PUBLIC MARKS from McDonna with tags "henry srebrnik" & upei

by Jim Day, for the Charlottetown Guardian, 20 November 2007 A political science professor at UPEI was dumbfounded to learn that a subject of his own research was a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb. “That surprised me as much as anybody else,’’ Henry Srebrnik said of revelations that George Koval likely helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own. Srebrnik, who has for many years been researching the Kovals for a project on American Jewish Communists, said the family belonged to a popular front organization, as did most American Jews who emigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland. Srebrnik believes Koval likely didn’t feel he was doing any damage in his role as a spy to help the Soviet Union build its own atomic bomb. The Kovals belonged to an organization called ICOR, a Yiddish acronym for the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. George Koval’s father served its Sioux City branch as secretary, noted Srebrnik. Srebrnik has just finished a book on the Canadian Jewish Communist movement that he hopes will be released in the spring. He has published four or five articles on the weightier subject of American Jewish Communists and hopes to eventually compile a book.