This newsreel documents the urgent and moving appeals, broadcast on 24 August 1941, of internationally renowned Soviet artists to their “Jewish brothers throughout the world” to support the Soviet Union in the war against Nazi Germany. They were spoken in Russian by actor Solomon Mikhoels and writer Ilya Ehrenburg, in English by Sergei Eisenstein (a famous Soviet artist, but not Jewish) and in Yiddish by the poet Peretz Markish. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, founded by the Soviet government, was active throughout the war; as early as 1943 it also began documenting the crimes committed by the Germans against the Soviet Jews. However The Black Book of Soviet Jewry by war correspondents Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg never appeared in the Soviet Union: the manuscript and even the typefaces were destroyed in 1948. Mikhoels, chairman of the JAC, Stalin Prize 1946, was murdered by Stalin’s secret police in 1948; his performance of a lullaby (in Yiddish) in the musical Cirk, which was very popular in the post-war period, disappeared. Most members of the JAC were killed in campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans”, including Peretz Markish on 12 August 1952, together with other Yiddish- Ukrainian authors.

Mariann Lewinsky