RUSSIA: Correction by Khrushchev

World Jewry has always kept an uneasy eye on Russia’s erratic treatment of Jews. Some of the early leaders of Communism (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Litvinoff and Kaganovich) were Jews, but Stalin later made Jewish “cosmopolitanism” a dangerous charge. Russia competed with the U.S. to be the first to recognize the infant Israeli state in 1948—only to switch later to all-out support of the Arab quarrel against Israel. Today the 3,000,000 Jews who still live in Russia are warned to merge themselves completely in Soviet society (while still carrying documents designating them as Jews) and are discouraged from their own cultural identity. In recent months the world Jewish press has been full of anxious debate about the changing Soviet attitude toward Jews. Last February a British Communist, Professor Hyman Levy, charged that “today there is not a single Jew in the Central Committee, and indeed no Jew in any high position.” Last month French Journalist Serge Groussard asked Khrushchev about reports that even in Stalin’s old Jewish colony of Birobidzhan in eastern

Siberia, Yiddish signs, schoolbooks and newspapers are no longer to be seen. Anything but reassuring, Khrushchev’s reply raised a fresh outcry from Jewish leaders in Paris, New York, Tel Aviv. The Soviet boss baldly labeled Birobidzhan a “failure” and in laying the blame on Jewish “individualism” and “intellectualism” seemed to single out the Jews as an element unfitted for Soviet collectivism.

Presumably somebody told Khrushchev he had said the wrong thing. Last week, as he held forth at a Polish embassy reception in Moscow, his eye lit on Israel’s Ambassador Joseph Avidar. Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians had asked Marshal Voroshilov about Soviet mistreatment of Jews, Khrushchev said, during her recent visit to Moscow’s Tchaikovsky festival. Voroshilov denied the charge by saying, “In fact my wife is Jewish.” Khrushchev added: “Half the members of the Presidium have Jewish wives.” Those who keep track of such matters in the West doubt that even two Presidium members have Jewish wives, but it is a fact that Nikita Khrushchev himself has a Jewish daughter-in-law.