Correspondents' Correspondence Czech Anti-Semitism
KOREY, WILLIAM
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Czech Anti-Semitism New York—Almost unnoticed in the...
...Another object of the Kremlin's fury was Dubcek's foreign minister...
...Thus when the Kremlin decided to destroy the Dubcek experiment, the vituperative propaganda campaign launched by the Soviet press attacked Czechoslovakia for succumbing to the "international Zionist conspiracy...
...They were accused, among other things, of being "Zionist" intriguers who had organized a "conspiratorial center" to undermine the Socialist state...
...Among those censured this time by Moscow was Frantisek Kriegel, a Politburo member and chairman of the National Front, whom Premier Alexei Kosygin called "this Jew from Galiria...
...On September 4, 1968, lzvestia, the Soviet government paper, determined to expose him as a "Zionist" agent, declared that he had "changed his name some time ago from Karpeles to Hajek...
...Jiri Hajek, who had flown to New York to present his country's case before the UN Security Council...
...You are a dirty Jew, that's what you are...
...as it was in Stalin's day, a testing ground for Moscow's campaign against the Jews.—WILLIAM KOREY...
...For Volkslimme, the organ of the Austrian Communist party, revealed on September 5 that lzvestia had confused Jiri Hajek with another Hajek —Bedrich...
...When the Czech leadership went to Moscow in August to negotiate with the Kremlin, the Soviets attempted to prevent Kriegel's return...
...He did, however, subsequently comment to the Czech journal Reporter: "I should like to emphasize that I would not be ashamed to be a Jew because I think that in this country we discarded racism some time ago...
...The Soviet agent dispatched to Prague to supervise his interrogation told him: "You are not a Communist, and you are not a Czechoslovak...
...Karpeles is a common Jewish name in Central Europe...
...A long, shrill editorial that appeared January 12 in both the principal Prague Party organ, Rude Pravo, and the Slovak organ, Pravda, charged "anti-Communist and Zionist headquarters" with having given the "orders" to produce the manifesto...
...The accusation turned out to be an indelicate journalistic boner...
...Of the 14 defendants, who included Loebl, 11 were Jews...
...The foreign minister had not changed his name and was not even Jewish...
...But racism has hardly been exorcised from the Bzech body politic...
...To emphasize its point, the editorial observed that "Charter 77" "proceeds from cosmopolitan postures" representing "the class attitudes of the defeated reactionary bourgeoisie...
...Most were sentenced to death, but Loebl was fortunate enough to receive a life sentence...
...Prague showed that it still is...
...Czech Anti-Semitism New York—Almost unnoticed in the Czechoslovak government's initial reaction to "Charter 77," the Czech human rights petition, was an overt appeal to anti-Semitism...
...The "Prague Spring" of 1968 moved to eliminate the vestiges of anti-Semitism that had desecrated Czechoslovakia's historic liberal tradition...
...Czechoslovakia was then the main testing ground of the Soviets' efforts to export anti-Semitism, as My Mind on Trial, a recently-published book by Eugene Loebl, powerfully documents...
...Loebl, a Jew and a leading Communist who served as Czechoslovakia's deputy minister of foreign trade, was arrested in 1949...
...Pardoned in 1960, he was rehabilitated by the Alexander Dubcek regime and served it briefly...
...Only at the insistence of the then Czech President, Ludwik Svoboda, did the authorities relent...
...Cosmopolitan," it will be recalled, was the Stalinist euphemism for Jew...
...Three years later, in the fall of 1952, came the infamous Slansky trial...
...Israel is your only real fatherland, and you have sold out Socialism to your bosses, the Zionist imperialist leaders of world Jewry...
...It reemerged this January when Hajek and Kriegel—along with Pavel Kohout, Vaclav Havel, Ludwik Vaculik, and several other signers of "Charter 77"—were once again singled out in anti-Semitic terms...
...During 1948-53, the term was used by the Kremlin and its Eastern European satellites in their anti-Semitic purges and trials...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 6
