Leningrad Trials
The report that the 2 death sentences passed upon the Jewish citizens in the recent Leningrad Trials in Russia for attempting to hijack a Soviet plane, from Smolny air port and fly to Boden, Sweden, have been commuted to 15 years’ imprisonment, is welcome news. To read into these reprieves, however, evidence of a more liberal spirit within the Russian Government, leading to any change of policy, would be a grave mistake. These men were charged with only the offence of preparing to hijack a plane as they had no other means of leaving the country, and the sentences have, therefore, been justly described as ‘judicial murder’. Mrs Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, has questioned in her protest if the charges had any reality in fact at all and were not evidence of Russian anti-Semitism, as no proof was ever produced at the secret trials. The Soviet authorities have simply in this instance shown some awareness of the strength of unfavourable world opinion which condemned these merciless sentences; more so, perhaps, they have been influenced by the decision of General Franco, the aged Spanish Dictator, to commute the death sentences on 6 Basques in the Burgos Trials in Spain. At the time, the Kremlin joined in the protests against the verdicts of the Burgos Trials, calling the Basques ‘patriots’, ‘fighters for freedom’, while the Jews at Leningrad were ‘traitors’; they could hardly refuse now to commute in their turn the death sentences in the Leningrad Trials. In both cases, the striking similarity is seen, that an oppressed minority were tried in secret courts by a dictator regime and given the extreme sentence. Here the similarity ends. Unlike the charges made in the Spanish Trials, which included murder, the Russian Jews were merely attempting to return to Israel, when their applications for permission to leave were refused. The sentences passed upon them were brutal in their severity; even the reduced sentences cannot be regarded as anything else than unjust and oppressive.
C.
Russian Anti-Semitism
The Soviet leaders do not like to be charged with Anti-Semitism and have gone to great lengths to maintain the pretence that all Soviet citizens are equal in the eyes of the law. They would like the world to forget the Stalinist era, when in a single day 26 leading creative Jewish intellectuals were tried in secret and executed; when thousands of Jews from every walk of life were sent to prison camps; and all public Jewish institutions, schools, publishing houses, etc. were closed down. The truth is, however, that mounting Anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R. is today becoming more open and violent. Conditions throughout the country for the large Jewish population, numbering about 3 million, have become so intolerable that a wave of Jewish demands to Soviet leaders for leave to return to Israel have been filed; petitions have been addressed to U.N. and appeals to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which confirm their right to live in Israel if they wish. Many Jews have renounced their Soviet citizenship, many have been deprived of their jobs, and many have been imprisoned. At present 7 Soviet Jews are awaiting trial at Kishinev, Capital of Soviet Moldavia, including 2 from Leningrad, arrested at the time of the skyjacking attempt, on the charge of “anti-Soviet agitation”. All had already been refused permission to leave Russia for Israel. Anti-Semitism in Russia today is having the effect of turning the Jews to a fresh study of the nation’s past, the Hebrew Language, Jewish History and Literature, and a strong tendency can be discerned to regard as the only solution of the Jewish problem a return to the national home of Israel. May the Lord speedily bring about the fulfilment of the ancient prophecy: “In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew saying, “We will go with you; for we have heard that God is with you” — Zech. viii, v. 23. C.