THE JEWISH NEWS Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with the issnc July ?A 1951 Member American 'Association of English-Jewish Newspapers. Michigan Press Association, National Editorial Association. Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co.. 17515 W. Nine Mile, Suite Sii5. Southfield, elicit. -1S075. a year. Second-Class Postage Paid at Southfield. Nlichigan and Additional :\htiling Offices. Subscription PHILIP SLOMOVITZ Editor and Publisher CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ Business Manager DREW LIEBERWITZ Advertising Manager ALAN IIITSKY. News Editor...II•II)I PRESS. Assistant New, Editor 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.- - -