When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (20 page)

Showered with insults, covered with the mud of slander, despised and persecuted, they earned their daily bread with blood and sweat, and reared their children. Their hands were calloused, their souls were drenched in blood. But the important thing is that the nation was not destroyed—and what a nation.

The Jews gave the world religion and revolutionaries, philosophers and scholars, wealthy men and wise men, geniuses with the hearts of children, and children with the eyes of old people. There is no field of knowledge, no branch of literature and art, to which Jews have not contributed their share. There is no country which gave Jews shelter which has not been repaid by their labor. And what did the Jews get in return?

When life was bearable for all, the Jews waited fearfully for other times. And when life became bad for all, the Jews knew that their last hour had come, and then they had to run from that country.

And whoever got away began from the beginning again.

And whoever could not run away was destroyed.

The letter went on to catalog the long history of persecution of European Jewry and then declared that now "the Prophecy has come true; Israel has risen from the ashes; we have not forgotten Jerusalem, and it needs our hands. There are eighteen of us who signed this letter. But he errs who thinks there are only eighteen of us."

Their plea was a desperate one: "We will wait months and years, we will wait all our lives, if necessary, but we will not renounce our faith or our hopes."

Coming from uneducated peddlers and artisans in what many considered a primitive and backward place, this letter was extraordinary. Once in the hands of the activists, it was reproduced in samizdat form and delivered to the Dutch embassy for transmission to the Israelis.

The movement matured in 1969, and not just because of the letters and increasing openness of the struggle. Coordination and communication among the different centers of activity also increased. Some level of contact had existed since 1967, but it was mostly the result of fortuitous personal connections. Ruth Alexandrovich, a young woman from Riga, knew David Khavkin, a respected activist and former Gulag prisoner from Moscow. He in turn knew some Jews in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, who had access to a photocopy machine and were able to print hundreds of copies of
Elef Millim.
In this way, the books were distributed all across the empire—from Novosibirsk to Khavkin to Alexandrovich and eventually to Leningrad, where Ruth knew Aron Shpilberg and his friends in the Zionist organization.

But this was all too tenuous and haphazard. There had to be a better way to coordinate their efforts. In the summer of 1969, with the letters beginning to get some press in the West, a few Moscow activists—Khavkin among them—decided to call a meeting of representatives from the various cities. Even though such a mass gathering posed many risks, they had the perfect excuse for being in the same city at the same time. Sasha Blank, an elderly Zionist from Leningrad known to many of the activists, was leaving for Israel, and they would all be attending his farewell party the first week of August. There were ten representatives in all, two from every city. Soyma Dreizner was one of the two from the Leningrad organization. In addition to those from Riga and Moscow, there were Jews from Tbilisi, Kiev, Kharkov, and Minsk. With the exception of Leningrad, none of the cities had anything resembling a structured group. The only city that came close was Riga, where a samizdat committee had recently been set up to help facilitate distribution. But for the most part and with good reason, none of the others had any authority to make decisions. And this was the first point of contention as the activists sat beneath a tree in a park in the middle of Moscow. Dreizner thought that there should be a Soviet-wide organization, with a clear hierarchy, a charter, and dues, just as had been established in Leningrad. Everyone else objected. It would be reckless. It would hand the authorities the perfect premise for staging arrests: illegal organization.

They decided instead to remain a loose federation, meeting periodically, exchanging information, working on samizdat projects together, and encouraging open letters and petitions. Nothing more than that. They would call themselves the All-Union Coordinating Committee, referred to as the VKK, its acronym in Russian. After two days of meetings, most of them outdoors, and a goodbye party at the airport for Sasha Blank, the various representatives went back to their respective cities.

The second VKK gathering was in Riga three months later. Aron Shpilberg had recently moved there to be with his wife, and he, along with Boris Maftser, a tall, handsome student who had emerged as a charismatic leader among the younger activists, represented the city. They decided to put out a samizdat magazine. For three days they met in a dacha and worked out the details. It would be a journal intended to educate and interest Soviet Jews. Production would take place in Riga. A three-man editorial board with representatives from Riga, Leningrad, and Moscow would collect the material and meet in January to put together the final product. Maftser had a recommendation for the editorial board, a thoughtful young man who had the respect of people in the movement: Yosef Mendelevich.

This was exactly the kind of task Mendelevich was looking for. After being refused an exit visa and quitting school, he needed an outlet for his increasing nervous energy. He started work on what they'd decided to call
Iton
(the Hebrew word for "newspaper"), writing a few articles himself and collecting materials from others. At the same time he was developing another idea, collecting a list of all anti-Semitic incidents in the Soviet Union, a Jewish version of
Khronika.
He discussed it with Maftser, who was eager to make it a national project for the VKK and who also gave it the name Operation Pushkin,
Pushkin
being the code word for the Soviet Union in their frequent chats.

As their activities became more aggressive, the activists in Riga became more careful. They decided to divide into two groups, one that would be engaged in the open, public struggle, and another that would continue at a clandestine level. They needed to isolate those who were doing the work of preparing samizdat from those signing their names to petitions and making themselves known to the KGB. Group Aleph would be open, and Group Bet secret.

It was probably naive to think that the two groups could remain distinct from each other or that discipline could somehow be maintained over individuals who worked mostly independently. Mendelevich, being an editor of
Iton,
was told to remain in the clandestine group. His role was too important for him to be exposed. Mendelevich acquiesced but he was jealous of his friends who had gone public with their opposition. A major initiative of the VKK was to increase the number of signed open letters and petitions. In the fall of 1969, a number of collective letters, all written in Moscow with a similar style and making identical demands, were released in city after city. First came the letter from a group of twenty-five Jewish Muscovites, and shortly after a similar petition from twenty-two Riga activists addressed to U Thant, the secretary-general of the United Nations. Both the Moscow letter and the Riga letter made direct reference to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Mendelevich heard the Riga letter read on Kol Israel. Then he heard the names of those who had signed it, and he started shaking. These were his friends. People who had worked with him in Rumbuli, whom he'd known for years, with whom he'd produced samizdat and celebrated Jewish holidays. They were declaring their desire in the most public way possible. He wanted to be among them. It seemed pointless to remove himself from the open struggle for the sake of a job he felt anyone could do. He wanted to hear his own name read over the radio by an Israeli. Even though he knew it would make his journey more complicated and dangerous, the sound of it, pronounced in that guttural Middle Eastern voice, would make him feel that much closer to home.

T
HE REB SHLOMO CARLEBACH
had a few days to spare. It was the Sabbath before Purim in the spring of 1965, and the Jewish folksinger had just performed in Frankfurt. His next show wasn't for another four days, in Lyon, and he didn't like sitting still. So he decided to travel to Prague. His entourage tried to dissuade him, worried about the difficulty of entering a Communist bloc country, assuring him that without a visa he would be turned away. But Carlebach, in his typical style, said that God, in his all-embracing, all-knowing power, would guide him to his destination if that was where he was truly meant to go.

Already a recognizable Jewish celebrity—with his large smile, black beard, long hair, and rotund, energetic body—Carlebach would become known as the singing, dancing hippie rabbi, the Jewish answer to the culture of the 1960s. Almost every story of his eventful life had the flavor of the Hasidic tales he endlessly recounted, filled with mystical revelations, unexplained coincidences, and ecstatic crying. Like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Yaakov Birnbaum, Carlebach drew sustenance from the pure Hasidic tradition, which saw joy as the most direct form of religious observance. But more than either of them, he was this joy manifest. Carlebach onstage was a dynamo of energy and charisma, singing folk songs and prayers set to simple melodies that he'd composed; he performed with fervor to the point of collapse. He spoke in the language of the growing hippie movement (everyone was a holy brother or holy sister), but he combined it with a distinctly Old World
Yiddishkeit
from his childhood days studying in a Polish yeshiva. At performances, he would tell his young, excited audiences: "You know,
chevra
[friends], if everyone in the whole world would hold hands and love each other, I swear
mamesh
[truly] those hands would go straight up to heaven."

Carlebach's family, a famous German Jewish rabbinical dynasty, arrived in New York in 1939, just barely escaping the Nazis. Shlomo was fourteen. His father started a synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that became known as the Carlebach Shul, and Shlomo began his rabbinical studies. But it was an attraction to the Hasidic tradition that set him on his path. He began frequenting the headquarters of the Lubavitch rabbi, sometimes walking all the way from the Upper West Side to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the seat of the Lubavitchers, just so he could spend the Sabbath there. One day in 1949, Shlomo and a friend were summoned into the study of the elderly Lubavitcher rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneerson, and told to begin an outreach program for college students. Shlomo had been composing for piano, but he switched to guitar. Soon he was performing Jewish music and telling his Hasidic tales on campuses all over the country, and by the mid-1950s he had developed a following. In 1959, he produced an album that sounded like no other Jewish music that had come before it. Arranged by Harry Belafonte,
Haneshama Lach
(Songs of My Soul) was thoroughly American in its folksiness, but also distinctly Jewish. He performed at all the most popular folk venues—the Village Gate and Town Hall in New York—and was considered a kind of novelty act, a rabbi with a guitar who sang about love. His popularity among the folk crowd, many of whom (like Bob Dylan) had a suppressed Jewishness, climaxed in his appearance at the Berkeley Folk Festival in 1966. It was on this visit to San Francisco, observing the growing throngs of hippies crowding Haight-Ashbury, that he came up with the idea for a House of Love and Prayer, a kind of Jewish halfway house/ashram/yeshiva. He stayed in the Bay Area to start it up. This planted him firmly in the counterculture—unlike other Hasidic rabbis, his hair was long, he hugged women, and he saw his job as helping drug-addicted hippies—but he also became an unlikely bridge between Jewish tradition and the new American Jewish youth.

The story of how he came to write the anthem of the Soviet Jewry movement is infused with that same spirit of Jewish awakening. On the flight from Frankfurt to Prague in 1965, Carlebach decided to open his mail. In the stack was a letter from Yaakov Birnbaum. Shlomo had already appeared at a few small Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry protests, events consisting mostly of a handful of yeshiva boys loudly singing along to his guitar. Birnbaum had an idea. He wondered if Shlomo would consider writing a melody to accompany the ancient Jewish motto "Am Yisrael Chai" (the people of Israel live). As Carlebach was reading he noticed the man next to him peering over his shoulder. Realizing that the stationery read
Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry,
he quickly crumpled up the paper and went to the bathroom to flush it down the toilet.

Once Carlebach arrived in Prague, he charmed an emigration officer into giving him a visa by explaining that he was related to Yehuda Loew, the famous sixteenth-century chief rabbi of Prague. Every little boy in the city, Jewish or non-Jewish, knew Loew as the creator of the myth of the magical Golem of Prague. Carlebach even managed to convince the head of Prague's main synagogue, an annoyed Communist bureaucrat, to let him perform on Purim. That evening, a few dozen young Jews accompanied him to a small concert hall, arguing with him all the way about the superiority of the Communist system. The concert did not go well at first. Around midnight, after a few hours of singing, Carlebach felt he hadn't reached them. He got up on a table and said to them, "
Chevra,
I have to tell you, tonight is Purim night. Tonight we are not afraid of Haman, we are not afraid of anyone in the world. I am telling you there is only one thing in the world:
Uvnei yerushalayim, ir ha kodesh
" (rebuild Jerusalem, the holy city).