by chuck on June 7th, 2008

chuck

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How come we never hear about the 100s upon 1000s of jews killed by the Russians during therussian purges, I mean they killed allot of jews, why does the Jewish community not speak of that? No really are there any survivors from the stalinist purges?

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  • by iwnit on June 8th, 2008

    iwnit

    Stalin was not specifically against Jews, he was against national discrimination. But he was also against nearly "all religious and non-communist cultural institutions".

    1) "Yevsektsiya (alternative spelling: Yevsektsia), Russian: ЕвСекция, the abbreviation of the phrase "Еврейская секция" (Yevreyskaya sektsiya) was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party which opposed the Bund and Zionist parties. The Yevsektsiya referred to these religious Jewish organizations as "bourgeois nationalists" and instead sought to popularize Marxism among the Jewish working class. An important aim of the Yevsektsiya was to mobilize the Jewish diaspora in favor of the Soviet regime. The founding conference of Yevsektsiya took place on October 20, 1918. For most of its existence, the Yevsektsya was headed by Semyon Dimanstein.

    Persons of Jewish origin were disproportionately represented in the Russian revolutionary leadership. However, most of them were hostile to traditional Jewish culture and Jewish political parties, and adamantly opposed to "Jewish cultural particularism". Yevsektsiya members were sometimes derogatorily called Yevseki (pl.).

    The Yevsektsia was disbanded in 1929, after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Many of its members perished in the Great Purge. Dimanstein was arrested and received death sentence in 1938 and was executed. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, 2 years after the death of Joseph Stalin."
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevsektsiya


    2) "Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Russian: Евре́йская автоно́мная о́бласть, Yevreyskaya avtonomnaya oblast; Yiddish: ייִדישע אווטאָנאָמע געגנט, yidishe avtonome gegnt) is a federal subject of Russia (autonomous oblast) situated in the Far Eastern federal district, bordering Khabarovsk Krai and Amur Oblast of Russia and Heilongjiang province of China. The region was created in 1934 as the Jewish National District. It was the result of Joseph Stalin's nationality policy, which allowed for the Jewish population of Russia to receive a territory in which to pursue Yiddish cultural heritage within a socialist framework."
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast


    3) "Even though Communism theoretically rejects every form of national discrimination, including antisemitism, and many Old Bolsheviks were ethnically Jewish, they sought to uproot Judaism and Zionism and established the Yevsektsiya to achieve this goal.

    Stalin's letter : Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States" dated January 12, 1931 indicated his official position of the Soviet Union:

    In answer to your inquiry: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism. Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism. In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

    To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down.

    By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, including Yevsektsiya. Despite the official Soviet opposition to antisemitism, critics of the ensuing USSR characterize it as an antisemitic regime, pointing out the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, the relatively high Jewish casualties in the Great Purges, and Soviet hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions. A hostility, however, that was applied with practically equal force against all religious and non-communist cultural institutions, the notable exception being the Christian Orthodox Church during World War II, or the "Great Patriotic War" as it was known there."
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin%27s_antisemitism


    4) "Jewish Bolshevism, Judeo-Bolshevism, Judeo-Communism, or in Polish, Żydokomuna, is a pejorative antisemitic expression based on the notion that Jews are responsible for Bolshevism and Communism.

    The expression was the title of a pamphlet, The Jewish Bolshevism, and became current after the October Revolution (1917) in Russia, and spread worldwide in the 1920s with the publication and circulation of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It made an issue out of the Jewishness of Bolsheviks (most notably Leon Trotsky) during and after the revolution. Daniel Pipes says that "primarily through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Whites spread these charges to an international audience." James Webb writes: "[i]t is rare to find an anti-Semitic source after 1917 which does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution."

    The label "Judeo-Bolshevism" was used in Nazi Germany to equate Jews with communists, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists. Nowadays, the term is used on numerous antisemitic sites."
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism

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