Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1952-12-19

ment was prepared by the Jewish
Community Council Of Greater WASH
ington. voluntary central body of
101 affiliated organizations devoted to
community planning, research, edu-
cation and community relations.)
A s WE REFLECT on the meaning and
4 n background of the Communist
purge trials in Prague, We experience
sense of alarm at the Communists open,
brazen use of anti-SemitiSm in connec-
ton with the trials. There is deep
anxiety about what this deliberate use
of anti-Jewish propaganda may portend
for the fate of the 2.5 million Jews in
Eastern Europe who managed to sur
vive the Hitler holocaust and are now
sealed behind the Iron Curtain.
AS to those who were sentenced and
executed in these recent Communist
trials. Jews in the free world will feel
no special urge to mourn for them.
They were not Jews at all. Indeed they
were traitors to Judaism. Only through
disavowal of all the principles of
Judaism could they have been led to
the service of Communist totalitarianism
and, by an all-too- familiar route, through
positions Of power to the hangman's
scaffold. To identify these renegades
from Judaism as Jews and Zionists and
to harp repeatedly on this Identification
all through the Prague trials is a fright
ening example of calculated Communist
scapegoating. It makes one fear that
being jew is in itself looked upon as
a crime by the Kremlin and its hench-
men. In these stage-managed trials,
the Kremlin's puppets have broadcast
to their captive audiences the idea that
Jews as Jews are now the approved
scapegoats in the Communist world.
The Communists have thus exhibited
themselves publicly in the obscene act
of embracing the most revolving of the
policies of the NaziS-with whom, when
it has suited their purpose, they have
made common cause.
Jews in the free world look to free
men everywhere to condemn and recoil
from this newest evidence of Communist
cynicism and duplicity. In 1888 the
civilized world protested only feebly
against Hitler's anti-Semitic program,
which subsequently led to the mass MUIR
der of million Jews and millions of
members Of other minority groups. The
civilized world today must not view
with complacency-as purely internal
matter-the anti-Semitic program be-
hind the Iron Curtain. of which the
anti-Jewish refrains throughout the
Czech trials are only the latest and least
disguised manifestations. An aroused
world in 1888 could perhaps have pre-
vented the murders in the gas cham
bers and crematoria. An aroused world
today may perhaps succeed in prevent
ing the Kremlin from carrying it's slim
ulation of anti-Semitism to extremes
that civilized mind fears to contem-
plate.
The much-publicized identification by
the Communist government Of II Of the
defendants as Jews and zionists, their
reiterated classification as members of
Jewish nationalist gang" had an
immediate effect on the anti-Semitic
elements in the Czech populace. It
provided advance justification for future
acts of prejudice. During and imme-
diately after the trials signs and inscrip-
tions appeared on many doors in Czecho-
slovakia which read: "A Jew Lives
Here" Jew Traitor" Jew" and others.
The impact of these events on the
Jewish population in CZechoslovakia,
and the fear which gripped it, are evil
denced by the wave of suicides reported
among leading Jews there. The Paris
radio reported on December that about
200 Jews had been arrested in CZecho-
slovakia during the preceding two weeks,
and had been sent to concentration
camps around MoravSka -OStrava, with
out first having been brought into court.
There are many indications that the
Communists use of anti-Semitism in the
Prague trials will be followed by similar
performances in other satellite countries.
That the Czech trials, and others which
may follow, mean the end of the trickle
Of Jewish migration to Israel from Iron
Curtain countries appears almost GER
tain. But that they may spell some
thing far more sinister for the Jews in
these lands is too real a possibility to
be ignored.
The injection of anti-SemitiSm into
the Prague trials was clearly the product
of deliberate calculation. This is readily
discernible in the preparations for the
trial during the past year. A few days
after the arrest of Rudolf Slansky, about
a year ago, Antonin Zapotocky, the
Czech Premier, made a speech before
the Central Executive Committee OF the
National Front. in which he attacked
Slansky and his alleged accomplices as
"coSmopoliteS. This term is we'll known
in Communist usage as a diSparaging
equivalent of "Jew," and was first used
in this sense by Hitler in "Mein Kampf."
The day after the Premier's speech, the
Czech Communist weekly Tvorba, which
sets the Communist party line, charged
that bourgeois Jewish nationalist"
were serving as "Anglo-American
agents. in Czechoslovakia, and that
many cosmopolitan elements who be-
came Anglo American agents were re-
cruited from the ranks of conscious and
active zionists. unanchored in our ma
ton" At the same time, most high
officials who were Jews were singled out
for dismissal from their positions, and
within month after Slanskys arrest
the purge of Jews was virtually COM
plete Lud, Communist Party paper
in Slovakia. gave a nod of approval to
pogroms and riots by Slovak anti