When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (35 page)

It was a major setback in the Soviets' ideological fight against Zionism. With the world watching, they were forced to admit they had gone too far. The international outcry had become unbearable, and on December 30, Generalissimo Franco had commuted the death sentences of the six Basque separatists; if the Soviets had insisted on carrying out their execution, their brutality would have stood in stark contrast to the clemency of the Fascists. As the
New York Times
put it in an editorial, "It is encouraging that the Kremlin has acknowledged the need for paying attention, in some cases at least, to the sensibilities of the civilized world."

In an attempt to divert attention from the Soviets' "Jewish problem," the trials of the twenty other Zionist activists arrested in the wake of the hijacking were postponed for weeks, and then months. Only in May did nine leaders of the Leningrad Zionist organization, the originators of the hijacking plot, finally take the stand. This time, the trial was kept as quiet as possible. Though officially public, it was closed to journalists. The KGB had succeeded in coercing a few of the defendants to cooperate. Some offered "confessions" that implicated the others. In the end, all were convicted on conspiracy charges, the main evidence being their attempt to contact Israel and get permission to carry out the first, larger hijacking plot. According to TASS, Hillel Butman, who along with his friends had pushed the hardest for dramatic action, was guilty of having "maintained illegal ties with the Government and Zionist circles in Israel." There was little evidence to link these Jews to the hijacking that was actually attempted. Their benign activities were largely portrayed as the acts of subversive malcontents. Still, the sentencing was harsh. Butman got ten years, the others only slightly less.

Later that May came the trial of the four Riga Jews, including Aron Shpilberg, the Leningrad-born activist who had moved to Latvia after his midlife circumcision, and Ruth Alexandrovich, whose case had been followed closely by Soviet Jewry activists in the West. The charges against them had nothing to do with the hijacking. Their crime was disseminating samizdat. Here too the trial turned ugly. At least one of the Riga activists, Boris Maftser, had been broken during the months of intense interrogation, and in an attempt to win leniency he now accused the others. In the end Shpilberg got four years and Alexandrovich and Maftser each received one—guilty, in TASS's phrasing, of "fabricating and circulating slanderous materials for subversive purposes and attempting to draw acquaintances and colleagues into activities hostile to the state." The last of the trials took place in Kishinev a month later and involved nine young students engaged in "Zionist activities." The case rested mostly on their having disassembled and transported an Era Duplicator copy machine from Kishinev to Leningrad, though they had never managed to make it work. All the defendants were found guilty. David Chernoglaz, the member of the Leningrad Zionist organization who had been against the hijacking, was also put on trial with this group. He received five years in prison.

Many of those already sentenced, like Kuznetsov, Dymshits, and Sylva Zalmanson, were kept at the Big House that entire spring so they could be used as witnesses in the other trials. But by early July, all those convicted—more than thirty activists—had begun their long journey east to be deposited at various labor camps in Mordvinia and the Ural Mountains. A whole generation of Zionist activists, the first to form a truly organized opposition, was about to be swallowed up by the Soviets' well-oiled penitentiary machine.

***

The fact that Kuznetsov and Dymshits had escaped death seemed concrete proof that the loud tactics so long decried by the Jewish establishment actually worked. It put to rest the question of
whether
to pressure. The battle now was over
how much.
The Israelis, in particular, were paying close attention. Nehemiah Levanon, who until 1970 had been the Washington representative of Lishkat Hakesher, had just succeeded Shaul Avigur as the head of the secret organization. Now working out of the Tel Aviv office, he still had the same vision. He wanted the American Jewish establishment to create a national organization, one with teeth, that would be focused solely on the Soviet Jewry issue. This had become an even more urgent objective if only because Levanon saw that his control of the movement's direction was being threatened—and not just by Kahane and his high-profile shenanigans. After he'd spent much of the sixties helping Moshe Decter encourage grass-roots activists to prod the establishment into action, Levanon now saw that a real alternative organization was being formed, one that might fulfill Levanon's goal of a serious national effort but that would be outside his authority, dictating its own strategy without Israel's guidance or foreign policy in mind.

The threat, of course, came from Cleveland. In April 1970 Lou Rosenblum, still at his job at NASA, had finally created what he called the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. It was a binding together of a half a dozen energetic local groups from cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Even though he feared his work at NASA would suffer, Rosenblum, with almost ten years of experience, was the expert on Soviet Jewry, and so he reluctantly became the group's first chairman. In his first memo to the six councils, he made it clear that the Union of Councils would embrace its role as "'loyal opposition' to spur the national Jewish organizations to greater activity," but he also made sure to emphasize: "We shall avoid guiding our policy or actions by the political exigencies of either the government of Israel or the United States."

Very soon, the Union of Councils was going where no one had gone before. Rosenblum began looking for what he called "people-to-people" opportunities, ways that American Jews could communicate with Soviet Jews, thereby humanizing the cause. It was a critical next step. If Yaakov Birnbaum provided the basic religious and civic tropes that informed every Soviet Jewry protest, then Lou Rosenblum's major contribution was increasing the points of contact between Soviet and American Jews, producing an essential intimacy between the two communities that fueled the movement.

Rosenblum had a list of seventy-five names and addresses of Soviet Jews who had gone public by signing petitions. He decided to get as many people as he could to send Passover cards to them. This modest plan became more elaborate when he managed to convince the head of the American Greeting Cards Company, who was Jewish, to mass-produce the cards at a discounted price. The Union of Councils sold packages that each contained five cards, five envelopes, and the names and addresses of five of the dissident families. The message on the cards was simple. In Russian, Yiddish, and English, it read: "Happy Passover. From the Jews of the USA to the Jews of the USSR—We have not forgotten you."

During that first spring of the Union of Councils' existence, it sold sixty thousand packages, mostly through the local councils and other groups—Student Struggle in New York ordered them by the box. And the initial correspondence often elicited further contact, with photographs sent back and forth, and letters in broken English telling the individual stories of jobs lost and bureaucratic headaches, and even giving coded messages about KGB interrogations. So successful was the program that Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah cards were made up, and they also sold by the tens of thousands. The income for the local councils was significant. The production cost of a package of five cards was twenty cents, and each packet was being sold for a dollar. So this brought in money to secure the independence of the new Union of Councils, providing funds for activities and helping to pay the telephone bills at Rosenblum's home office.

The first calls to the Soviet Union soon followed. Rosenblum had developed a crucial contact in Israel, Ann Shenkar, an American woman who had married a wealthy Israeli and lived in a suburb of Tel Aviv. She had taken it upon herself to become familiar with the community of Soviet Jews, most of them from Riga, who had emigrated in 1969. They were increasingly unhappy with the Israeli government's measured tone when it came to the Soviet Union. (Abba Eban, Israel's foreign minister, was annoyed by the outspoken new arrivals and had once publicly asked them to shut up, saying, "Recent immigrants are not the best people to carry this message forward because we don't want them to be the last.") Shenkar fed off this frustration, starting an activist group that, among other things, compiled lists of names, addresses, and phone numbers of their Soviet Jewish brethren, along with notes on who spoke English or French or German. This fit well with Rosenblum's commitment to independence, because by going through Shenkar, he avoided Levanon and the Lishka, who would surely have tried to control the calls. Rosenblum was soon dialing Moscow numbers from Cleveland and sending off contact lists to all the councils so they could make their own calls. Transatlantic connections to the Soviet Union went through two operators, one in New York and one in Moscow. But at the time, with the KGB largely unaware of the proliferating conversations—which in 1970 were mostly innocuous greetings and expressions of solidarity—the Moscow operators let the calls go through.

The effectiveness of people-to-people contact was clear. One conversation with a Jew in the Soviet Union who described the hardship of his life made an abstract issue exceedingly real. Heard over a crackling wire, an Old World Russian accent—which might remind an American Jew of his grandfather—did more for the cause than any policy paper or rally. Understanding this was Lou Rosenblum's genius.

At the end of 1970, still in the first year of his Union of Councils, Rosenblum invited a Soviet Jew who had managed to emigrate to Israel to come visit the United States. Lyuba Bershadskaya, a large, gold-toothed Muscovite woman who had lived a particularly difficult life, toured America in the winter of 1970. In synagogue after synagogue she told her story in her broken English: Stalin had sent her to the Siberian Gulag for ten years for the crime of having worked at the American embassy during World War II. It was there, in conversation with other imprisoned Zionists, that she discovered her Jewish identity, and from the moment of her release, in 1956, she tried to get out.

Rosenblum managed to recruit a writer to meet with Bershadskaya and dramatize her story for an American audience. Cynthia Ozick, a young novelist living in New Rochelle, whose first novel,
Trust,
had been published four years earlier, was then working on a book of short stories and raising her young daughter. She had reservations at first about taking the job, fears shared by other American Jews. Her father still had relatives in the Soviet Union, and she had grown up being told not to bring too much attention to them as it could only hurt them. As she wrote to Rosenblum: "All my life, from babyhood on, I've been trained (I'm sure that word isn't too strong) to be cautious.... The huge SHAH of my father's fear concerning his family in Russia descends on me like a cloud." In spite of this, she agreed to meet with Bershadskaya. "I'll be glad to do it; though trembling. Because there is nothing about Jews in Russia that doesn't make me tremble, from this old old old training in fear."

The resulting six-thousand-word account of Bershadskaya's life appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
in March 1971. Ozick insisted on publishing it under a pseudonym, Trudie Vocse. Three months after the Leningrad verdict, the article presented the character and voice of a Jew who had struggled against the regime. Ozick found a way to channel Bershadskaya and let her longing speak for itself. "The Six-Day War changed everything," she wrote in the Russian woman's voice. "Suddenly, you saw young men and women openly wearing the Star of David around their necks. People began coming to OVIR flaunting their Stars of David. And once I saw a man walking all around a huge square in Moscow, holding the hand of a little girl about 6 years old. Her dress was pinned all over with big Stars of David. He walked around and around the square, not going anywhere, just for everyone to see what was on the little girl's dress. A policeman chased him away finally.... We had stopped being afraid. We began fighting openly, we began to give our names and addresses. The silent time was over for us."

The Israelis were not happy with the way things were playing out in America. The grassroots activists, along with Kahane, seemed to be grabbing hold of the movement. The Israelis needed to reassert control. As Nehemiah Levanon saw it, it was the Lishka that had first given the issue life in the United States. Why should it cede power to people like Rosenblum—useful as he had been—when he now refused to listen to the Israelis or follow their orders? Protesting in a way that seemed too anti-Soviet or struck the wrong tone could jeopardize the whole movement. This wasn't a game for amateurs. After the victory of the Six-Day War, Israelis were filled with an almost biblical conviction that they had single-handedly ensured Jewish continuity, giving them the last word on all things Jewish. Unfortunately, the man Levanon chose to carry out the delicate mission of checking the grass roots while still harnessing their power turned out to be an uncompromising bully. Yoram Dinstein was an Israeli lawyer in his early thirties who had just received his doctorate from NYU. Rather than gently persuading activists like Rosenblum to do what he wanted, he almost immediately declared war on them.

Lou Rosenblum had never had a good feeling about Dinstein. On a car ride to the Cleveland airport in March 1970—they had both just attended a regional Soviet Jewry conference—Dinstein had threatened him. "You people are doing everything you can to destroy the Soviet Jewry movement," he said as the car neared the airport. "What are you talking about?" Rosenblum asked him. "I hear that you're starting a new organization. It's no secret. But if you go ahead with this, I'll see to it that you are destroyed—all of you." Rosenblum, amazed that Dinstein would menace him so publicly, simply said, "Yoram, shut up!" And they drove the rest of the way in silence.