For Diasporas that have been mentioned repeatedly in the recent write-ups, there is the tendency to refer to Jewish Diasporas that occurred in 538 B.C. and afterwards. What relevancy all that epic will have is the social instinct of man to belong somewhere.

For weeks preceding the Zionist sponsored conference in Brussels, Belgium on February 17, 1976, attacking the Soviet Union on the false charge of barring Jews from immigrating to Israel, the Daily World office in Moscow was flooded with letters from Soviet Jews denouncing angrily the conference and the anti-Soviet campaign.

Most of the letters were addressed to the major U.S. newspapers and the press services. On checking, not even one appeared in the letter sections of the U.S.Press, not even acknowledgement of their receipt in any form. Protests from Soviet Jews against the lying press stories of oppression of Jews in the USSR just fell into the waste basket. But even if one letter was received favourable to the Zionists, that the anti-Sovieteers could use, it would rate a headline.

The write-up is dependent on the accounts of a famous writer called George Morris, an American journalist born in1903. He made his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1928, lived there for over a year in 1929-30, making further extensive visits in 1959, 1966 and 1970.

He reported that Jews in the USSR held positions in Science, Medicine and other important posts, proportionally exceeding that of almost every other ethnic section of the country’s population.

The way he wrote how emigration of a few of the Soviet Jews to Palestine, which they claimed as their ancestral land and their ungraceful return to the Soviet Land had taken place is, in some respects, similar to aspirations of some sections of the people of Manipur in particular, and the rest of the states in the NE Region of India in general. It opens a horizon for our inability to look beyond the horror and brutality of militancy in the region.

That, projection of the plight of the oppressed people by a journalist turned book writer of international standing is no less than a noble venture in the literal sense. In dealing with his book entitled “Where Human Rights Are Real”, the author is found to be far more sympathetic to the causes of the Jewish Diasporas of modern time. Morris received over 100 letters denouncing anti-Soviet propaganda.

The attitude conveyed in the letters was exemplified by Efim Yusifovic Andrachnikov, who wrote the letter to the Washington Post, which din’t run it. He said, “Soviet Jews are first of all Soviet citizens with equal rights, and our motherland is the Soviet Union”.

Born of a poor working class family, he wrote, his father was killed in 1919 by the Czarist anti-Semitic bands and his mother was murdered by the Hitlerites when they invaded Kiev in 1941. For 25 years he had been the director of an enterprise in Moscow with 2,000 workers.

For more than 20 years he had been elected a Deputy to the Soviet. The Government had honoured him 11 times. His wife was a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Republic and was the chief doctor in a hospital.

Daniel Eizenshtat, who headed a large construction directorate, wrote, “In our large establishment there are workers of various nationalities, but none of them feels any kind of oppression of which the Zionists scream so hysterically. The Soviet Jews, honest workers for their motherland, will never be supporters of the Zionists”. So the letters went on and on, in a similar vein.

Shortly before the Brussels conference, in reply to the Zionist campaign emanating chiefly from New York and Washington, Novosti Press Agency and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called a conference attended by about 500 Soviet and foreign newsmen to hear what seven former emigrants who escaped from Israel, had to tell of the land of “milk and honey”.

From the reports of the seven who were in Israel, it is evident that it was far more difficult to get out of Israel than to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Valery Kuvent, then 35 who left the Soviet Union for Israel in 1971 and returned in 1975, described how he was hidden in a trunk to get to Cyprus. From there, he, his wife, mother and three children went to the United States. He chose to escape the draft, which was invoked against him when he indicated his refusal to go on the radio to lie about the conditions of Soviet Jews.

“As soon as you come to Israel you find yourself in Israel, you come to realize that the Zionists need you and your family to make their job easier to populate the occupied Arab lands. People are being resettled in annexed territories”, he said. Just think what it means to live in places from which thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have been driven out.

These people are now huddled in tent colonies and slums which are bombed by Israeli aircraft. We Soviet Jews have nothing to do there. Israel wants to use us as unskilled work-hands and cannon fodder”. Kuvent described one case of a Soviet emigrant who was taken in to the army in handcuffs.

Also, a friend’s son who lost an eye during childhood was forcibly enlisted in the armed forces and told, “Moshe Dyan also has only one eye, but wears a military uniforms”. At that time, Moshe Dyan was the Defence Minister of Israel.

Klara Kreis described how she and her husband struggled out of Israel with their two children and made their way to Vienna where they received permission to return to their motherland, the Soviet Union. Kreis was prepared to wait, be it ten years, for permission, if only she could return.

She went on to say Israel is a racist society. For example, a Vietnamese woman went to Israel with her two children whose father was an Israeli. She wanted to become a citizen of Israel and was prepared to adopt Judaism. Zionist propaganda was then shedding tears over the fate of Vietnamese refugees. But the chief Rabbinate ruled they were not interested in her conversion.

The Vietnamese was expelled from Israel so that the “Chosen Race” might be kept pure. Kreis described how the immigrants from the USSR are treated as second class citizens by the Rabbinate and the ministry, and are termed “Half Breeds”.

And Israeli blacklisting of people on religious ground is well known, she added. Her children were required to study from text-books like “Sefer Hokazari”. That book asserts, she quoted, “The race of the people of Israel is the best of all races and that the Israelis are the chosen people.”

She referred to another text approved by the Ministry of Education and Culture that states “the Jews are the elite of mankind.” Lazar Kreis said that thousands of Jews were eager to leave Israel, but it was not easy, because they must show they have settled all their debts. Lazar Kreis said, Aaron Kurolopnik, who was in his eighties, was dreaming of returning to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine to be buried in the soil of his country.

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