Beat, Beat, and Once Again, Beat'

...In his intensely absorbing and thoroughly documented history of Soviet Jewry, Yehoshua Gilboa, a Polish-born editor of the Israeli newspaper Maariv, shows that Russia's Jewish population, led by its intelligentsia, was well on the road to assimilation prior to World War II...

...The Soviet government, needing the support of Jews throughout the world in its struggle against Nazism, was willing to temporarily tolerate such nationalistic sentiments...

...In reality, however, there are at least two major exceptions to this rule: (1) Though all nationalities are equal, the Russians are considered more equal than the others...

...The major part of Gilboa's book is devoted to those black years between 1948 and Stalin's death in 1953...

...According to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, all Soviet nationalities will blossom in harmony and equality under the light of socialism...

...Imitating Hitler's plan to render Germany judenrein, Stalin sought to make the USSR judentumrein, unleashing an anti-Semitic campaign calculated to remove all traces of Jewishness from the land...

...Nonetheless, on October 12, the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, thousands of young Soviet Jews will gather at the Great Moscow Synagogue on Archi-pova Street to sing Otpusti Narod May ("Let My People Go...

...It includes recurring caricatures of Jews in the press, constant propaganda about a world Zionist conspiracy, and the publication of novels portraying Jews as virtually subhuman...

...Despite some sporadic easing of restrictions on emigration to Israel during the last year, official anti-Semitism remains a desperate fact of Jewish life in the Soviet Union...

...In January 1953 Pravda reported that a group of doctors had been arrested for serving international Zionist agencies, describing them as "monsters in white coats," "despised degenerates from among men of science," and "loathsome vermin...

...Khrushchev later revealed that Stalin himself had prescribed the treatment of these nine men, seven of them Jewish, with the command: "Beat, beat, and once again, beat...

...Reviewed by Dennis Prager Fellow, School of International Affairs and Russian Institute, Columbia University ANTI-SEMITISM, we are told by Communist spokesmen, is an outgrowth of capitalistic class rivalry that cannot exist in the USSR...

...and (2) the Jews, regarded as unworthy of nationhood, are supposed to disappear through voluntary or forced assimilation abetted by the eradication of their history and culture...

...Meanwhile, Soviet communications media were saturated with obscene attacks on "rootless cosmopolitans" who invariably had Jewish names and were portrayed with hook noses...

...It was an expedient tactic, for anti-Semitism already pervaded much of the Soviet Union—especially in areas like the Ukraine, where Jews were returning from concentration camps to reclaim their homes and possessions from non-Jews unwilling to part with them, and where Nazi propaganda had fed deep-rooted prejudices...

...Ironically, this is largely due to the USSR's refusal to allow them to assimilate after all, while simultaneously attempting to stamp out every aspect of Jewish life...

...And the same negative combination has prompted many young Soviet Jews —unwilling to live in limbo as neither Soviets nor Jews—to opt for emigration to Israel...

...Bialik, the foremost Hebrew national poet, was simply dismissed as a "bourgeois nationalist and cosmopolite...

...The Jewish past was buried along with its present, as the Soviet leaders meticulously Orwellianized history...

...The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1932 contained 76 pages on subjects of Jewish interest...

...He describes how many Soviet Jews tried to become more Russian than the Russians, how Jewish writers hailed the conversion of synagogues into workers' clubs, idealized mixed marriages, and even accorded the pig special prominence in their literary works...

...Had Stalin lived longer, there is little doubt that a Jewish bloodbath would have occurred...

...The Jewish villain in the 1970 Ivan Shevstsov novel seduces, rapes and disembowels his mother...

...Gil-boa reports the existence of detailed plans to expel masses of Jews to Siberia...

...The Jews," the entry echoed Stalin, "do not constitute a nation...

...By the end of Stalin's reign, the disappearance of Jews who were never to be heard from again was so common that many families had bundles prepared for unexpected journeys...

...In a moving, if somewhat overdetailed, chapter on the national awakening in Soviet Jewish literature, Gilboa cites example after example of this new preoccupation with Jewish history, Jewish suffering, the Jewish nation, and Yiddishkeit in general...

...Indiscriminate terror ceased after Stalin's death, but his successors have continued to deny Jews their history and culture...

...In true Stalinist fashion, though, all the members of the jac except Ilya Ehrenburg were rewarded soon after the War with long imprisonment or death...

...Bloodletting began in January 1948 when the secret police murdered Solomon Mikhoels, a prominent Jewish actor-director and head of the jac...

...It is the finest work to date on the subject...

...Until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Jewish writers were obligated to praise the Nazi leader, but with the ensuing mass slaughter of their fellows, a keen Jewish self-consciousness arose...

...It also gave Stalin an internal "enemy," enabling him to keep the populace "eternally vigilant" and to distract it from the nation's real problems...

...In April 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was founded specifically to mobilize world Jewish opinion on behalf of the Soviet Union—and thereby increase pressure in the West for the opening of a second European front, as well as for greater American involvement in the fighting against Germany...

...In November 1952 the USSR started exporting anti-Semitism to its satellites, staging the infamous Rudolf Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia...

...The jac performed its task diligently, sending spokesmen to Jewish communities in America and England who raised large amounts of money and sympathy for the Russian war effort...

...Not one Soviet Yiddish poet was cited, and the few Jewish figures listed were portrayed in the most negative terms...

...To understand the meaning of this event, one should read The Black Years of Soviet Jewry...

...The first Jewish organization allowed to exist in the USSR since 1930, it was greeted joyfully by the renascent Jewish intelligentsia despite its restricted mandate...

...the 1952 edition gave them only two pages plus two more on Birobizhan, the so-called Jewish Autonomous Region...

...The gradual decimation of the Jewish intelligentsia culminated in the August 12, 1952, execution of 24 leading literary figures...

...Yet far from disappearing, a significant number of Russia's 2.5 million Jews are today displaying a tenacity unmatched by any other Soviet people in nearly 55 years of Communist rule...

...During a recent visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where 2.5 million Jews were exterminated, I watched the 30-minute Russian film that is shown to Soviet visitors: The word Jew was never mentioned...

...The following month it opened a series of domestic trials for "economic crimes," with a cast composed primarily of Jews...