When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (37 page)

Then on January 8, another pipe bomb exploded—this time at the Soviet cultural building in Washington, D.C. No one was hurt, but it was powerful enough to shatter all the windows and hurl an iron gate two hundred and fifty feet. "We do not condemn the act—nor did we do it," Kahane told the press the next day. "The applause for the bombing in Washington comes from imprisoned Soviet Jewry. The commuting of the death sentence was but a skirmish in a war of liberation. We call upon the people of the world to join that war."

The FBI went into panic mode. The elderly and increasingly paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, then nearing the end of his thirty-fifth year as director, personally reviewed every one of Kahane's utterances. Most of the daily reports on the rabbi were provided by the many young informers in the JDL, one of whom was described as "a 'hippie' type individual ... sloppy in appearance and discourteous in manner."Much of the material given was absurd, and yet it was treated with the utmost urgency. A typical memo received by Hoover on January 15, 1971, from the bureau's New York City field office contained this ominous piece of information: "Kahane has seriously discussed capturing a Soviet city. His intent is to secure germs of a virulent disease from a hospital or bacteriologist, grow a sufficient amount of these germs, and then smuggle them to a Soviet city. He will then threaten to contaminate the city unless the Soviets allow Jews to emigrate to Israel. Source advised that the problem of securing the germs and growing them is relatively simple for any bacteriologist. However the details of getting them into the Soviet Union have not been worked out."

No statement by Kahane was too trivial to investigate. When he told a group of his followers in January that they should target Leonard Bernstein in retaliation for his hosting of a Black Panther fundraiser (immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book
Radical Chic),
the news quickly made its way to Hoover himself. Apparently, Kahane had said he was planning to go to the New York composer's Park Avenue duplex and "take over the entire building, sit in it, and see how much pressure Bernstein can take."

In one week, Kahane's antics managed to shatter the general goodwill that had recently come to characterize Soviet-American relations. The
New York Times,
in its Week in Review section, described the two countries as entering a "nasty phase" and foresaw no less than the end of détente. "It is impossible to predict how far the present unpleasantness will go or what its full impact on Soviet-American relations will be," the
Times
article concluded. "But already it is putting a damper on the plans of Americans thinking of visiting the Soviet Union as tourists or businessmen. And the possibility exists that Moscow could choose to use the tension on this issue as a means or an excuse to end or postpone the Soviet-American SALT negotiations looking towards strategic arms limitations."

At the beginning of 1971, détente was an explicit goal of both the United States and the Soviet Union. And Kahane was turning out to be its biggest enemy. The FBI and the Justice Department were instructed by the White House to find a way, any way, to silence him. Kahane's FBI files—where he is referred to at one point as a "Yiddish Frantz Fanon"—are filled with requests from Kissinger and the State Department to prioritize the prosecution of Kahane. The attorney general issued an order for a wiretap of the JDL offices and Kahane's home. One telegrammed message from the Los Angeles FBI office to Hoover pointed out that Kahane had told his followers they could get tax deductions for their JDL contributions; the agent wondered if this minor breach of federal tax law could be a potential avenue for indictment.

Kahane basked in the attention and cared only that his name and his cause appeared day after day on page one of every national paper in America as well as on the smudged copies of
Pravda
and
Izvestia
pinned to bulletin boards on the streets of Moscow. When Charles Yost, the American ambassador to the United Nations, met with him in private to demand that he call off the harassment campaign, Kahane took it as a sign his plan was working. He played with the press, at one point announcing an "indefinite moratorium." He had been convinced by "people in government and major Jewish groups" to put a leash on his young troops for a "reasonable period of time." But this too was a stunt. Two weeks later, in early February, Yossi Klein and his friends were hanging out in front of the mission with signs that had the word
pig
written in Russian. And worse—bricks were thrown through the windows of Aeroflot and Intourist. So successful was the harassment campaign that Kahane moved on to targeting American companies engaged in trade with the Soviet Union, setting up a hot line run out of an office above a porn theater in Times Square that would supply the names of a thousand guilty firms.

In March of 1971, Kahane pulled off his most dramatic move yet. In almost all of his speeches, he asked why the older generation of American Jews hadn't done anything to stop the Holocaust. Even the slogan Never Again was a rebuke. One of the ways he dramatized the point was by speculating what would have happened if Jews in the 1940s had sat down in the streets of Washington and refused to move until the concentration camps had been bombed. Kahane decided to use most of the JDL's budget for just such a demonstration. He rented a fleet of buses, and on the morning of March 21, a group of more than a thousand young people, mostly from the outer boroughs of New York, headed to the capital.

Yossi Klein and his sister Chani were among the protesters; they left in a chartered bus that took them from Borough Park straight to the Ellipse in front of the White House. The weather was good, a day of sun and wind, and the mood was exuberant. About thirteen hundred people showed up, far fewer than the thousands predicted by Kahane, but it didn't seem to matter. They began marching toward the Soviet embassy, and at the intersection nearest the building, Kahane turned on his megaphone: "I'm asking you to do today what Jews didn't do while the gas chambers were burning. Sit down in the streets of Washington." And they sat. Kahane had assured DC police that this would be a nonviolent protest. The cops would tap the protesters on the shoulder and they would calmly stand up and be arrested. There was not much confrontation. In fact, it felt to Yossi more like a party. One of his friends had brought along his guitar and was playing Grateful Dead songs. When Yossi's turn came to be arrested, he asked the officer how he could get a copy of his mug shot. He was escorted onto a waiting bus with barred windows. There his friends were all banging on the roof and singing together, "One, two, three, four, open up the iron door! Five, six, seven, eight, let my people emigrate!" They all spent a few hours in jail, paid their ten-dollar fines, and were back home in Brooklyn by evening. The protest was a success, though there was some discrepancy in reported arrests—Kahane claimed twelve hundred and newspaper accounts said eight hundred. Either way, it was the largest mass arrest in the capital in American history, at least until the May Day protests a few weeks later, when ten thousand people were arrested in their attempt to shut down the federal government over the Vietnam War.

For Kahane, the Washington demonstration was more than just a publicity stunt. It was proof of a new wave of Jewish youth. Here were Jews who were not afraid to do something risky for their own people and go to jail for a Jewish cause. It was the fulfillment of Kahane's Jabotinskyite dream. He later wrote about the day: "What marked March 21, 1971, as so different was that instead of being arrested for Vietnam, Angola, Chicanos, Blacks, Indians, or Eskimos, for the first time, huge numbers of young Jews were beginning to look at themselves not with self-hate or disinterest but with pride and self-respect. From a period of time when young Jews looked at themselves and asked, 'Who am I?' and answered either: 'I don't know,' or, worse, 'I don't care,' we had moved to thousands of young Jews marching off to jail after looking at themselves in the mirror and saying 'I am a Jew and I am beautiful. I am a Jew and Jewish is beautiful. I am a Jew and I give a Jewish damn.'"

If Kahane had stuck with nonviolent civil disobedience, he might have continued for a long time as the de facto leader of Soviet Jewry in America. Certainly no one else was providing Jews with their own brand of identity politics or matching his flair for publicity. But he truly believed that violence had its place as well.

On April 22, a group of tough Jewish teenagers from Queens placed bombs on the nineteenth and twentieth floors of the building containing Amtorg, the corporation dealing with Soviet-American trade. The first blast, which came a little after five thirty in the evening, was so powerful it collapsed the ceiling, blew out doors and windows, ripped through part of the concrete stairwell, destroyed some office chairs, and lit the carpet on fire. Miraculously, no one was injured. Kahane sat calmly in his office at JDL headquarters. After news of the first explosion was announced, he raised two fingers in a V-for-victory sign. He knew there was another bomb.

The police were able to take apart the second device in time. It was the largest JDL bomb yet (packed dynamite as opposed to a pipe bomb), and the government was not willing to wait and see what would happen next. On May 12, ten NYPD officers and agents of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division of the Treasury Department raided the two Midtown JDL offices. After arresting twelve JDL members, they tracked Kahane down and took him into custody. He was charged with violating the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968 by illegally purchasing firearms and setting off explosives without obtaining a federal permit or paying the necessary taxes.

Kahane insisted that whatever remained in the JDL coffers be used to bail out the young JDL members first. Sitting in the federal house of detention that night, he was truly worried for the first time. Kahane had been arrested before, but only for small infractions. This was bigger. He needed a good lawyer, and he made a call that evening to Barry Slotnick, a defense attorney famous for taking on high-profile criminal cases. That night, Slotnick happened to be having dinner with one of his most infamous clients: Joe Colombo. The boss of the notorious Colombo crime family, this barrel-chested, greasy-haired gangster had spent his early years as a hit man. In 1970, beset by legal problems, he had come up with an ingenious cover, consistent with the spirit of the times. He started the Italian-American Civil Liberties League, a group whose purpose was to defend the reputation of Italian Americans against a legal system that was allegedly biased. The league picketed the FBI, claiming that it unfairly targeted Italian Americans. Colombo had even held a recent league fundraiser at Madison Square Garden featuring Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. Over dinner, Barry Slotnick told Colombo about his new client Kahane. The mob boss, impressed with the rabbi's willingness to stay in jail and aware that a radical rabbi might make for a good ally, decided to put up the twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail himself.

The next day, on the courthouse steps, Kahane proclaimed his allegiance to Colombo. Standing next to him in a brown trench coat, Colombo told the press that Kahane was "a man of God and his cause is just." The rabbi, he said, was "fighting for his people in Russia and we're fighting for our people here." Asked how he could justify the coalition, Kahane replied, "It's a human brotherhood. People of other faiths and backgrounds have come to help. It's the kind of thing which, had it been blacks helping Jews, it would have drawn raves. The Italians are no worse than the blacks."

It was a bizarre partnership and one that alienated many of Kahane's followers. It was hard to understand why he would taint the purity of his mission. For the next two months, Kahane could be seen eating with Colombo at his favorite deli on the Lower East Side, and JDL members joined the Italian pride pickets in front of the FBI. Kahane and Colombo even participated in a golf tournament together on Long Island. Kahane's reasons for embracing the Mafia seemed weak. He never denied that it was a marriage of convenience, but he mistakenly thought there was no need for further justification. Yossi Klein was disappointed. A few months earlier, Kahane's former double life as Michael King had been exposed on the front page of the
New York Times,
including information about his affair with Estelle Donna Evans and his role in her suicide. This had bothered Yossi, but he had accepted the JDL line that the article was just a smear, proof that those respectable Jewish Irvings were simply threatened by Kahane's growing power. Now he began to wonder whether Kahane was nothing more than a talented self-promoter.

At the end of June, two months after the joining of the Jewish and Italian leagues, Colombo was shot in the head at an Italian-American Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle; it left him brain-dead and paralyzed. Kahane was soon back in court facing federal indictments. But the case that might have put him away for a few years—as Nixon and Mayor Lindsay had both hoped—ended up giving him his final triumph. After a few weeks in court, the government was forced to settle. Part of the evidence against Kahane was based on illegal wiretaps, and therefore—like the rest of the material collected on radical leftist groups through the bureau's infamous
COINTELPRO
program—it was inadmissible in court. Ten of the thirteen defendants would get off free. Kahane and two others pleaded guilty, but their firearms charges were dropped once they revealed the location of the stockpile.

All that remained was the matter of the pipe bombs set off at the Catskills camp. Kahane commanded the courtroom on the day of his sentencing. He defended his tactics, claiming that everything he had done was for the good of the Jewish people. The judge, though, wanted him and his two teenage codefendants to know that their ends did not justify their means: "While these three defendants may believe themselves to be in a superior moral position, so far as the law is concerned, when they use guns and bombs illegally they are not readily distinguishable from the Weathermen or Black Panthers on the left or the Ku Klux Klan on the right. Those groups too use terror to encourage a way of life that their members, in good faith no doubt, think needs to be encouraged and protected." The judge—Jack Weinstein—went further, lecturing Kahane on his own turf. "In this country, at this time, it is not permissible to substitute the bomb for the book as the symbol of Jewish manhood." The sentence, however, was surprisingly light. Kahane had to pay a five-thousand-dollar fine. There was also a five-year jail term, but it would be suspended as long as Kahane abided by the judge's specific conditions: he could have nothing to do with guns, bombs, dynamite, gunpowder, fuses, Molotov cocktails, clubs, or other weapons.