From MosNews.com:
"One of the skeletons rattling in the former Soviet Union's closet was finally put to rest with honors on September 21--it even happened at a cemetery. A newly unveiled memorial at Moscow's Donskoye Cemetery commemorates the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The committee had been created to further Jewish culture in the USSR, but in the 1950s its members, including renowned artists and writers, were eliminated during Stalin's anti-Semitic purge. The story of the committee's end has been unraveled by historians as a stark, chilling testimony of Stalin-era horrors. The committee had been formed in 1942 to create support for the Soviet Union among Jewish communities in the West. Solomon Mykhoels, a well-known Jewish actor, was chosen to head the committee. Many other famous Jewish cultural icons of the time were also active in the committee, including actors, poets, writers, scientists, and others. The committee published a newspaper in Yiddish. It was the first Soviet organization of this kind. Obviously, in the Soviet Union, an atheist state, the uniting factor was Jewish culture, since religion was discouraged. After the war, the committee revived Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, helping preserve Soviet Jews as an ethnicity. The ties it established with Western Jews helped assemble and spread information about the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust. After WWII, when the Soviet Union was becoming the center of one of two warring camps in a bipolar world, these ties to the West, which were the very reason the Committee was established, became a threat to the secretive, policing Soviet government."
