Program for Pogrom

In his Jerusalem flat, Rabbi Klemes let himself down into a comfortable chair and tuned in the radio. "Tonight you will hear a recording of this morning's broadcast from Moscow," said the announcer. Frail old (74) Jacob Klemes, who had slipped out of Russia in 1934 after nine nervous years as Rabbi of Moscow, leaned forward, the better to hear his mother tongue. Half an hour later his housekeeper found him dead.

Rabbi Klemes had a son and a daughter in Moscow; both are practicing physicians. But it did not need a personal relationship for the announcement of the arrest of the Moscow doctors to make Jewish hearts everywhere miss a beat that morning. In many Jewish minds was the thought: So it has begun--the Soviet pogrom. In the trial of Rudolf Slansky and his ten Jewish Communist comrades last November on charges of "Zionism and bourgeois Jewish nationalism," there had been room for doubt. In their cynical ways the Communists might simply have been making a play for Arab support. They had taken pains to make a distinction between anti-Zionism and antiSemitism. That distinction no longer exists.

Around the world, the news from Moscow stirred anxieties and activities:

BERLIN. Communist Deputy Julius Meyer, leader of the Jewish community (2,800) in East Germany, skipped into West Berlin with ten leading East German Jews and their families, after being interrogated by Red police.

BONN. West German officials expanded their "refugee airlift" to fly 7,000 Soviet-zone refugees, many of them Jews, from camps in West Berlin to the Bonn Republic. Jews who have been Communists will not be turned back, but neither will they receive full political asylum, entitling them to preferential treatment in housing, pensions and jobs.

AMSTERDAM. Applications of Jews wishing to leave The Netherlands rose from 3,000 to 4,000 in the past two weeks.

BUDAPEST. Hungarian police arrested Lajos Stoeckler, leader of the Hungarian Jewish community. The official Communist newspaper trumpeted that the dangers "of hostile, undermining activities" of Joint are much more imminent in Hungary (many of whose top Communist rulers are Jews) than in the Soviet Union.

NEW YORK. The Communist Daily Worker, after first mumbling that there could be no anti-Semitism in Russia be cause it is prohibited by law, launched a tirade against "wealthy Jewish capitalists" and the "tightly knit group of Jewish members of the Wall Street finance capitalist strata."

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