On 3 August the Council of Ministers of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed a resolution to levy a ‘diploma tax’ on all Jews who wished to go to Israel. This meant basically that all qualified Jews have to pay back the cost of their education to the Soviet government before emigrating. The tax…
One of the oddest cases of Jews trying to settle in Israel is that of Naum Alshansky of Minsk. together with his wife, Clara, Naum recently wrote to Meir Vilner, the leader of Israel’s Moscow-oriented Communist party, Rakah. They firmly declared themselves to be Marxist-Leninists and requested membership of Rakah so that they could continue…
In July 1969, six young Jews, Shimon Grillius, Yuri and Valery Vudka, Oleg frolov, Shimon Zaslavskyand Yevgeny Martimonov were arrested in Riazan in the Lithuanian soviet socialist Republic and charged under Articles 70 and 72 of the Soviet Criminal Code which deals with anti-soviet propaganda. The trial began on February 10 1970 behind closed doors….
The Brussels Conference was a strange affair. The organisers had the dubious task of bringing representatives of Jewish organisations to Brussels in order that they should say their piece about the fate of their brethren in the Soviet Union. WUJS had great reservations about attending this conference because it was in essence a huge public…
A Nation or Not? The theoretical basis of the Marxist attitude to the Jewish Question lies in J.V. Stalin’s classical work, “Marxism and the National Question”, first ‘published in 1913. Stalin defined a nation as a “historically constituted stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common -language, territory, economic life and…
In the third letter of her series (Tribune July 18), K. Y. Rintoul has attempted to create a ‘Zionist’ smokescreen in order to obscure the very real problem of soviet anti-Semitism. She implies that anti-Semitism has existed only since ‘American-trained General Dayan launched a six day war against the Arab countries’. This, as she should…
K. Y. Rintoul now openly admits (Tribune June 27) not only that anti-Semitism exists in the Soviet Union today, but also that it has increased since the Middle East war of June 1967. This appears to conflict with her earlier assertion (Tribune May 30) that soviet Jews live in ‘a non-deistic humanist society’. Your correspondent…
In his letter (Tribune June 13) Mr Efimov carefully evades or gives half-hearted explanations of the very concrete statistics quoted in our first letter (Tribune June 6). For example, one wonders how the decrease in the number of synagogues in the Soviet Union from 450 in 1956 to 55 in 1969 can be accounted for…
K. Y. Rintoul (Tribune May 30) blindly defends anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union within the guise of the formation of a ‘non-deistic humanist society’. Certain facts seems to conflict with the tolerant doctrine of humanism. Since 1956 nearly 80% of all synagogues in the Soviet Union have been closed down, usually following an intensive press…