THE JEWISH NEWS
Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with the issnc July ?A 1951
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PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
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CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
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Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the 29th day of 4v, 5737, the following scriptural selections will be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17. Prophetical portion, Isaiah 54:11-55:5.
Rosh Hodesh Elul, Sunday and Monday, Numbers 28:1-15
Candle lighting, Friday, August 12. 8:19 p.m.
VOL. LXX1, No. 23
Page Four
Friday, August 12, 1977
A Tragic Genocidal Anniversary
This is a tragic day on the Jewish calendar
and in human relations.
In a sense Aug. 12 is a genocidal day. It was
25 years ago on this date that the most distin-
guished Jewish writers were massacred in Rus-
sia as part of the Stalinist madness.
Only the death of Stalin in 1953 brought res-
pite to a decade of killings from 1946 to 1955,
during which everything religious and cultural
was under attack and the very lives of those en-
gaged in them were in jeopardy. The period of
1946 to 1953 was labeled "the Black Years."
The 431 eminent Jews who were murdered at
that time included 217 - writers, 103 actors, 87
painters and sculptors and 10,musicians. They
were imprisoned in labor camps and many
were tortured. A chronology of the horrors of
these "Black Years," compiled by the National
Conference on Soviet Jewry, reveals the follow-
ing tragedies:
1946—The Soviet Yiddish writer Vasili Gross-
man, in the city of Berdichev, was refused per-
mission to publish his "Black Book" of Nazi
crimes against Soviet Jews.
1947—Rabbi Lev of Kharkov was arrested,
after refusing to become an inforrher, later
dying in a labor camp. The Kharkov synagogue
was closed in 1948.
1948—The Jewish writer Solomon Mikhoels
was killed by the KGB in Minsk.
1949—The Olevsk synagogue was closed and
its building confiscated. That same year the
Jewish Anit-Facist Committee was dissolved,
its leaders arrested. Many Jewish 'writers were
accused of 'Zionism' and of links with 'Ameri-
can Imperialism'.
1951—Rabbi Labanov of Leningrad was sen-
tenced to five years in prison, while Rabbi
Epshtein was sentenced to 10 years. Seven
houses of worship were closed in Leningrad.
1952—On Aug. 12, 24 of the leading Jewish
writers and intellectuals in Moscow were exe-
cuted at the Lubianka prison as a climax of Sta-
lin's terror campaign to wipe out all vestiges of
Soviet Yiddish culture. The execution took
place less then one month after they had been
accused of being "enemies of the USSR, agents
of American imperialism and bourgeois nation-
alist Zionists."
January, 1953—Prominent doctors, many of
them Jewish accused of conspiring to kill So-
viet leaders were arrested. A wave of govern-
ment inspired anti-Semitism swept through the
USSR.
1953—The Communist magazine Krokodil at-
tacks, in the same article, "American and Brit-
ish bankers, colonialist's, armament rings, Nazi
generals, the Vatican and the Zionist con-
spiraEy."
1956–Several hundred Jews arrested for 'eco-
nomic crimes' and sentenced to long prison
terms in labor camps. Seventy-five percent of
those arrested were executed.
In the process of the confrontation with the
Soviet Union that escalated from President Car-
ter's emphasis on human rights, it is of the ut-
most importance that the recollections of what
had occurred under Stalinism should not be
dimmed, that the rights of Jews should not be
ignored, that the elementary principle that
people haYe a right, often a duty, to emigrate
when they live under oppression, should not be
abused.
A serious duty devolves upon all free men
not to reduce the efforts in behalf of Russian
Jewry and to carry on the battle in their behalf
without uncalled for intermissions. The tasks
ahead were notably outlined by Eugene Gold,
the chairman of the National Conference on So-
viet Jewry, who declared, memorializing the 24
Jewish poets, writers and intellectuals who
were murdered on Aug. 12, 1952:
"Those cruel and senseless series of execu-
tions, which demolished the remnants of Jew-
ish culture in the USSR, have been com-
memorated in the best possible way—hundreds
of thousands of Soviet Jews have declared their
Jewish consciousness, refused to be in- -
timidated by Soviet agents and tactics, and ap
plied to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere. So-
viet officials must realize that while it exe-
cuted the finest of Soviet Jewish intellectuals,
it will not eradicate Jewish culture, as shown
by last year's symposium on Jewish culture in
Moscow, and it cannot destroy Jewish will or
subvert Jekivish consciousness.
"Once again, there will be events nationwide
commemorating those murdered 25 years ago.
We call upon the Soviet Union to let those Jews
who wish to emigrate to do so, without further
harassment. We call upon them to rehabilitate
the names of those murdered, acknowledge
their grave sites so that they may be taken out
of historical oblivion and properly memorial-
ized and we call upon the USSR to cease the
pattern of anti-Semitism which has tragically
become so prevalent in publications and the
media, and end the persecution of Soviet Jews
seeking their basic human rights."
The American concern is especially heart-
ening on this sad day. Not only the President,
but leading members of Congress, including
members of the Michigan congressional delega-
tion, consistently exert their energies in behalf
of the rescue and emigration efforts for the
Jews of Russia. Many have been aided in emi-
grating, others are being assisted. With such
continuing support as a basic American policy
of succor for the oppressed, and with the tragic
Russian occurrences during the "Black Years"
as reminders, there is hope that what had hap-
pened then will not recur.
The Czarist Legacy
Why is Communist Russia pursuing an anti-
Semitic policy when the party platform specifi-
cally relegates the prejudice to a realm of capi-
talism?
The answer appears to be very simple. What
is happening under Communism is a legacy
from Czarism. The old hatreds, which were
rooted in religious fanaticism and the codes of
Czarist oppression continue to rule in a land
that could well have been a leader in the high-
est forms of democracy. Czarism rules under
the domination of a monstrous dictatorship.
It was the church in Russia that inspired
pogroms.
It was a combination of church and state that
set up barriers for Jewish students seeking ad-
mission to universities.
Even if not all of the discriminatiry practices
are being perpetuated, insofar as the Kremlin
is concerned it is still the root of hatred for
Jews in Russia.
The Soviet-Yiddish Writers:
Their Genius and Tragedy
For some 15 years, the late Dr. Eliezer Greenberg collaborated
with Irving Howe in the publication of noteworthy Yiddish literary
writings. They were the editors and in many instances the trans-
lators of short stories, novelletes, poetry of the most distinguished au-
thors of Yiddish works.
Their anthologies added immensely to an appreciation of creative
Yiddish writings and Dr. Greenberg played a major role in these ef-
forts.
The most recent of their anthological works, "Ashes Out of Hope:
Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish Writers' was published by Schocken at
about the time of Dr. Greenberg's death on June 2, and, in a sense,
serves as an added tribute to his scholarship.
The 25th anniversary of the Stalinist murder of 24 of the leading
Jewish intellectuals in Russia—the tragic events of Aug. 12, 1952—
lend special significance to the publication of the works of three of
the eminent Jewish writers: David Bergelson, 1884-1952; Moshe Kul-
bak, 1896 - 1940: and Der Nisterm, 1884-1950. Their literary labors find
excellent echoes for the present time in the translations in this impor-
tant Schocken book by Reuben Bercuvich, Leonard Wolf, Seth L. Mol-
itz, Seymour Levitan and Nathan Halper. Most notable is the com-
mentary by the two editors. Greenberg and Howe gave special em-
phasis to the role of the Yiddish writers, their agonized roles, the
misfortunes that confronted them.
In these works are mirrored the pathos and also the humor of Jew-
ish existence in the Soviet Union. They are evaluations of the drastic _
changes that have taken place with the Revolution. The reader will
find in them the evidence of the disappearance of the traditional,
while there also is the evidence of the nostalgic that beckons for the
inspiration that has vanished.
In "Ashes Out of Hope" editors Greenberg and Howe not only re-
late to the three authors whose works they included in their very
timely volume. They devote their introductory essay to a discussion
of the role of Yiddish in Russian Jewish experiences, the manner in
which the Yiddish language dominated the masses, the type of au-
thor who ensued, the elder and the newer poets and novelists.
Thus they expose the tragedy that was suffered by Yiddish as a
persecuted language in the USSR by stating:
"With the mounting terror of the Stalin years, only the strictest
`proletarian' writers—and soon enough, not even they—escaped the
blows of the Yiddish commissars who in every sentence found evi-
dence of a tainted nostalgia for the old world, ties of emotion with-
the Jewish past, a failure to apply the 'methodology of cla:
struggle' to the life of the shtetl.
"Yet the truth is that this life had been so intertwined with- Yidd-
ish, it was almost impossible to write anything in that language with-
out sooner or later employing Hasidic sayings, folk proverbs, and the
imagery of religious belief.
"Yiddish was suspect, inherently suspect. It contains, of course, a
large component of Hebrew words, and to the commissars, not all of
them Russian, this raised the spectre of heresy. But while the cam-
paign against the Hebrew component' was presented as a cleaning-
out of clerical remains, in actuality it formed a kind of death war-
rant for the Yiddish language—not just a cutting off from vital
sources. but a destruction of the very culture in which it had arisen.
For. among the Eastern European Jews, religion had not been
something that could be neatly separated from the rest of their lives;
it had been entirely interwoven with daily speech and manners, with
the ways people thought, felt, spoke.
The secularist Yiddish writers knew, of course, that their lan-
guage overflowed with references and metaphors of the faith they
had abandoned. Where Yiddish literature flourished in freedom. or
relative freedom, this fact was simply accepted as a - given"—you
could not undo history. But in the Soviet Union, the campaign
against Hebraisms led to a crippling of both language and liter-
ature.-
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