When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (69 page)

Lein was tried a few months later. Some eighty participants in the seminar pushed their way into the courtroom and were allowed to observe; several of them even wore yarmulkes. Representatives of the U.S. consulate in Leningrad were there as well. An American student present recorded the chaotic scene in a letter: "At last a door opened and a stampede ensued. I was pushed in the direction of the opening. I had no control over where I was being shoved ... Our body heat, combined with the cramped seating, made the courtroom extremely hot. I remember one very large man. His head rested against the wall, sweat poured down his face." Lein was accused of assaulting one of the policemen who had raided the seminar. In the end, he was given a relatively light punishment: instead of going to prison, he would spend two years in Siberia doing manual labor. As he stood up to hear his sentence, a few refuseniks outside the courtroom managed to take a photo through the window. With his eyes closed and his long goatee, flanked by uniformed guards more than twice his size, he had the beatific look of a Roman martyr on his way to the stake.

The Leningrad refuseniks, like those in Moscow, tried to go on. Keeping alive the seminar in some form became a cause in itself. One young refusenik insisted on finding a way. Misha Beizer, heavily bearded and with large square glasses, had always been interested in history. But in the Soviet Union, the humanities were dangerous for Jews. The direction of research and even an academic's findings could be affected by the whims of the state. So Jews tended to stay away from these subjects. Beizer, like so many other Jews, studied physics and mathematics instead. In college, when he first started to be curious about Israel, he made superficial contact with the early Leningrad Zionist circle. But it wasn't until the end of the 1970s, when people he knew, including his ex-wife and son, began emigrating, that he himself risked applying. He was refused in the summer of 1980 and soon joined the seminar, eventually becoming a regular lecturer. Beizer studied the few available history books so that he could teach others. His specialty was the Jewish history of Leningrad. And his new idea was to take the lectures outside and turn them into walking tours of the city.

Without access to archives or other reference material, Beizer conducted his own historical research, slowly building an encyclopedic knowledge of the Jewish presence in the city. He looked in old address books from the turn of the century, interviewed older people, rummaged through personal libraries. It was a desire for historical resuscitation that the Riga Jews who had excavated the mass graves at Rumbuli would have understood. And this is how Beizer built his tour. One stop, for example, was the home of the attorney who defended Mendel Beilis in the infamous blood libel case of 1913. Beizer looked up his name, Gruzenberg, in the address book and found his building intact. In this way, he found the homes of other famous Jews and the locations of old Jewish societies from before the revolution. The tours consisted of small groups of people who spent hours trudging around the city, often through thick snow, listening to Beizer as he pointed out the significant locations and slowly explained the history. The popularity of the tours grew week by week, and soon Beizer had as many as two dozen people at a time following him and his large fur hat. It wasn't long before KGB agents joined the tours also. They scared people off. And Beizer had no interest in creating an opportunity for mass arrest.

In mid-1982, he stopped acting as a guide, preferring instead to write up his notes in samizdat form so that anyone who wanted could take a self-guided tour (a version was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, translated by Michael Sherbourne in London, and published). Beizer continued his historical research, meeting clandestinely every two weeks with a few other academically minded refuseniks to share the material they were uncovering. Eventually this work produced a scholarly journal, the
Leningradsky Evreisky Almanakh
(Leningrad Jewish Almanac), similar in some ways to the defunct
Jews in the USSR.
The first issue, a collection of research articles, came out in September 1982; it was produced and distributed entirely underground.

One of the more active Leningrad refuseniks, Yakov Gorodezky, a witness at Lein's trial who had led an effort to collect evidence in his defense, tried to continue the seminars in some other form. He decided to legally register the group with the local Communist Party authorities as the "Leningrad Society for Study of Jewish Culture." More than fifty young participants, many of them students, signed a petition. One by one, they were asked to appear at the Communist Party offices of their respective jobs and universities and pressured to remove their names. Gorodezky himself was physically threatened at the Leningrad KGB headquarters, and he resigned from the head of the group. In 1983, the seminar ceased to exist. Even this harmless attempt at reviving cultural awareness among the smallest cross-section of Leningrad elite was perceived as a threat.

The war against Jewish culture blazed through every corner of the Soviet Union. Even in cities far from Moscow, where all that existed was a handful of active refuseniks and maybe a feeble attempt at Hebrew classes, the KGB hammered away with renewed ferocity. The Ukraine was particularly brutal. Nearly half a million Jews inhabited Odessa, Kharkov, and Kiev, places where anti-Semitism was deeply rooted. Jews there had always known that it was simply too dangerous to replicate the movements of Moscow and Leningrad. But even those few refuseniks who had attempted to organize some smaller-scale Jewish activities were harassed or imprisoned. In Kiev, the central figure of the small Jewish underground, a nuclear physicist, was put into a psychiatric ward and later arrested for allegedly being drunk in public and beating up an old woman. Another well-known refusenik was charged with parasitism.

The dramatic drop in emigration had the greatest effect on Jews living far from the capital. Thousands had applied in 1979 when emigration numbers were on the rise, and a majority of them had been refused, thrown out of their jobs, and ostracized. Now they were telling stories of being attacked in the street. "Most often the beatings are at night, when no one is around," an anonymous refusenik told an AP reporter. On the Jewish New Year in the fall of 1981, a group of five Jews on their way to lay a wreath at Babi Yar, the ravine where tens of thousands were killed during the war, was stopped at the Kiev train station and given fifteen-day detentions. In Kharkov in 1980, a resilient group of refuseniks tried to start an informal Jewish university, giving older refuseniks fired from their jobs a chance to help young refuseniks thrown out of school. Classes covered scientific subjects as well as Jewish tradition and Hebrew. An entire year passed without incident but just before the fall semester was to begin, one of the main organizers, Alexander Paritsky, was arrested. He was sentenced to three years in a prison camp for slandering the Soviet state. From Leningrad to Kiev, the KGB managed to extinguish any hope that Jewish life could find expression on Soviet soil.

Ida Nudel and her collie, Pizer, returned from Siberian exile in March of 1982. She found in Moscow a demoralized and depressed community of refuseniks. Everything was more dangerous now, more difficult. With fewer people receiving permission to leave, the number of refuseniks had climbed into the thousands, but they were mostly a scared and passive group. The sit-down protests and demonstrations of the 1970s were inconceivable.

Ida experienced this new more oppressive atmosphere when she tried to simply register for a
propiska,
a residence permit. Most ex-convicts were not allowed to live within a hundred kilometers of a major city. This restriction did not apply to exiles; still, Ida was told by the local police that there was an order forbidding her to live in Moscow. She tried everything, refusing to let herself be squeezed out by an unforgiving bureaucracy. She even resorted to calling a high Soviet official with whom she had struck up a strange relationship in the years before her exile. Albert Ivanov was the deputy director of the administrative department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Ida had gotten his number from Dina Beilin in 1973 and was told that he could sometimes be sympathetic. Ivanov, strangely, was willing to take her calls, to listen to her rant and complain about the conditions her adopted prisoners were forced to endure. She told him about what the KGB was doing and the reaction in the West. Something close to a friendship developed, teasing, often tense, but sometimes warm. In five years, they had never met, though Ivanov told Ida he had seen her in the protests he watched through his window. When the troubles with her
propiska
began, in 1982, she called him for help. His voice sounded twenty years older than when they had last spoken, defeated and tired. He could do nothing for her. What followed were months of wandering. No local authorities seemed willing to register her. She went to Riga, where the father of the Zalmansons tried to help her. She had people check with the local authorities in a town in Estonia, and then in Tbilisi. No one would take her. And without a
propiska
stamp in her internal passport she was vulnerable to arrest. Finally, a few refusenik families in a Moldovan town called Bendery helped her register and find a home. Half a year had passed. It was already the fall of 1982. The cold had set in. The move to Bendery ended her months as an internal refugee, but it also inaugurated a new hardship, a continuation of her life in exile—far away from her friends in Moscow.

The bleakness that Ida Nudel discovered in what remained of her old Moscow circle was partly due to the death of Alexander Lerner's wife, Judith, the previous year. The Lerner home had long been the center of refusenik activity, one of those relatively safe islands in that Moscow archipelago. Lerner, the now aging cyberneticist, had been in refusal for more than ten years, and Judith had played the role of nurturing matriarch for the younger activists. At the funeral, she was buried in a metal box inside a wooden coffin. This way, the body could be exhumed more easily if Lerner, hoping against all reason, got permission to leave. His wife could be reburied in Israel.

With the freeze on emigration and the silencing of all political and cultural expression, very few outlets remained for those refuseniks still willing to fight. Many of them simply returned to the quiet, basic building blocks of their activism. Ever since the earliest phases of the movement, Hebrew had been seen as the gateway to Jewish identity. Language provided access to culture. The Hebrew learner felt instantly connected to a long tradition, to the language of the Bible, and to the country where Hebrew was now spoken, Israel. The one constant activity that ran beneath the ups and downs of political engagement was the teaching of Hebrew, which went on in dozens of apartments throughout Moscow and Leningrad. Instructional books like
Elef Millim
(A Thousand Words) were the most reproduced materials in samizdat. A small group of respected teachers, mostly unharmed in the 1970s, organized summer retreats and instructed cells of four or five Hebrew students; those few people trained several new cadres of others, and these others went on to train many more, a pyramid-like system. In Moscow, Yuli Kosharovsky, a refusenik who had been waiting for a visa since 1971, was at the top of this pyramid. He taught the teachers.

Toward the end of the 1970s, with prominent refuseniks losing energy or simply not around anymore, Kosharovsky became one of the most important leaders of the movement. He moved to Moscow from the city of Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, where he'd been relentlessly harassed, and he eventually began organizing Hebrew classes. Kosharovsky was one of the Lishka's main contacts in the Soviet Union. Israel trusted his judgment and increasingly chose to act through him. Communication with the Tel Aviv office was a convoluted and clandestine process. Well-briefed tourists would come with instructions and a secret sign to indicate that they represented Israel and should be given priority. They would bring the latest message or policy directive; Kosharovsky would load them down with requests—funds for the wife of a prisoner who needed financial help, a copy of a specific book he wanted to reproduce—and give them information and updated lists of refuseniks. It helped that Kosharovsky was a staunch Zionist and that his objectives lined up perfectly with Israel's—a tight focus on emigration and Jewish culture, and the avoidance of activity that might be perceived as anti-Soviet. Early on in his life as an activist, Kosharovsky had hit on the idea of using Hebrew teaching as a form of outreach. He was trying to widen the circle of aspiring emigrants. Hebrew classes provided a structure, a framework for bringing people together, a goal for them to work toward, and a relatively safe way to introduce Zionist concepts. He also saw the classes as a way to suss out people who were not committed or who could be informing for the KGB. Only those students who advanced to a certain level gained his trust and were allowed to deal with more sensitive operations, such as reproducing books or starting up new classes.

In 1979, Kosharovsky became even more ambitious. He began sending his teachers on missions to parts of the Soviet Union that contained Jewish populations but had almost no Jewish activity. These emissaries set up Hebrew classes in the hopes that new teachers would emerge to continue the lessons after the original instructors moved on to the next city. Everyone went to great lengths to make sure these activities went undetected. Kosharovsky himself would take his students high into the Caucasus Mountains in the summers to set up camp and study together. Other teachers went on hiking tours or lived together in unheated dachas. In a short time, a whole Hebrew teaching network had developed. Kosharovsky largely stepped back from the day-to-day planning, leaving three former students—the Kholmiansky brothers, Sasha and Mikhail, and Yuli Edelstein—to divide up the whole Soviet Union and focus on developing cells in all the cities where Jews lived. Meanwhile Kosharovsky built a kind of superstructure and invited all these new teachers to Moscow in the summer of 1979 for the first intercity seminar. The following year, he had fifty-six teachers from eight different cities come for a month of intensive Hebrew.