The Harsh Plight of the Soviet Jews

WHILE concern mounted in the U.S. over the harassment of Soviet diplomats by a small band of Jewish militants (see THE NATION), Moscow's retaliatory campaign against Americans tapered off last week. There was no easing, however, of the Soviet propaganda campaign accusing Washington of complicity in the Jewish Defense League's guerrilla tactics against Russian diplomats. Even the Chief Rabbi of Moscow joined in the protests. In a letter delivered to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin wrote: "Soviet Jews do not want the help of unsolicited protectors and fascist Jews.''

Despite the obvious political overtones of his letter, Rabbi Levin was undoubtedly correct that terror tactics against Soviet diplomats harm the cause of Jews in Russia. Yet no matter how wrongheaded the acts of the Jewish Defense League in the U.S. have been, one of the organization's basic arguments is accurate: Jews in the Soviet Union are routinely subjected to harsh treatment.

Officially, there is no discrimination in the Soviet Union, and many Jewish artists and writers, scientists and physicians, engineers and economists, are members of the privileged elite. There is Veniamin Dymshits, the Deputy Premier in charge of Soviet industry. Economist Yevsei Liberman was responsible for a brief attempt at loosening Moscow's rigidly centralized economic control, and his ideas are now widely emulated in Eastern Europe. An estimated one-third of the Soviet Academy of Sciences is Jewish. Bolshoi Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and perhaps 90% of the Bolshoi Orchestra are Jewish, as are Violinists Leonid Kogan and David Oistrakh and Pianist Emil Gilels. Nor do the Soviet Jews face the open, rampant persecution that German Jews endured in Hitler's Third Reich. But that is small consolation for the vast majority of Russia's 3,500,000 Jews who suffer job discrimination, racial slurs, and the anxiety that arises from being regarded as outsiders or even potential traitors by many of their fellow citizens.

Cruel Dilemma. The Soviet Union is, of course, a dictatorship that denies all its citizens many basic human rights taken for granted in the West. But the Jews are treated worse than most. Despite its slogans about equality. Communism has always been ambivalent on the Semitic question. In the early days, many leading Bolsheviks were Jewish, including Leon Trotsky. Under Stalin,

Russia's age-old anti-Semitism resurfaced. Later it was compounded by the Kremlin's strong pro-Arab policy, which has cast Israel and Jews elsewhere in the role of enemies.

This development has only intensified the cruel dilemma that has confronted the Soviet Jew for years. Soviet policy is against all religions, but the Jew is discouraged to a far greater degree than either the Christian or Moslem from trying to practice his faith. In all of the Soviet Union, there are only about 60 synagogues and a dozen or so ordained rabbis. At the same time, the Soviet Jew cannot shed his identity and become a fully assimilated Russian even if he wants to. No matter where he was born, he is always listed as a Jew in the domestic passport that all Soviet citizens must carry.