In April 2006, a letter appeared on the Internet entitled "An Appeal to All Jews Living in Russia." The authorship was attributed to academician Israel Gelfand:
Exposing one fake
Gelfand Israel Moiseevich.
September 2, 2013 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great scientist, academician Gelfand Izrail Moiseevich. It is difficult to overestimate his contribution to Soviet and world science. To list all his awards and honorary titles, you will need more than one sheet of the usual format.
Brief information from the academician's biography: “Being an honorary member of most foreign academies since the early 60s, Gelfand was finally elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences only on December 26, 1984 at the age of 71, thus becoming the first chosen mathematician of Jewish origin since 1964 of the year. In 1968 he signed a collective letter condemning the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. In the same year Gelfand and his wife, Z. Ya. Shapiro, signed a collective "letter 99" addressed to the USSR Minister of Health and the USSR Prosecutor General, in defense of the mathematician A. S., who was forcibly placed in the Moscow psychiatric hospital No. 5. Yesenin-Volpin.
In 1989 Gelfand settled in the United States and was a visiting professor at Harvard University.
Throughout his life, I. Gelfand devoted almost all his time to scientific activity, and for him the concepts of honor and conscience were part of his character - the main qualities of his noble personality.
In April 2006, a letter appeared on the Internet entitled "An Appeal to All Jews Living in Russia." The authorship was attributed to academician Israel Gelfand.
An excerpt from the "Appeal to all Jews living in Russia":
It seems to me that right now, in the year of the centenary of the birth of the scientist, it will be appropriate to find out the authenticity of the above letter and the belonging of the text to Academician Gelfand.
I deliberately did not begin to make a detailed analysis of each phrase in the specified letter, it is too ineptly written, as if it was written hastily and anyhow. Appeals to the Russian population, calls for confrontation with the authorities and disobedience to them are things that are completely incompatible with the personality of the great scientist and are alien to him.
Strange and inconsistent with the image of an intellectual and enlightener, I see the phrases and writing style in question. The text is written surprisingly illiterate, everything in it breathes anger and hatred towards people.
Many who knew Academician I. Gelfand closely can confirm that he never “tried on the mantle of a prophet and teacher of nations,” as the writer A. Solzhenitsyn tried to do.
After reading the aforementioned letter several times, upon careful analysis of the text, I discovered a lot of inconsistencies and inconsistencies in phrases, phrases and the very style of this opus, which looks like a frank and crude forgery - a classic "fake coupon".
The favorite method of nationalists is to use a figure of world importance, in this case - the personality of an academician of world renown, and to attribute to the latter the authorship of this wretched "construct".
An anonymous letter, allegedly from Academician I. Gelfand, with a conscientious check, does not reveal a single truthful line and does not stand up to criticism.
The appeal to all Jews living in Russia, according to the intention of the true authors of this libel, implies the undoubted and universal responsibility of representatives of a non-titular nationality, which constitutes a meager part of the Russian peoples, for all the crimes of power in the entire history of the country.
This is a favorite technique of "guardians for the morality of Russian Jews" - to write on behalf of the whole people, hiding behind the broad people's back. Collective responsibility for certain misconduct or crimes is the strong point of the aforementioned authors of forgeries. Well-known literary critic Igor Dedkov wrote well about this as "the dream of all liars and villains." It's hard to disagree with him.
“The feeling of natural dignity determined the attitude of Ginzburg and Gelfand to the Jewish question - undoubtedly very important for them, as for any Jews (not only in the USSR, Russia!) And very acute in the academic environment. Not in word or deed, they did not bow before state anti-Semitism … Neither one nor the other was engaged in "politics", were not "dissidents", but the scale of the figures was such that they were perceived as "public figures." L. Radzikhovsky - article "The Last".
“For me, mathematics is a universal and adequate language of science, an example of how people of different cultures and education can communicate and work together,” the scientist said. He has received numerous prestigious international awards. In 1989, he was awarded the Japanese Kyoto Prize, which was founded in 1985 and is awarded for excellence in science and culture. In September 2003, Israel Gelfand received congratulations from the head of the Russian state on his 90th birthday.
While conducting an investigation to find the first publication of a letter called "A Message to the Jews of Russia" on the Internet, as well as to establish the authorship of this document, I discovered that the letter was posted on several openly fascist websites and nationalist forums on the Runet. One more detail: in every publication there is a disclaimer that this is an "excerpt" from a more complete and main source. But all my searches did not lead to the source - to the source material.
To finally confirm my idea that the described text is a crude and vile forgery, an attempt to denigrate the name of a famous scientist, I turned to the widow of Academician I. Gelfand - Tatiana Gelfand.
Tatyana Vladimirovna Gelfand (nee Alekseevskaya, born 1952) is a mathematician, lecturer at Rutgers University (USA), author of works in the field of combinatorial analysis and applied mathematics.
Tatyana Vladimirovna writes:
From comments:
Michael Godes