Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

Foundation and wartime activity

In August 1941, shortly after the German invasion, twenty-four Jewish cultural and academic figures led by Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Bergelson held a ‘meeting of representatives of the Jewish people’ and broadcast a radio appeal calling on Jews worldwide to support the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany. The following April, with Stalin's approval, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC, Russian: ЕАК) was formally established under the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo). The actor and director Solomon Mikhoels of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre was appointed chairman, and Solomon Lozovsky, head of Sovinformburo, served as its operational chief.

The committee's newspaper was the Yiddish-language Eynikayt (Unity), distributed internationally with news of Soviet Jewish life and the front. In 1943 Mikhoels and the poet Itzik Feffer, as the first official representatives of Soviet Jewry to visit the West, undertook a seven-month tour of the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Britain. Their visit, welcomed by a National Reception Committee chaired by Albert Einstein and a rally of 50,000 at New York's Polo Grounds, raised $16 million in the US, $15 million in Britain, $1 million in Mexico, and $750,000 in Mandatory Palestine for the war effort.

Holocaust documentation and the Crimean proposal

As the war drew to a close, the committee turned to documenting the Holocaust. The Black Book project, led by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, collected testimony and documents on the genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. It clashed with the official line emphasizing the suffering of all Soviet nationalities equally; the book appeared in New York in 1946, but the Soviet edition's type was destroyed in 1948. The JAC leadership also proposed to the Soviet authorities the creation of a Jewish autonomous republic in Crimea to resettle Holocaust survivors, a proposal later used as the central charge of treason.

Repression and the trial

In January 1948 Mikhoels was murdered in Minsk by MGB operatives in a killing staged as a traffic accident. On 20 November 1948 the committee was dissolved by decree of the USSR Council of Ministers as ‘a centre of anti-Soviet propaganda,’ and dozens of its leading members, Feffer, Zuskin, Kvitko, Markish, Bergelson, Hofshteyn, and others, were arrested between late 1948 and early 1949. The Soviet press launched the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ campaign, unmistakably targeting Jews.

From May to July 1952 a closed trial was held by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court inside the Lubyanka. Lozovsky resisted across six days of testimony, comparing the court to the Spanish Inquisition; other defendants retracted their confessions. On 18 July thirteen were sentenced to death and executed on the night of 12 August, the Night of the Murdered Poets. Only Lina Stern survived, sentenced to three and a half years of imprisonment. Solomon Bregman lapsed into a coma during the trial and died in January 1953.

Rehabilitation and legacy

In November 1955, after Stalin's death, the Military Collegium quashed the sentences for lack of corpus delicti. Full rehabilitation, however, did not come until December 1988. The destruction of the JAC dismantled the institutional basis of Soviet Jewish culture; Yiddish publishing, theatre, and schooling effectively disappeared in its wake.