When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (38 page)

Kahane emerged from the courthouse with a large smile on his face. His young JDL followers had already crowded the steps and were dancing the hora and singing. They lifted him onto their shoulders and bounced him around triumphantly. With a wide-collared white shirt open at the neck, and his supporters pumping their fists into the air around him, he looked carefree and energized. "I want you to know that I can't talk about guns. But I want you all to have this," Kahane said, making his hand into a pistol and shooting imaginary bullets into the air. He was defiant, already determined to violate the terms of his probation even as the judge sat in his chambers. "Our campaign motto will be 'Every Jew a .22,'" he shouted to the cheering crowd. "I didn't ask for mercy. I cannot compromise my principles with expediency. Some time or other, there is no other way than violence. I am not against the use of violence if necessary."

Kahane's days in America were numbered. A handful of other cases against him were still pending, and despite his loud rhetoric, he knew that if he wanted to stay out of jail and in the public eye, he'd have to leave the country. He had always planned on moving to Israel. The dream of his life, after all, was to one day become the prime minister of the Jewish State. He couldn't do that from a basement office in Brooklyn. With pressure mounting, now was as good a time as any. On a humid September morning, a caravan of cars accompanied Kahane to JFK Airport. He gave a brief press conference, announcing that he was moving his family to Jerusalem, where he would establish a world headquarters for the JDL, and that he would split his time between the United States and Israel. His plane taxied to the runway, and JDL boys ran with it along the airline terminal's balcony, which was festooned with the flags of the world; the boys cheered and sang and ripped off any flag that had a hammer and sickle or an Islamic crescent. Kahane's departure, however, did not guarantee his silence. Just a week later, when he received word that Sylva Zalmanson, still in a prison camp, was ill, suffering from tuberculosis and ulcers, he told a reporter in Israel, "If anything happens to Sylva Zalmanson or another Jew, Soviet diplomats throughout the world will be open targets for every Jewish militant. Two Soviets for every Jew!"

But without a full-time leader, the JDL in New York devolved into a gang of angry and undisciplined young men and their girlfriends, aimless and still primed for violence. At the same time, the administration was even more determined to put an end to their activities. An internal FBI review of Kahane's book
Never Again
called his ideas "un-American, nationalistic, and extremely dangerous." George Bush, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was particularly eager to subdue Kahane's followers. At the end of October, four shots were fired from the roof of nearby Hunter College into an eleventh-floor window of the Soviet mission. The room that was hit was in a diplomat's residence where four children were sleeping. Amazingly, the children weren't injured, but it raised the anger of the Soviets to an unprecedented level. An overweight, mustachioed eighteen-year-old JDL member, Isaac Jaroslawicz, was taken into custody. He seemed an unlikely assassin. On the weekends, he performed magic tricks at birthday parties in Borough Park under the name Izzini. A friend of Yossi Klein's told him that Jaroslawicz was not the gunman, just the fall guy for a new, more violent cell within the JDL. He was released within a few weeks.

The reaction at the United Nations was fierce. There were "chaotic floor debates of rare bitterness," according to one paper, at one point leading to a "virtual breakdown in the [General] Assembly's proceedings." The Soviet ambassador even engaged the Israeli ambassador Yosef Tekoah in a yelling match about the superiority of Communism to Zionism. "It was the Soviet Union, not Zionism or the Jewish people, who had concluded a treaty with Hitler and von Ribbentrop!" Tekoah screamed back, his voice shaking with emotion. Eventually the Arab ambassadors got involved also, with the representative of Saudi Arabia blaming Mayor Lindsay for the attack because he'd failed to provide enough security for delegates in the city. "Who is responsible?" he asked and then responded to his own question: "The politicians—the mayor, who goes to synagogues and acts like a rabbi to obtain Jewish votes."

George Bush was tired of constantly apologizing to the Soviets. Kahane was back in New York protesting outside the United Nations when Bush spotted him one day. He called Kahane a "madman," and told him, "You have damaged your country's cause, the cause of Soviet Jews and the name of American Jewry." Kahane moved closer and tried to strike a conciliatory pose. "Well, I came here for a dialogue," he told Bush. "I don't want to see you," the ambassador shot back. There was real pressure from the government to stop the JDL from undermining détente. A confidential memo from the State Department to the FBI around this time warned "that further incidents of [JDL] violence would have a damaging impact on our overall relations with the USSR." A month after the shooting, in late November, Bush convened a high-level meeting in his apartment at the Waldorf Astoria with officials from the Justice Department, the Secret Service, and the FBI to try to figure out how to deal with the problem of the JDL. But the JDL would soon implode without any outside help.

Sol Hurok, the last of the New York impresarios, stepped out of his car and into his Midtown office at nine thirty on the morning of January 26, 1972. Practically a New York institution, Hurok had been putting up money for European artists to tour America ever since World War I, when his concerts had filled the New York Hippodrome on Sundays. He'd discovered Marian Anderson in 1935 and represented Arthur Rubinstein throughout most of his career. With his gold- or silver-headed cane (depending on the occasion), horn-rimmed glasses, and black slouch hat, Hurok could be seen and heard at the back of concert halls most nights. Over the years his Sol Hurok Presents had become particularly well known for its Soviet acts. Even during chilly periods in the Cold War, Hurok, born Solomon Isaievich in a town not far from Kharkov, found a way to get Soviet performers into the United States. From the Kirov to the Igor Moiseyev Ballet Company, Hurok knew them all and took delight in the company of testy ballerinas and musicians. The pinnacle of his career came in 1959 when he finally brought over the Bolshoi Ballet (something he would do three more times over the next decade) and rented a three-room suite for the prima ballerina Galina Ulanova, filling its refrigerator with caviar and champagne.

For Kahane, there was no greater domestic enemy than Hurok. Speaking at a press conference at the Overseas Press Club in February of 1970, just as he was gaining attention, Kahane described Hurok as a modern-day Shylock, a man "whose appetite for profits leads him to abandon his obligations as a human and his loyalties as a Jew." In the past year, hardly a single Soviet performer had mounted a stage without some JDL-organized incident. That winter, to Hurok's great disappointment, the Kremlin canceled a planned tour by the Bolshoi.

But Hurok was in a good mood that January morning, swathed in a large brown fur coat with a Russian fur hat on his head, his cane tapping the ground in front of him. The night before, Vladimir Ashkenazy, the famous young pianist, had performed at Carnegie Hall. The son of a Jewish father who had defected to England in the early 1960s, Ashkenazy had protested on behalf of Soviet Jews and had elicited a JDL promise not to disrupt the evening with bottles of ammonia or scurrying mice.

A few minutes after Hurok arrived at his office on the twentieth floor, two young men walked into the office's reception area, one of them carrying a suitcase. They asked about tickets to a performance by a dance group from Kiev, sat down, placed the suitcase on the floor, got up, and left. A few seconds later, a small incendiary bomb in the suitcase went off, igniting a purplish flare and setting a nearby couch on fire. The heat of the blast was so strong that all the typewriters in the reception area melted, and the nails holding up framed photos of Russian performers bent in two. The area quickly filled with thick black smoke. The fourteen people in the office, including Hurok, a few secretaries, and some maintenance workers, began running in a panic toward the back rooms, but this only trapped them. Soon black plumes engulfed the entire floor. One of the men ran to Hurok's office, grabbed a chair, and smashed the window that looked out on the Avenue of the Americas. He started screaming for help into the cold morning air. Hurok lay on the floor, still in his furs. In the next room, three secretaries huddled together on the ground trying to escape the smoke. They too tried to break a window but weren't strong enough to shatter it. Crying and frightened, they all passed out within minutes. Afterward, lying in a bed in Roosevelt Hospital, one of the secretaries, Myra Armstrong, described the panic: "We were scared stiff. Smoke was coming in the ventilators. Virginia said, 'It's all right; somebody will come for us.' Iris was real frightened. I can't remember what she said, but she was absolutely still after a while."

Iris was Iris Kones, a twenty-seven-year-old Jewish secretary from Long Island. After the firefighters arrived and put out the flames with water cannons, she was discovered lying dead on the office floor. Thirteen people required hospitalization, including Hurok. He was carried out on a chair with his fur hat still on his head, his brown coat spread across him and pulled up over his nose, only his horn-rimmed glasses showing.

The attack on Hurok's office was one of two that took place simultaneously that morning (the other, at Columbia Artists Management, injured no one). In phone calls an hour later to a few news services the words
Never again!
were yelled. Kahane, in Jerusalem, claimed he had nothing to do with the attack. And maybe he didn't. But he had inveighed against Hurok for years, painting him as an enemy of the Jewish people. And it was Kahane who promoted a culture of violence in the JDL. It had only been a matter of time before something like this happened. Reached by phone in Israel, he sounded sincerely shocked that a Jewish woman had died. "I think the people who did this are insane," he said. "What else can I say?"

The news that an innocent woman had been killed and that Kahane was responsible—however indirectly—shook many people in the Jewish community, some of whom had looked at JDL members as mischief-makers but not murderers. A
New York Times
editorial grouped the Hurok bombing with other recent JDL actions and wrote that "these firebombings fit a terrible pattern of mad violence that has shown no regard for innocent life, a violence wholly alien to every decent impulse." The FBI and the city's police began a massive operation to find the bombers. Even Yossi Klein, at home in Borough Park and only peripherally connected to the more violent elements in the group, received a visit from two FBI agents.

For days after the bombing, the papers were full of stories that painted the JDL and Kahane as responsible for the death of Iris Kones. As if this publicity weren't bad enough, Yevgeny Yevtushenko happened to be in New York during the bombing and announced that he was going to write a poem about it. The Russian poet, whose "Babi Yar" had brought international attention to the issue of Soviet anti-Semitism, was about to depart on a cross-country tour. The Soviet leadership had continued to indulge his occasional dissent because he generally toed the line. When he'd heard about the explosion, Yevtushenko saw an opportunity to please the KGB minders who were accompanying him on his trip. He asked to see Hurok's office so he could observe the damage firsthand. That afternoon, the blond-haired, high-cheekboned Yevtushenko walked solemnly through the soot-covered rooms. At one point he stopped to clear the ash off a black-and-white photo of Feodor Chaliapin, a Russian singer and the first performer Hurok had brought to America, nearly fifty years before. It was after this twenty-minute visit that Yevtushenko told the press, through his translator, that a poem about the incident was slowly writing itself in his mind.

The following night, Yevtushenko was slated to give a reading at Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. It was sold out, with five thousand people in attendance. Eugene McCarthy, once again a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was present to read his own poetry; Allen Ginsberg and James Dickey were there, and both read translations of Yevtushenko's work. The Russian himself appeared on the stage in blue jeans and a turtleneck and stood framed by a white spotlight. He told the audience that before he read from his published work, he wanted to recite a poem he had written the night before, dedicated to Iris Kones. He said it was a poem protesting those who were trying to prevent cultural exchange. He unfolded a page that had been stuffed into his pocket and read the title, "Bombs for Balalaikas":

Poor Iris,
victim of the age,
you've fallen,
fragile,
dark-eyed
Jewish girl suffocated by smoke,
as though in a Nazi gas chamber.
It's hard to vent out poisoned air.
...
Damn you, servants of hell
who seek coexistence between peoples
by building bridges of cadavers.

The poem, which was published in
Izvestia
days later, went on to describe the Hurok offices as having the "stench of Auschwitz." It was at this moment, when a Soviet poet effectively used Kahane's own Holocaust rhetoric against him, that the rabbi lost all credibility—and along with it, the power to dictate the direction of the Soviet Jewry movement in America.

The JDL became increasingly irrelevant and dysfunctional. Kahane took fewer trips to the United States, choosing to focus instead on his other obsession: ejecting the Palestinian Arab population from greater Israel. Within a year of the bombing, he had resigned his position as head of the American branch of the Jewish Defense League. The young people he had left behind still managed to make news occasionally with their exploits. Before dropping out of the JDL altogether, Yossi Klein took part in an especially elaborate protest: in April of 1973 he flew to Moscow with seven other young militants and tried to chain himself to an OVIR office. The protest ended uneventfully when, after briefly arresting them, the KGB simply encouraged Yossi and his friends to rejoin their tour group.