When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (71 page)

The propaganda onslaught gained force through the spring and climaxed with the inaugural press conference of the committee on June 6, a day chosen to coincide with the first anniversary of Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Dragunsky was in uniform, his chest covered in medals. Next to him was the other major voice of the committee, also a longtime "official" Jew, Samuel Zivs, a sixty-one-year-old jurist at the Institute of State and Law and a Party ideologue. After explaining that the committee had been formed in order to aid "the political unmasking of Zionism," the eight founding members, all Jews with no connection to Jewish life, insisted that emigration had ended because Jews no longer wanted to go to Israel. The few Western reporters present kept hammering this point. The answer, given by Zivs, was based on a lie. He maintained the "basic motivation" for emigration was "family reunification" and that "those who want to leave have left the country." He completely absolved the government of any role in the fluctuation of emigration. Jews simply didn't want to leave anymore. That was it. Those who did had simply succumbed "to Zionist lures" and were "victims of Zionist propaganda," the very force the new committee would combat. Western activists immediately responded to this claim, citing the four hundred thousand invitations that had been sent from Israel over the years and the list of more than ten thousand known refuseniks.

David Dragunsky used the conference to draw parallels between Zionism and Nazism, a longtime staple of Soviet anti-Semitism. Referring to the Lebanon war, he said, "The past year has made perfectly clear that Zionism is increasingly modeled on the ideas and methods of Hitler." No matter how preposterous this sounded to outside ears, the committee clearly thought it was a winning argument since it was soon amplified in a state-sanctioned book. Lev Korneyev's
The Class Essence of Zionism
made any earlier anti-Semitic Soviet book, such as
Judaism Without Embellishment,
seem mild by comparison. Zionists, in his telling, had actually collaborated with the Nazis in mass executions. Billing himself as an expert on Zionism, Korneyev argued that the Jewish people since ancient times had had "profit [as] their ideology" and could not be trusted. Jews in fact constituted "a fifth column in any country." Soviet citizens were told to beware. All sales of Levi's jeans on the black market went straight into the pocket of "Zionist militarists." The book was released in a press run of ten thousand copies and reviewed positively in
Izvestia
and
Sovetskaya Kultura.
Korneyev was given a platform: his articles appeared in literary journals and even in a newspaper for children,
Pionerskaya Pravda,
in which he warned young Communists to beware of Zionists who were trying to turn loyal citizens into "traitors."

The fact that Andropov was behind such a public attack on Jews demoralized the refuseniks tremendously. Even though they understood that some of this bluster was directed at the Soviets' Arab allies—propaganda red meat to assure them of continued Soviet support—the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee was not a joke. It had a fourteen-person staff, thirty-seven members, and a smaller presidium, including Dragunsky and Zivs, who acted as chairman and first deputy, respectively. It also included some big players in Soviet media, like the deputy editor of the Novosti publishing house and the head of a section in the influential weekly
Literaturnaya Gazeta.
And the plans were ambitious. They wanted to open up municipal branches in each Soviet republic, starting with Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, and, of course, Birobidzhan. The committee would fund plays, films, and works of art, and even create a new state prize in the field of anti-Zionism.

This was the public face of the assault, and by no means just a pose. It was at the center of a renewed attack on all Jewish activists. No longer were they simply "hooligans" or "anti-social elements." Now they were portrayed as a dangerous, subversive force that had to be eradicated. Just before Yosef Begun was finally brought to trial in the fall of 1983, after nearly a year spent in Vladimir Prison, the new head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, prepared a brief for the Central Committee. In it, he explained the charges against Begun and what the long investigation had revealed. More than any other previous case, Begun's seemed to rest simply on his Hebrew teaching. Since this was not officially a crime, the teaching was presented as a front, a way to recruit innocent Soviet citizens into acting against the state. "In the course of the investigation, it was established that Begun, as a result of his hostile attitude toward the socialist order, adopted an active anti-Soviet line," the report began. "Under cover of distributing textbooks for the study of Hebrew (Ivrit) and 'bringing Jews into contact' with their 'national culture,' Begun illegally prepared anti-Soviet literature and other materials containing slanderous fabrications defaming the Soviet state and special order. He distributed these slanderous materials prepared by himself and by his accomplices in the Soviet USSR and transferred them abroad for use in subversive activity against the Soviet state, compromising the social order and political system of the USSR and deceiving and disorienting world opinion."

When the evidence was presented in the Vladimir courtroom, the "slanderous fabrications" consisted of nothing more than a few pages written by Begun about the need to support Hebrew teaching and Jewish culture. It seems the most accurate part of Chebrikov's memo was the bit about Begun "deceiving and disorienting world opinion." For this, and surely to send another message to the refusenik community, Begun was given the maximum sentence of seven years in a labor camp followed by five years of exile. Andropov might have had a thing for American music, but he was no closet liberal. His takeover of the leadership simply extended the power of the KGB and made an already harsh environment for the activists even worse.

Strangely, even during these black days, one subset of refuseniks had found a way to thrive: the small group of Jews who had discovered Orthodoxy.

For the most part, the intellectuals and scientists who became activists in the sixties and the seventies never embraced the religious life. Except for the enthusiastic celebration of a few holidays, like a Passover Seder or the swirling, dancing parties of Simchat Torah, the refuseniks saw their return to Jewish identity in mostly cultural terms. They were drawn to the secular Zionism of Israel, in which Judaism's highlights were plucked. Few engaged in the hard work of observing the Sabbath or wearing a yarmulke, let alone keeping kosher. This was much like the Judaism practiced by the overwhelming majority of American Jews. The refuseniks fought for an identity that allowed them full knowledge of their history, the freedom to learn their own ancient language and to practice whatever form of the religion they chose. Even
kulturniki
like Volodya Prestin and Pasha Abramovich, who had always argued vehemently for cultural and religious outreach to the greater Soviet Jewish population, didn't demand more than this. To reclaim some form of Jewish identity in the face of a Soviet society that denigrated any kind of spirituality was already a kind of achievement. To take the next step and abide by the strictures of Halakah, Jewish law, demanded an internal revolution that no one—or almost no one—was willing to undertake.

But then there was Ilya Essas. As a young graduate student in mathematics at Vilnius University, Essas got his first glimpse of positive Jewishness from old prerevolutionary books he discovered on library shelves, like Heinrich Graetz's encyclopedic nineteenth-century Jewish history. In Moscow in the early 1970s, Essas linked up with other refuseniks and began learning Hebrew. But unlike them, he discovered that his hunger for Jewish culture was not sated with a copy of
Exodus.
He wanted more. The only Jewish tradition he saw that could possibly rival the rich Russian one of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky was contained in the ancient books, the Torah and the tomes of commentary that had accumulated over the centuries. It was very clear to him that only this rich, religious culture could form the basis of a new identity. But where to even begin? In 1972, in preparation for Nixon's first visit to Moscow, the authorities allowed the city's Great Choral Synagogue to open a yeshiva in a show of religious tolerance. Essas signed up to be one of the first pupils but on day one realized that he was practically the only sentient person in the room. The rest of the students included a hand ful of senile old men and a mentally disabled teenager. But the teacher was authentic, an elder of the community who had studied Torah in his boyhood before the revolution. He put a
chumash,
a bound version of the Torah, into Essas's hands. It was a revelation. Even though he could hardly understand the ancient Hebrew, he knew that this would be his way. He quickly took to the study of the biblical text. When his teacher suffered a heart attack three months later, Essas began leading the weekly discussion of the Torah portion attended by five of the white-bearded men who frequented the synagogue.

Essas's time at the yeshiva, and the yeshiva itself, didn't last very long. In early 1974, he applied and was refused an exit visa on the grounds that his wife, an engineer who had three years earlier worked at a government construction office, had once held a high-level security clearance. He was soon banned from the synagogue by the nominal head of the Jewish community in Moscow, a man who, like the chief rabbi, took his orders from the KGB. But this did not stop Essas, now a full refusenik. Losing his place in Soviet society only intensified his pursuit of a spiritual life. The cultural parties at Ovrazhki and the intellectual camaraderie of other refuseniks were not enough. He wanted a new worldview, one that only religiosity could provide. What did it mean to be Jewish, he wondered, if he did not fully accept all the rules, follow God's tenets completely?

Essas's new piousness turned him into a singular figure among the refuseniks, a group whose taste and sensibility were not much different than the rest of the beleaguered Russian intelligentsia's. He grew a long beard and began wearing a black beret, a way of covering his head that, unlike a yarmulke, would not draw attention. He stopped working on the Sabbath and began keeping kosher as best he could. In a total vacuum, and without realizing it, he was becoming part of a small but vibrant worldwide movement:
baal teshuva
(meaning "one who has returned"). In the 1970s, completely secular Jews in the West were suddenly turning to Orthodoxy; many joined various Hasidic sects, especially the Lubavitchers, who had set up an ambitious international outreach arm known as Chabad. Essas's transformation, a man in his early thirties suddenly becoming a Torah-abiding Jew, would not have been unusual in New York or Tel Aviv. But in Moscow, he was largely on his own, and even the other refuseniks thought him extreme. They felt his new Orthodoxy was a judgment of their own secularism. But it was actually a sign of healthy diversification—something organically Jewish was growing in Moscow, even under worsening conditions. If Soviet Jews were going to be a normal community like any other in the world, why shouldn't there be at least one person representing the most devout end of the spectrum?

In 1977, Essas began teaching Torah classes in his apartment to groups no bigger than a dozen students. He was trying to single-hand-edly raise the spiritual level and biblical literacy of the community. As he told a
Baltimore Sun
reporter in the winter of 1979: "The spiritual life of Jews in the Soviet Union is non-existent. We have only one ideology. You can believe it or not. For a young Jew, it is natural for him to turn to his own background, to find out about his own religion. And a Jew cannot know his background without knowing Hebrew. It is the principal thing in Judaism. No translation can give you the knowledge. It can only give you the smell."

In early 1980, as the rest of the community was feeling the effects of the latest crackdown, Essas's enterprise really started taking off. He had managed to assemble a group of young men, most just out of their teens, who were eager to embrace a religious life. Together they studied, just as in the
cheders
(elementary schools) of Eastern European Jewish past, all crowded around a poorly duplicated page of Talmud. Essas, the eldest, was only in his early thirties but he tried to project confidence; he established a method that he thought might pull these atheists from darkness toward light. One of his idiosyncratic rules was that there would be no discussion of God's existence in the first few weeks of classes. "Right now, you are not equipped with the ideas or the terms to discuss this question with me. For the next two months, assume that there is an almighty guiding us. After two months of learning Torah, feel free to ask." The classes had a format. In the first half, Essas taught that week's Torah portion, and in the second half he instructed his students on some elementary aspect of Jewish practice—how to wrap phylacteries, the guidelines for keeping kosher, wedding rituals.

The network of young religious families grew, and Essas needed to set up an infrastructure that would enable them to live a Jewish life. Before this resurgence, the kosher needs of the handful of elderly men at the synagogue had been met with one piece of livestock a month that was slaughtered outside of Moscow and then carved up and distributed in the street behind the synagogue by one old
shochet,
the ritual slaughterer. But now there were more than a hundred people who needed meat. A network was set up to provide it. In Leningrad, a refusenik named Yitzchak Kogan had also become a
baal teshuva,
and he had made contacts with Chabad. He had taught himself how to be a
shochet
and was soon slaughtering animals at home, smoking the meat, and then sending it as sausages to Moscow. Since meat was difficult to attain, Essas had made contact with a local fish-packaging plant and instructed a few of the workers in how to pick out certain fish, like carp, that could be blessed as kosher. Eventually, the workers became familiar with the Jewish calendar and put aside hundreds of pounds of fish during the times of year, like Rosh Hashanah, that they knew Essas would come calling.