Gary Selikow, Johannesburg
Every day they come up with venomous and ruthless attacks on the Jewish State and its supporters, and are directing a campaign of ethnic hatred against Israel and its Jews.
We must not let them succeed; the Communist government of the old Soviet Union tried the same and did not succeed.
In his book The Jews of Silence, Elie Wiesel provided a classic testament to the brutal persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union during the dark days of Communist oppression.
With both poetic and potent eloquence, Wiesel described the atmosphere of fear and silence among Soviet Jewry during the 1960s, when this book was written; the attempts to force Jews to abandon their faith and identity, and to cut ties with their brothers and sisters in Israel, by the brutal Communist tyrants.
Then there was the daily disparagement of the State of Israel and the maligning of Zionism by the state media (something we see in many countries around the world today).
Indeed, even though Communist tyranny in Russia has collapsed, the crusade of hate by the left, formulated by Soviet propagandists, has only got more vicious in recent years.
But the Jews of the Soviet Union refused to forget who they were, or to give up their faith or their love for the State of Israel.
Referring to the violent anti-Israel propaganda in the Soviet Union, the author explains: “The purpose of such propaganda is to make Israel seem hateful to the general populace, but to the Jews as well, to undermine the esteem in which they hold the Jewish State, and to convince them finally to relinquish an idea which has failed, a vision of redemption which has somehow been made profane…”
But this form of psychological warfare, directed against the Jewish dream, and designed to divide Jews of the Diaspora from their own people in Israel, failed in Russia.
Jews all over the world need to reject it, wherever it raises its ugly head.
As Wiesel described it: “There are Jews who will under no circumstances let themselves be severed from their people.”
