When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (21 page)

With that he began dancing wildly, his black hair sticking to his sweaty round face. And the young people began dancing too, and soon they began crying. Before he knew it, it was after four in the morning, and many of them had come up to him and put their heads on his shoulder to weep.

At dawn, he found himself with some of the group back in his hotel room, and he wrapped his phylacteries around the arm and forehead of each boy, one after the other. When he was alone again, he felt so moved by the transformation he had witnessed that he grabbed his guitar and began working on the task Birnbaum had assigned him, a new "Am Yisrael Chai." He decided that one more phrase was needed, and he remembered the story of Joseph from the Bible. When Joseph's brothers discovered him in Egypt, where he was a prosperous adviser to the pharaoh, the first thing Joseph said to them was "
Od aveinu chai?
" (Is our father alive?) Shlomo added the affirmative answer to this—Our father
is
alive—as a refrain, and within minutes he had composed the song and sung it into his tape recorder. His version had the rhythm of an assertive battle cry, of a military chant; each word was belted out slow and strong and then repeated again and again.
The people of Israel live.
He left Prague that night, and within a few weeks he was in New York again, playing "Am Yisrael Chai" for the first time to a rapturous audience; their fists pounded the air with so much enthusiasm, it seemed to Shlomo that they themselves had pulled the song out of him.

By 1965, Carlebach had become the centerpiece of an increasing number of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry rallies and his "Am Yisrael Chai" its quintessential anthem, distilling perfectly all the emotions that were motivating the young, mostly yarmulke-wearing ranks of Yaakov Birnbaum's growing army. The group still worked mostly out of Birnbaum's apartment in New York and survived off the dollar bills collected from the small membership dues and from selling SSSJ buttons at rallies. Birnbaum himself was obsessively driven; he was draining his savings and subsisting mostly on cans of Heinz beans, and his apartment was a jumble of stencils and cardboard, leaflets and books on Russian Jewry. Birnbaum's strategy had been to provide a steady drumbeat, to keep poking again and again at both the Soviets and the American Jewish establishment, trying to force them to take more serious action. And the students had responded. In the year and a half following the first protest, in May of 1964, they had organized more than thirty increasingly elaborate public demonstrations.

His pace was frantic. In the first issue of
S.O.S. Russian Jewry,
a mimeographed newsletter put out two months after the group's inaugural protest, he wrote, "Ever since the days of its inception, the SSSJ has been a dynamic movement. For a number of us, a 2o-hour day has been the norm; the necessity of action compels us not to stop.... What we must now do is work, and work must be done by all, whether in the cities or at camps: work at our headquarters, lecture, talk, argue, persuade, write, organize, everything—everything to ultimately educate the American public to the shocking situation of Russian Jewry."

It was during this prolific period that the American movement's distinctive character came into focus, and it was largely shaped by Birnbaum.

He wanted it to be Jewish. The cause would be helped, he thought, if the act of protesting looked and felt like religious devotion. He linked demonstrations to Jewish holidays, beginning with the Jericho March around Passover 1965 in which he loaded Jewish symbol upon Jewish symbol. On Sunday morning, April 4, on the block of Sixty-seventh Street just west of the Soviet mission to the United Nations, a couple of thousand young people carrying hand-stenciled signs with slogans like
WHY ARE MATZOS SUBVERSIVE?
and
HISTORY SHALL NOT REPEAT
(each one seen and approved by Birnbaum) were arranged into two distinct columns. Between the columns marched seven men carrying Torah scrolls, and behind them seven rabbis, all wrapped in fringed blue and white prayer shawls and carrying shofars. Two rabbis read out Hebrew psalms as the procession walked by, and when the seven rabbis reached the edge of the police barrier that had been set up, at the closest point to the mission, the shofars were blown seven times, the high-pitched wails bouncing off the red-brick townhouses of the Upper East Side. Standing directly behind the rabbis and their shofars on that brisk spring day was Birnbaum, supervising from his commanding height, dressed in a dark suit and fedora.

The shofars, the choosing of a date near Passover for the protest, the Torahs, the singing of Isaiah's prophecies, the prayer shawls, even the biblically significant number seven—Birnbaum had used it all to turn the protest into a religious pageant. Following the blowing of the shofars—meant to echo the trumpets that brought down Jericho—the crowd marched to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, across the street from the United Nations, where Shlomo Carlebach, his shirt open and his jewelry jangling, mounted the stage and led the crowd for the first time in "Am Yisrael Chai."

All of Birnbaum's demonstrations received extensive press, with most news organizations reporting on the activities as profound acts of religious witnessing, in much the same way that the voter registration battles down south and the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery were depicted. On April 4, the eleven o'clock news on WNBC reported, "The sound of ceremonial rams' horns echoed against the walls of the Soviet mission on Manhattan's East Sixty-seventh Street as two thousand Jews conducted Operation Jericho to protest Soviet anti-Semitism. However the walls of the mission did not come tumbling down." In December of 1965, the Menorah March was reported by ABC News this way: "A group that uses as its motto 'I am my brother's keeper' marched in protest today against the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry used the ancient holiday of Hanukkah to stage their protest march. They carried a ten-foot menorah, the traditional symbol of the Jewish Maccabees, who fought for their religious freedom against the Syrians in the year 165
B.C.
"

Yossi Klein was only in sixth grade when he came upon Glenn Richter, dressed in his usual outfit of green trench coat and peddler cap, standing on a street corner in Klein's neighborhood of Borough Park. Richter was handing out leaflets and making puns to anyone who would listen ("I
am
my brother's keeper! Or is it my kipper's brother?"). Klein was the sensitive son of a Holocaust survivor, and he had posters of Jabotinsky and Bob Dylan on his bedroom wall. He listened intently to Richter's spiel, and soon this engaging jokester dubbed him the Borough Park Elementary School Chairman of SSSJ and promptly loaded his arms with boxes of leaflets. Some had images of Soviet anti-Semitic cartoons, others had facts and figures about synagogue closures and economic crimes. On top of the leaflets Richter placed a box of buttons and stickers. "Don't call us," he told Klein. "We'll call you."

For a boy like Klein, although he was much younger than most of the SSSJ student activists, the chance to participate, to be engaged, at a time when everyone seemed to be marching for one cause or another was elevating. Birnbaum and Richter made it a point to treat the students, even those in sixth grade, like adults, giving them responsibilities and a sense of their own integral importance to no less lofty a goal than saving three million of their brethren. Klein soon found himself in his first SSSJ rally, the Menorah March of 1965. A procession of a thousand students snaked across Central Park from the West Side of Manhattan to the East on the freezing night of December 19. Led by a team of four strong young men lifting a two-hundred-pound lead-pipe menorah, the marchers each carried a flashlight covered in red cellophane and sang the Hebrew words of Isaiah's prophecy: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation and shall study war no more." Later that night, Klein excitedly watched the coverage of the rally on the evening news and was thrilled to see his own face, tucked between earmuffs and a visor, in the long line of protesters.

The Holocaust continued to be a motivating factor, one that only grew in significance as the genocide slowly began to take its place at the center of American Jewish identity. In the early and mid-1960s, and especially following the Eichmann trial, talk of what had happened during the war became more widespread and normalized. New history books began the work of detailing the final solution, and even popular culture took the first steps toward depicting the Holocaust. In December of 1965, the same month as the Menorah March,
Hadassah
magazine ran a feature on SSSJ in which it described the Holocaust as the motivating factor behind the group's activism: "The Soviet Jewry protest campaign has captured the imagination of youth to whom the Nazi disaster represents not simply an historical fact but a pressing reminder of the need for Jewish brotherly concern. Fate prevented these students from being alive in the 1930s and early 1940s and they are determined that this horror, in any of its manifestations, not be repeated in their generation. As such, the effort to save Soviet Jewry represents a new focal point for Jewish identification—in addition to traditional religious and Zionist organizations."

Yeshiva students were not the only ones at the Student Struggle rallies. Young secular Jews looking for a cause and a stronger sense of Jewish identity were attracted to them as well. This was 1965, the tipping point of the civil rights movement. Images of protest were everywhere. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was also made up of two neat columns of well-dressed young people singing religious hymns and asking for liberation. For most Jewish students, ending segregation was a much more immediate and urgent cause than Soviet Jewry. But Birnbaum knew that appropriating for his protests the same language and the same set of gestures as the civil rights movement used made his cause seem equally worthy of sacrifice.

Even as he encouraged a Jewish character, Birnbaum consciously piggybacked on the general spirit of the times. Though painfully less evocative than "We Shall Overcome," the opus of protest songs Birnbaum commissioned and collected during this period were nevertheless his movement's own. "There's a Fire Burning" was a typical example:

There's a fire burning brightly in the sky
And the roar of thunder crashing from on high,
I see a nation there awakening
Iron yokes will soon be breaking,
And a nation long oppressed shall arise—
A nation long oppressed shall arise.

A trumpet rings through the night,
The dawn appears—we see the light,
We wake the world, we make them see
That our people must be free.

Freedom's train is racing swiftly through the land
swiftly through the land
And the tide of love is
pounding on the sand,
I can hear the whole world crying
For a nation that's been dying,
It will soon hold out its helping hand,
It will soon hold out its helping hand.

What was most striking about the fervor of those students who trudged through Central Park in the cold night following a gargantuan menorah is how little they knew about the actual "plight of the Soviet Jew," as they referred to their cause. Soviet Jews themselves were still unseen and unheard. So the passion and activity of these young American Jews was largely self-motivated and self-directed. The reaction to all their activity from the other side of the iron curtain was silence. Before 1967, before there was a Kochubievsky and a Kazakov and the letter of the Georgian Jews, there was no image in the minds of these students to correspond with the people they were defending. The problem was understood as a theoretical one and expressed mostly in cold facts and figures: How many synagogues had been closed down? What proportion of economic crimes had been blamed on Jews? Was matzo readily available? When was the last book in Yiddish published?

When Moshe Decter, the man working secretly for the Israeli Lishka, spoke to a group of SSSJ students on November 1, 1964, at the West Side Jewish Community Center, the extent of this disconnect was palpable. After spending most of the four-hour session recounting Russian Jewish history going back to czarist times, he opened the floor to questions. "When did you make your most recent trip to the Soviet Union?" one student asked. Decter was sitting next to Yaakov Birnbaum; both men wore beatnik goatees. Decter lit a cigarette, adjusted his black horn-rimmed glasses, and answered, "I've never been there."

Another student wanted to know if there was any evidence the Soviet Jews actually cared about being Jews, whether they were fearful or just apathetic. He preempted Decter's prepared answer about the large yearly Simchat Torah celebrations. "Beyond the Simchat Torah?" Decter asked. "Well, that is a fact. I wouldn't snipe at that fact," he barked harshly. "It happens every year. There are people perhaps better informed than I on this particular facet who can perhaps tell you of the large numbers—I don't know what numbers there are and I doubt if even the better informed people know what numbers there are, but large numbers—of young people who, with self-sacrifice, endangering their freedom and maybe even their lives, are engaged in the study of the traditional Jewish texts, secretly."

But this fuzziness about what Soviet Jews themselves desired did not stop Decter from presenting the students with an exalted vision of their own responsibility. "What can we do?" he asked them.

Well, we can do the kind of thing that we're doing. You are providing a stimulus to Jewish public opinion. Only when Jewish public opinion in this country becomes totally aroused, and acts on this question daily in every conceivable way, dramatic and undramatic ... and there are hundreds of things that can be dreamed up to do, responsibly and based on factuality and dignity and self-respect, to demand, to insist, to appeal, in two different directions, one to the Soviet government and one to our own government. Our hope, I think we can rest assured, is that we will do no harm. Our hope is that the Soviets may be sufficiently sensitive that they may succumb to the pressure of world opinion and the insistence of our own government, if we can ever achieve that, that they modify their policies sufficiently.