the present ex-
pansion aided by the recent tax cut, has
many more months to go, with both private
and Government economists convinced that
it will last through the rest of this year.
at least.
The record duration for expansion, estab-
lished before and during World War U. is
put at 80 months.
One remarkable feature of the current
expansion, in the view of most analysts,
is that it has proceeded so long without any
notable Inflation. Although fears of a re-
vival of inflation exists both in and out of
the Government, the record to date shows 8
years of stability in wholesale prices and an
unusually small upward movement of con-
sumer prices, averaging about 1.3 percent a
year.
The Consumer Price Index rose one-tenth
of 1 percent in March, the Labor Depart-
ment's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported
yesterday. But this increase only wiped out
the slight decline of the price index that
was reported for February.
The economy now has few of the signs
that In the past have Indicated a recession
to come-such things as rising prices, a
heavy buildup of inventories, a leveling or
decline in corporate profits, or an overrapid
buildup of new industrial capacity.
One remarkable feature of the current ex-
pansion, in the view of most analysts, is
that It has proceeded so long without any
notable inflation. Although fears of re-
newed inflation exist both in and out of
the Government, the record to date shows
6 years of stability in wholesale prices and
an unusually small rise in consumer prices-
about 1.3 percent a year.
While most businessmen and many pri-
vate analysts are skeptical, some top Gov-
ernment economists have a genuine hope
that the present expansion can be kept going
more or less indefinitely. They do not pre-
dict this. but the latest report of the Presi-
dent's Council of Economic Advisers said
there was nothing inevitable about reces-
sions.
EUROPE AN EXAMPLE
Depending partly on how various economic
Indicators are judged, it can be argued that
the nations of Western Europe have not had
a recession since 1954. The only interruption
in 10 years of sustained expansion was a din
in 1958. It was so brief and so mild It could
hardly be termed a "recession."
It is with the hope of Indefinite continua-
tion of the present American expansion that
President Johnson and Walter W. Heller,
Chairman of the Council of Economic Advis-
ers, have recently begun to talk about the
possibility of another tax cut In a few years.
According to the Council's analysis, the
continued expansion of the economy will in-
evitably generate a large budget surplus, even
at the newly reduced tax rates. Such a sur-
plus, in the Council's view, could be a drag on
the economy, by reducing potential demand.
Assuming a surplus to be undesirable in
the then-existing circumstances of the econ-
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