The Joys of Being Jewish in the USSR
INTELLECTUALS, SIXTEEN FRENCH
SIXTEEN FRENCH INTELLECTUALS ON The Joys of Being Jewish in the USSR As part of their effort to counter the reaction in the West to such acts of Soviet justice as the 12-year sentence meted out...
...He neglects to mention that the remote Siberian territory, whose cultural and intellectual elites were massacred from 1936 on, has among its 195,000 inhabitants only some 10,000 Jews out of a total Soviet Jewish population of approximately 2 million...
...The truth is that the refuseniks are more and more numerous...
...The conclusions drawn by 16 leading French figures who recently received Ru-khadze'swork appeared in the November 7 issue of the Paris daily, Le Monde...
...Here the Zionists are exploiting the fact that offenders and criminals are still to be found among Soviet Jews, as among citizens of other nationalities in the USSR...
...The Jewish candidates rejected by the examiners on orders from above (examiners who tried to resist have been fired) are given theop-tion of enrolling in second- or third-rate technical schools, thus preserving the fiction that Jews have free access to institutions of higher learning...
...Daniel Pezertl A uxiliary Bishop of Paris...
...Let us also skip the entire chapter devoted to Birobidjan, that "autonomous Jewish region" which in 1934 became "the first Jewish state in 2,000 years"-except to note that the author has simply forgotten a few details...
...The signatories of this statement, all non-Jews who are nonetheless very familiar with the situation of the Jews in the Soviet Union, are profoundly alarmed by the accumulating evidence of a resurgence of official anti-Semitism in the USSR...
...SIXTEEN FRENCH INTELLECTUALS ON The Joys of Being Jewish in the USSR As part of their effort to counter the reaction in the West to such acts of Soviet justice as the 12-year sentence meted out last month to Jewish dissident Yosef Begun for teaching Hebrew, Soviet embassies have been distributing to prominent authors, political figures, scientists and clergymen a booklet issued by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House in Moscow, entitled Jews in the USSR: Figures, Facts, Comment...
...in 1972,12 out of 96...
...that the number of trials-political in the strongest sense of the word-Is growing...
...He similarly fails to tell us that the regime consents to erect monuments commemorating Nazi massacres of Soviet Jews only on the condition that there be no mention of the victims' ethnic identity...
...Soviet Jews, after receiving permission to apply for emigration visas in the early 1970s (an elementary right that to this day, it should be noted, is withheld from the Russians and Ukrainians), have in recent years seen more and more of their applications denied...
...the artists, writers, generals...
...When these criminals are exposed and brought to trial, the Zionist propaganda machine springs to their defense and the Soviet state is accused of 'persecuting' and 'discriminating against' Jews...
...This system, holding absolute control of the courts and the media, circulates its propaganda while shipping off to labor camps, exile or jail those who try to raise an alternative voice (Anatoly Shcharansky, Viktor Brailovsky, Yosef Begun...
...Rukhadze is also silent about the virulent anti-Semitism that has developed over the past 15 years in entire branches of intellectual endeavor...
...All Soviet Jews in custody or behind bars after being sentenced by Soviet courts...
...Frequently fired from their jobs, the would-be emigres become unemployed persons...
...For falsehood of the most glaring variety, we can turn to Ru-khadze's treatment of the emigration problem...
...unemployed persons are parasites...
...The author is silent, too, on the efforts of the editors of schoolbooks over the last three decades to expunge any trace of Jewish history that does not expose the base "Jewish bankers" (those "benefactors of Nazism," cf., The Insanity of the Swastika, by M.S...
...and that emigration has dramatically declined (51,328 visas were granted in 1979...
...2,692 in 1982...
...When the regime deigns to provide a reason for refusing permission to emigrate, it is normally that the refusenik "knows scientific secrets...
...Above all, Rukhadze is silent on the supreme insult to the Jews: the fact that for some 20 years now Soviet schools have "forgotten" to teach their children that the Nazis were anti-Semitic, and have refused to say a word about the Holocaust...
...the Dreyfus affair, mentioned in a text edited in 1949, disappeared from the 1954 edition, etc...
...Again, mathematics is a revealing example, for it is a field where Jews played a prominent role in the past and today are the victims of practices worthy of the time of Lysenko...
...640 in the first six months of 1983...
...Nor is there a word about the campaign to strike out references to the Jews from all pre-1950 texts...
...that they are increasingly harassed by interrogations and searches of their homes...
...Rukhadze's strange silences and flagrant falsehoods concerning the present...
...The aim of the publication is to demonstrate, in thespaceof 90 pages, that the lot of Jews in the Soviet Union is more enviable than anywhere else in the world, and to show how poorly informed or malicious anyone who could have any doubt about this must be...
...the streets named after one or another of them...
...The pamphlet now reveals to us the "The term 'prisoner of Zion' is an invention of the Zionist propaganda machine...
...and parasites are liable to terms in prison or the labor camps...
...The name " Judea" disappeared in 1957, to be replaced by "Palestine" or simply unnamed "provinces...
...In their immense bounty, the Soviet authorities are laboring, as did the Grand Inquisitor of Ivan Karamazov, to make their people happy despite themselves...
...9,431 in 1981...
...Let us skip rapidly over the edifying enumerations: the famous Jews of Soviet history...
...Their signed critique, translated for The New Leader by Norman Jacobs, is presented below...
...And the fate of those rejected-the "refuseniks"-Serves to dissuade new applicants...
...currently there are none...
...SlMONE de beauvoir Author Henri Cartan Academy of Sciences Cornelius Castoriadis Author Olivier Clement Author Jean-Marie Domenach Author Pastor Andre Dumas Protestant Theological Seminary of Paris Pierre Emmanuel Academie francaise Alfred Kastler Nobel Laureate, Academy of Sciences Louis Leprtnce-Ringuet Academie francaise Jean-Paul Matheu Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris Louis Michel A cademy of Sciences Jacques Oudtn Academy of Sciences Msgr...
...They denounce as particularly indecent the pamphlet Jews in the USSR, a smokescreen sent upin the West in order to conceal the reality in the Soviet Union...
...are called 'prisoners of Zion.' Zionist propaganda claims that these persons who, it says, voice the 'aspirations of all Soviet Jews,' are being punished solely for their Zionist beliefs or their wish to emigrate to Israel...
...Achosen few have recently received-thanks to the efforts of the Soviet Embassy in Paris-an astonishing pamphlet entitled Jews in the USSR, published in Moscow (Novosti, 1982) and written by one A. Rukhadze...
...Men such as these have made sure as well that the committee examining doctoral theses virtually refuses to consider the work of Jewish mathematicians...
...With equal severity, they denounce the obscurantism of the Soviet system...
...21,472 in 1980...
...The aim of such lies is to foster the myth about 'eternal Russian' and, above all, 'Soviet' anti-Semitism and to promote the idea of the 'exodus' of Soviet Jews to the 'Promised Land.'" -From "Jews in the USSR" moving real motivation for the refusals: Departures create "disunity among families" and "the destruction of family relationships...
...He is silent, for example, about the steep decline over the last 10 years in the admission of Jewish students to the great institutions of higher education...
...member, Secretariat for Cooperation with Judaism Jean Poperen Deputy, Rhone District Yves Que re Corresponding member, Academy of Sciences Rene Thom Fields Medal winner...
...that their lives are more and more difficult...
...In the mathematics faculty of the University of Moscow-roughly equivalent to our Ecole Normale Superior or Polytech-nique-not more than two or three Jews are now admitted each year (none were accepted in 1977), compared to 84 out of 410 new students in 1964...
...The author, Avtandil Rukhadze, declares at the end of his introductory note: "The reader who goes through this pamphlet carefully and without the bias fostered over many years by Zionist and some other Western mass media, will, I have no doubt, draw the correct conclusions about the life of Jews in the USSR...
...The refuseniks ought to bless a regime that knows their own profound interests so much better than they do, and that surrounds them with such a touching solicitude...
...Gouss, Moscow 1972), or the despised Zionist movement...
...Official" mathematicians like Vinogradov-who professes an impeccable anti-Semitism and boasts of having eliminated every Jew from the Steklov Institute-pontryagin and Yablonsky have practically "scrubbed clean" the review Matematichesky Sbornik, preventing contributions by Jewish mathematicians: In 1970,43 articles out of 108 were by Jews...
...Academy of Sciences...
...Babi-Yar, Rum-buli...
...the Inquisition, which in a 1951 work was still admitted to have persecuted Jews, has since 1977 officially been described as affecting only "heretics...
...That is how it repudiates and eradicates any sort of scientific or dialectical search for the truth...
...But rather than dwell on these matters from the past, let us consider several of Mr...
...that is to say, it is nothing but a circus sideshow...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 22
