Missing Voices-An Editorial
EDITORIAL Missing Voices As late as September 1959, when The New Leader published a special report by its editors entitled "Jews in the Soviet Union," few persons were aware that...
...One wonders whether we have, after all, yet learned that we are our brother's keeper...
...It should be emphasized that Judaism Without Embellishment is not an obscure, privately produced tract...
...With increased tourism, it is difficult to hide the fear in the eyes, the boarded-up synagogues, the absence or forced decay of virtually everything distinctly Jewish—in sharp contrast to the condition of the culture and the religion of other Soviet minorities...
...or, more to the point, on the fact that it was not merely his religion, along with all others, that the Soviets appeared eager to extinguish...
...It has been officially issued by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences —the first volume of its kind to appear under these auspices—and had an initial press run of 12,000 in the Ukrainian language...
...It further attempts to demonstrate that Judaism teaches contempt for work as well as workers and peasants, that Judaism glorifies extortion and usury, and that Judaism knowingly leads its followers into hypocrisy, bribery and financial speculation...
...Yet few are the individuals who have raised their voices against the Soviets' treatment of their Jewish citizens, and fewer still the heads of state...
...Ironically, this latest Soviet view of the Jew appears amid the controversy stirred by Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy...
...A crude distortion of Jewish history and traditional Jewish writings, the book maintains that it is incumbent upon Judaism's adherents to steal from non-Jews, to bear false witness and lie to non-Jews, and to exploit the labor of non-Jews...
...With the relaxation of censorship, the press occasionally records incidents where Jews are singled out for discriminatory treatment...
...Now a book has appeared which leaves no room for such doubt...
...Perhaps most significant, the book portrays Judaism as ultimately a façade for an international imperialist conspiracy involving Zionism, Israel, and Western capitalists...
...From a copy of the book that we have managed to obtain, our art director, Herb Lubalin, has reproduced most of those drawings on the next two pages...
...EDITORIAL Missing Voices As late as September 1959, when The New Leader published a special report by its editors entitled "Jews in the Soviet Union," few persons were aware that the subject warranted special concern...
...the same year, he wrote a long article entitled, "What Does Jewish Ethics Teach...
...Published late last year in Kiev, three copies of it arrived in this country several weeks ago...
...We would only observe that even many of those who are defending the Pope's stand agree with George Shuster that "It is for us to realize that we are not freed of responsibility for the present and the future our duty must henceforth be toward all the beleaguered and oppressed...
...The author, Trofim Korneyevich Kichko, though not himself a Jew, seems to rank as a foremost Soviet sociologist of the Jews...
...The three studies, expanded and updated, make up his 191-page Judaism Without Embellishment...
...A Foreword, signed by two members of the Academy, hails it as a "profound and substantial work which contains a tremendous amount of factual material, conscientiously and scientifically analyzed, [that] will be a valuable manual and will assist wide circles of readers...
...in 1962, after several years of reportedly intensive study, he received the equivalent of a master's degree for a dissertation on contemporary Judaism...
...In 1957, he published a pamphlet on "The Jewish Religion, Its Origin and Essence...
...Finally, the chapter titles and text are embellished with caricatures and cartoons hauntingly reminiscent of Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer, or of those published in the Soviet press during Stalin's campaign against the "homeless cosmopolitans...
...these are taken up elsewhere in the issue by Reinhold Niebuhr and Albert Bermel...
...It is not our intention here to discuss Pope Pius XII's failure to condemn openly the acts that added the word genocide to our vocabulary, or the dramatic merit of Hochhuth's effort...
...And for all its admitted ambivalence, we think a similar view motivated playwright Arthur Miller's essay on page 6 (written before the existence of Kichko's book was known...
...With the task of aiding the Jewish remnant of Europe virtually complete, Jewish organizations find themselves looking apprehensively to the East...
...Indeed, it was this lack of awareness that prompted us to devote an entire issue to what was essentially a collection of documents, articles and statements that together formed a revealing report on the status of the Russian Jew under Communism...
...But doubt about basic Soviet intentions has remained...
...The intervening years, of course, have seen additional information filter through to the West...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 6
