When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (13 page)

Birnbaum tried to combine his grandfather's passion with his father's meticulousness. To the students who started coming to his cluttered room in increasing numbers, this conviction translated at times to a comical self-righteousness. They would jokingly call him Messiah behind his back and giggle at the speech impediment that caused his every
r
to become a
w.
But Birnbaum's impassioned tirades mesmerized the students and gave the cause more urgency.

In mid-April, with the help of his Columbia students, Birnbaum got permission to hold an organizing meeting in that university's Philosophy Lounge. He scheduled it for Monday, April 27, and he went to work typing up an announcement. He called the group the College Students' Struggle for Soviet Jewry. The leaflet he designed radiated his ambition for the new endeavor.

The time has come for a mass grass-roots movement—spearheaded by the student youth. A ferment is indeed at work at this time. Groups of students all over New York are spontaneously coming together and hundreds of signatures have been collected.

There is a time to be passive and a time to act. We believe most emphatically that this is
not
the time for quietism. We believe that a bold, well-planned campaign, to include some very active measures, can create a climate of opinion, a moral power, which will become a force to be reckoned with.

His roommate, the librarian, had access to an old mimeograph machine and ran off a few hundred copies. Students distributed the fliers at Yeshiva, City University, Columbia, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and New York University.

On Monday night, the oak-paneled Philosophy Lounge was packed with students. Tables were pushed aside to make room, and many people had to stand in the back against the massive bookshelves that lined the walls. Birnbaum hadn't expected so many students. He tried to count how many there were and gave up after a hundred and fifty. He could feel his heart beating fast.

Morris Brafman gave the opening address, pumping his arms and decrying the "spiritual and cultural strangulation of our brethren." Birnbaum walked around the room nodding and handing out typewritten fact sheets that detailed the problem in more specific terms, from the number of synagogues closed to the lack of prayer books. When Brafman achieved his final flourish, telling the students to "fight with all you've got," Birnbaum asked for suggestions from the audience about what they wished to do next. Immediately, a hand shot up. A Columbia freshman stepped forward and offered to sing a chant he had thought up. Birnbaum said he should come to the front of the room. The boy cleared his throat dramatically and the students laughed. "'History shall not repeat,'" he sang. "'History shall not repeat.'" The room grew quiet. There was no need to specify which history he meant. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem three years earlier was still fresh in their minds. The news from the Soviet Union, especially coming from the fired-up Brafman, sounded ominous to them. Maybe it heralded the start of another extermination campaign. Suddenly the meeting was heavy with significance and emotion. It was more than Birnbaum could have hoped for.

Another student suggested they hold a rally as soon as possible. Birnbaum told them that the soonest they could demonstrate would be Friday—which, to his great satisfaction, was May Day. He got a thrill out of subverting Soviet symbols. For the group's name, he eventually dropped the word
College
and went with Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, a conscious wink at the Marxist concept of class struggle. Even if the students didn't catch the irony, he found it hilarious. But May 1, he told them, was only four days away.

Birnbaum set up an office in his bedroom, pushing aside the stacks of books and manila folders stuffed with newspaper clippings. The students sometimes wondered how he had managed to amass so much paper in the short time he had lived there. His roommate, frustrated at the incessant phone calls from students, offered to hook up a separate line in the bathroom.

Several students came forward to help with the organizing. One of these was Glenn Richter. A native of the outer boroughs and a student at Queens College, Richter had a reedy frame and always wore a green trench coat and a peddler's cap. At nineteen, he was also an amateur comic in search of an audience. Sometimes he talked in a Donald Duck voice. When he did speak normally, every sentence contained a pun or wacky rhyme. "That's Glenn Richter, as in the Richter scale," he cracked. Before he'd started spending most of his time at the barely functioning typewriter in Birnbaum's room, Richter had worked at the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most youthful of the civil rights groups spearheading the voter registration campaign in Mississippi. But the mood at SNCC had started to shift slightly over the past ten months, since King's speech in Washington. Richter used to sit in the office at lunch with a yarmulke on his head, and he'd get approving looks from the SNCC workers, many of whom had friends who were nursing bruises from the increasingly violent white retaliation in the South. But more exclusionary forces within SNCC, led by its aggressive and rising star Stokely Carmichael, were beginning to take over, making young Jews feel unwanted by the civil rights movement that had so seduced them. Richter welcomed a cause where he could unabashedly be a Jew and work hard for, as he saw it, the redemption of his own people.

Days of organizing out of Birnbaum's bedroom ensued. Richter manned the typewriter. Students contacted professors at all the major universities. Birnbaum followed up with phone calls and letters. Congressman Leonard Farbstein of Manhattan, seeing a possible photo op for his upcoming campaign posters, agreed to march. By Friday afternoon, Birnbaum's and the students' fingers were dyed blue from the ink of the mimeograph machines.

The Soviet mission to the United Nations, the protest target, was an imposing white building on a residential block of Sixty-seventh Street on the Upper East Side. At nine in the morning on May 1, Birnbaum paced the street nervously. He rubbed his beard. He took off his white straw hat and put it on again. No one was there yet, but Birnbaum tried to convince himself that at least a handful of his own student friends would show, at least the few who were absolutely committed. In an hour, they started trickling in, young adults dressed as if they were on their way to synagogue. Birnbaum had told them to look sharp. The boys wore black suits and thin dark ties, and the girls wore long dresses and pumps, not high heels. Birnbaum had tried to think of everything.

By ten there were a thousand people, mostly students, but some parents as well. They picked up the hand-lettered signs that Birnbaum had been churning out all week:
I AM MY BROTHER
's
KEEPER
and
LET THEM PRAY,
simple black paint on white poster board. Congressman Farbstein, in glasses and a porkpie hat, put on a sandwich-board sign and insisted on standing at the head of the line.

Just like the early civil rights protesters in the South, the students marched two by two. Birnbaum stood to the side, speechless for a few minutes, and watched what seemed like a great mass of young people organizing themselves. He couldn't believe this was happening. Birnbaum picked up a sign and started marching. The kids were singing the hymn "Ani Ma'amin," the Hebrew phrase meaning "I believe" sung over and over again.

The demonstration lasted four hours and was covered by all the major newspapers and news agencies, from the AP to the
New York Daily News.
The big three TV networks were also there. It was described as an unprecedented gathering for a cause hardly anybody outside the Jewish community had been aware of, and it was depicted as subdued and respectful. The
New York Times
' reporter Irving Spiegel, who wrote a page-two story, remained for the entire four hours. He told Birnbaum he had stayed so long because it was refreshing to see such an orderly protest in contrast to the water cannons and German shepherds that had begun to mark the civil rights marches. Birnbaum was glad; he wanted the protest to be "responsible." The article on the march in the
National Jewish Post and Opinion
reported that the students "made it a point not to protest against the convictions of Jews for economic crimes, feeling that anti-Jewish motives would be harder to prove. They also avoided urging mass immigration, attacking the Russian people, or indulging in name-calling."

Days after the May 1 protest, Birnbaum, electrified by the sense that his vision was being fulfilled but scared that the students, who were now entering finals, might lose interest, sent an excited memo to his small flock. "Our great demonstration attracted over 1000 college students from all over the city," he wrote. "We think that the strength of feeling here expressed will catch on spontaneously all over America and beyond, as well as among Christian students and civil righters. According to experienced observers, our movement has very great potential. Out of this student ferment there is emerging a wave of constructive, dynamic yet responsible action."

A few days after the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry adjourned, presidents of the twenty-four organizations that had sponsored the conference paid a visit to Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the White House. They delivered the list of demands generated by the meeting, measures needed to restore Jewish life in the USSR. The most provocative was the last point, which called on the Soviets "to make possible on humanitarian grounds Soviet Jews who are members of families separated as a result of the holocaust to be reunited with their relatives abroad." In order to soften a point that might seem like Cold War meddling, the leaders also read a statement to Rusk affirming that "our action is not to be considered in any sense as an exacerbation of political conflict between East and West. This is not a political issue." What they were asking, essentially, was for the government to become aware of the problem.

Halfway through the White House meeting with Rusk, there was a knock on the door from Myer Feldman, recently appointed assistant special counsel to President Johnson and the administration's Jewish liaison. Feldman said the president wanted to meet with a delegation of the group in a half hour. Six delegates from among the most prominent organizations were quickly chosen. Johnson entered, and in his usual jocular and domineering Texan manner, he put his arm around Morris Abram's shoulder and showed what looked like sincere concern as he talked knowledgeably for fifteen minutes about Soviet Jewry. Half a year had passed since Kennedy's assassination, and Johnson was still trying to prove himself to a Jewish community that had played such a pivotal role in securing Kennedy's slim margin of victory in 1960. Only a month before, Johnson had received a Presidents Conference delegation at the White House and told them, "You have lost a good friend. But you have found a better one in me."

Johnson promised to meet with the Soviet ambassador Dobrynin and raise the matter. And the next day, April 17, when the Jewish leaders opened the evening papers, they found that Johnson had held his first encounter with the envoy. It wasn't clear what the two discussed, but the Jewish leaders felt a Johnsonian wink in his statement to the press that he had "some specific things on his mind" as he entered the talks.

And yet, the Jewish establishment was floundering. In a closed meeting at the end of April to finalize the logistics of the new American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, the sponsoring presidents decided there would be no staff, office space, or specific budget. Instead, the twenty-four organizations would rotate the home of the conference, a different one taking over every six months. The American Jewish Committee had the first round and agreed to loan out one of their young staffers, a Soviet specialist named Jerry Goodman. But that was it. The conference would have an itinerant existence and no real funds. The Israelis at the Lishka had wanted more. But the American Jewish world just didn't sense the urgency.

In the middle of June, Birnbaum, emboldened by the early success of Student Struggle, decided to test the seriousness of the conference. He was hoping to send informational kits to all the major Jewish summer camps, and he needed money. The group was subsisting on Birnbaum's small savings and the three-dollar membership fee collected from each student. This meant he had total independence, much like Rosenblum and Caron. No one could dictate what the group should or shouldn't say—an important prerequisite for its goal, which was to draw as much attention to the cause as possible. But Birnbaum didn't write off the establishment completely. He needed resources. So together with the group of students he now called his executive committee, he decided to crash a steering committee meeting of the new American Jewish Conference that was taking place at the Delmonico Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

As soon as he entered, he was confronted by George Maislen, the president of the United Synagogues of America (an association of Conservative Jewish synagogues) who had been elected the first chairman of the steering committee. Birnbaum made his case, asking for money to fund the summer-camp information kits. Maislen later described the interaction in a memo: "We asked Mr. Birnbaum whether his group would accept the discipline of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry and he informed us that under no circumstances would they recognize any form of discipline and only required money from us." Birnbaum stormed out, offended that his proposal to cooperate was misread as his begging for a few dollars. To the eyes of the Jewish establishment, this group of religious teenagers and their bizarre leader, an overexcited Englishman, seemed uncontrollable. Maislen, who also wrote in his memo of how he had quelled a recent independent Soviet Jewry protest by a group of rabbis from Philadelphia, telling them it was "not in our best interest," described Birnbaum as a kind of outlaw and a nuisance. With annoyance, he wrote that the "Birnbaum group," as he referred to the students, was clearly getting funding from some outside force, an "agency" that he wouldn't name but that anyone involved with Soviet Jewry understood meant the Lishka.