Speech #880194123

The Communists pride themselves on the law which makes antiSemitism a criminal offense. Indeed. they tried to deny its existence when the poet Yevtushenko published his famous poem "Babi Yar" as a protest against Russian antiSemitism. But when 89 out of 163 sentenced to death by Soviet courts between July 1961 and October 1963 for alleged economic crimes--almost 60 percent--are publicly reported to be Jews and their names are held up for ridicule and contempt in the official Soviet press. when the Soviet regime closes down synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. crushes every vestige of Jewish culture and deports Jews to Kazakhstan while simultaneously telling the outside world that Jews enjoy religious freedom. and when there is distributed an officially published edition of 12.000 copies of the blatantly antiSemitic book by Trofim Klohko. entitled "Judaism Without Embellishment." under the auspices of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciencesthen it is time to rip off the false mask from the Soviet claim that there is no "Jewish question" under communism and to expose the hypocrisy behind official denials of antiJewish actions. The Kremlin would like us to believe that antiJewish repressive acts are cold war lies spread by capitalists and imperialists. but the facts give this explanation the lie. I have asked the Soviet authorities to explain why there is such a sharp difference between the way Jews are described in Soviet publications for external distribution and the way they are vilified and made objects of suspicion In books and periodicals distributed inside the U.S.S.R.