When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (75 page)

They call me Anatole.
In prison I do lie,
My little window looks out
On a Russian sky.
I've been arrested here for crimes they have not named
But all my people know
The charges will be a frame....

We are leaving Mother Russia,
We have waited far too long.
We are leaving Mother Russia,
When they come for us we'll be gone.

There was no shortage of people who wanted to cradle Avital Shcharansky. But in America, she found a defender—and more important, a fundraiser—who had his own reasons for making Shcharansky the center of his activism. Avi Weiss was a bearish, bearded, sometimes combative man with a domineering presence. From the same Flatbush streets as Kahane and also the son of a rabbi but born a generation later, Weiss was a teacher at Stern College—Yeshiva University's women's school—and the leader of a successful modern Orthodox congregation in the Bronx community of Riverdale. He saw himself as not only a religious leader but also an activist for the Jewish people; he was devoted to the notion of turning his pulpit into a spearhead of social engagement. On his good days, he followed in the tradition of Abraham Joshua Heschel, practicing as few others did a life of spiritual witness. On his bad days, though, he could be just as self-promoting as Kahane (though Weiss lacked Kahane's violent streak) and with the same penchant for flashy public action that drew as much attention to himself as to his cause.

It was at one of these public displays, in the fall of 1982, that he first met Avital Shcharansky. In solidarity with Shcharansky, who was on a hunger strike because his correspondence privileges had been taken away, Weiss had decided to begin a fast in front of the Soviet mission in Manhattan. Weiss set himself up on a bench on the corner of Sixty-seventh Street and Third Avenue. Subsisting on mineral water alone, by the second day, the thirty-eight-year-old rabbi could hardly take the physical and mental strain. He hallucinated that KGB spies were peering out the mission's window and that FBI agents were snapping photos of him and the small group of friends that stood around him. To make matters worse, newspapers did not seem to care that one rabbi was publicly fasting in Midtown. He couldn't get a single journalist interested in the story. His sense of persecution was heightened when none of the establishment organizations endorsed his action, and the rabbi at the synagogue across the street—which had often been forcibly occupied by Kahane and his JDL boys in their New York heyday—denied him permission to take breaks inside the building. Even Weiss's wife begged him not to fast; it would exacerbate his heart problems. But he continued for a week, convinced that Shcharansky represented the heart and soul of the Soviet Jewry movement. If he could bring even a bit of attention to his plight, he would have succeeded. He lost seventeen pounds and got the chance to write an op-ed in the
New York Times,
in which he claimed he now had a spiritual kinship with Shcharansky, a glimpse into what his daily life must feel like, an "emptiness" full of "deep meaning." His conclusion, which he must have meant for himself as well: "The Shcharanskys, in fighting for human rights, lead full lives."

Avital visited Weiss on the fourth day of his weeklong hunger strike. It was the beginning of a close collaboration. He decided then that he needed to increase his Soviet Jewry activism even more and that an intense focus on Shcharansky's case would be the way to do it. He pledged to help Avital and her religious handlers fundraise so that she could continue her intrepid traveling and speaking—an expensive proposition, given the airfare and hotel stays, even with the amount of support she was receiving. Soon, Weiss became a kind of unofficial North American liaison for the international campaign out of Jerusalem. He arranged for small groups of people to have conversations with Avital in living rooms all over America and Canada. They had an effective script. Avital would quietly give the latest update on Tolya, talk about her despair, sometimes weep softly. And then Weiss would ask for contributions. In this way, he raised tens of thousands of dollars for the campaign. And he became particularly close to Avital. Weiss thought of them as having a pure love, like a brother and sister. But he was also aware that the more they traveled together, the more it looked like a romantic affair.

A few months after his fast, in early 1983, Weiss became the national chairman of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. The organization started by Yaakov Birnbaum in the early 1960s was floundering. Its protest style had been co-opted long ago by larger and more influential American Jewish organizations, and its activist philosophy was identical to that of the Union of Councils, a group that now had fifty thousand members in more than three dozen local councils, lobbyists in Washington, and an impressive budget. But besides its style and goals being overtaken by larger groups—a fact that deeply aggravated the aging and often sick Birnbaum—Student Struggle suffered the fate of many youth movements that had been powered in the 1960s and 1970s by a combination of youthful idealism and identity politics. These forces had dimmed. A rugged individualism had returned to American culture during the 1980s—fueled by an economic resurgence that began in 1983 and a president who romanticized and reinforced (through tax cuts) the lives of families and hard-working individuals while he demonized government and ignored the needs of minorities and the poor. The Jewish world was turning inward. Small groups of families disdained what they saw as the impersonal synagogue and gathered together in
chavurahs,
friendship circles, to pray, socialize, and create community on a small, human scale. Jewish power, for all its growing muscle, had largely left the streets of New York and was concentrated now in the corridors of Capitol Hill. Even Birnbaum, organizer of the first Soviet Jewry protest and many thereafter, had become far more occupied with the counterpart adult group he had set up, the Center for Russian Jewry, which focused on research and lobbying in Washington. But the fact that Student Struggle's mission had become mainstream did not discourage its die-hard activist core; it just made them hungrier for greater agitation. Weiss brought his charisma to the group and helped give it a second life. He worked with Glenn Richter, Birnbaum's quirky trench-coat-wearing lieutenant who had been at the center of the group's day-to-day activities for the past twenty years. Richter earned no more than a few thousand dollars a year to supplement his wife's teacher's salary, and yet amazingly he was just as indefatigable as the college kid he had been when he first started protesting.

In 1985, Avital Shcharansky and hard-liners like Weiss and the Student Struggle saw Gorbachev's rise as an opportunity to press their point. If engagement with the West was the Soviets' new tack, the activists' job would be to illustrate in clear terms what the nonnegotiable price of that engagement was. Avital intensified her public appearances and meetings with world leaders; Weiss initiated what he called Operation Redemption. He convinced groups of rabbis to let themselves be arrested in a series of civil disobedience actions. The first took place in early January to coincide with the opening of the Shultz-Gromyko arms limitation talks in Geneva. Together with five other rabbis, Weiss took over the Rockefeller Center offices of TASS, a regular target of the JDL fifteen years before. It had been a long time since TASS had been bothered like this. Weiss and the rabbis, all wearing fringed prayer shawls, demonstrated in the office in front of the dismayed Russian employees for an hour and a half before the police arrived. They chanted "Free Shcharansky" and "Am Yisrael Chai." One rabbi kept blowing a shofar.

Weiss saw the publicity potential of arrested rabbis and aimed for an even bigger protest. He and Lynn Singer—the intense Long Island housewife who had just ended her tenure as president of the Union of Councils—gathered rabbis for an unprecedented mass demonstration. So popular was his call that even the large New York umbrella organization responsible for the annual Solidarity Sunday rallies—the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, recently renamed the Coalition to Free Soviet Jewry—decided to help with recruiting. On the afternoon of March 5, more than a hundred rabbis sat down on Sixty-seventh Street in front of the Soviet mission, blocking traffic. The protesters included the most respected rabbis in the city from each of the major denominations. Weiss spoke to the group, hammering hard the idea of linkage: "To the Soviets, we proclaim: You seek trade; we dream freedom. You seek dollars; we search for human dignity. You seek technology; we demand Jewish emigration."

The day was a triumph for Weiss. He had tapped into a feeling of anxiousness that a coming détente might leave the Soviet Jews behind. Paradoxically, the possibility of change only pushed the activists further in the direction of extreme rhetoric and tactics. Weiss liked to tell a story about Avital. He had seen her at a rally at the end of 1982, shortly after Brezhnev's death. Usually much more understated, she'd fired up the crowd by saying, "Brezhnev did not free my husband, and that is why he died. I am warning Andropov that if doesn't free my husband, he too will die!" Weiss took her aside afterward and told her he thought the line didn't work, that it was over the top. But once Andropov died, she brought it up again. "I told Andropov that if he didn't free my Anatoly he would die, and now he is dead," she intoned. "Now, I'm giving the same warning to Chernenko; he too will die if he doesn't let Anatoly go." Weiss warned her once more that she might have gotten lucky with Andropov, but it was foolish to make such pronouncements. When Chernenko died, Weiss just stood by dumbfounded at another rally when she made the same remarks again, this time about the new Soviet leader Gorbachev.

The fourteenth iteration of Solidarity Sunday—in 1985 —felt different. The form hadn't changed—the same march down Fifth Avenue, the same long queue of politicians standing behind loudmouthed Mayor Ed Koch, eager to follow him and wave their clenched fists at the Soviet Union. But this year, the Holocaust loomed larger than usual. That same day, Reagan was in West Germany commemorating the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day by laying a wreath at Bitburg military cemetery, where the bodies of forty-nine members of Hitler's Waf-fen-SS were buried. Reagan's insistence on visiting Bitburg had become an embarrassing fiasco and led, as one newspaper put it, to much "sorrow and dismay" on the part of the Jewish community. The president had accepted German chancellor Helmut Kohl's invitation before knowing about the SS remains. But to avoid looking like he was giving in to pressure—and to support Kohl, who histrionically claimed his government would collapse if Reagan didn't show up—Reagan decided not to renege. Coincidentally, on April 19, two weeks before the trip and at the emotional height of the crisis, Elie Wiesel was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal at a White House ceremony. With the president sitting a few feet away, the episode captured on television, Wiesel pleaded with Reagan not to go. "That place, Mr. President, is not your place," he told him, his voice breaking. "Your place is with the victims of the SS."

The reaction of the American Jewish community was revealing. Commemoration of the Holocaust now played a central role in American Jewish identity. A look at the budget priorities of any Jewish community would have told the story. No city was complete without a monument. Jimmy Carter had approved a Holocaust Commission that was now building a giant museum on the National Mall to memorialize the Jewish genocide. Elie Wiesel was the commission's chairman. This consciousness pervaded the general culture. Ever since the spring of 1978, when the blockbuster television miniseries
Holocaust
had aired, drawing an astounding 120 million viewers, new films and books had been appearing constantly. So the wreath laying was not just an affront to historical memory; it was a negation of what mattered most to American Jews. Bitburg also exposed the political power and moral authority that had been wrung from this history. Who else but Elie Wiesel could have publicly wagged a finger in Reagan's face? At the suggestion of his advisers and George Shultz—who seemed better attuned to the Jewish community than any one else in the administration—before going to Bitburg, the president made a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There he delivered an incredibly emotional speech that ended with these words: "And then, rising above all this cruelty, out of this tragic and nightmarish time, beyond the anguish, the pain and the suffering for all time, we can and must pledge: Never Again!" It is said that Martin Luther King Jr. shed a tear when he heard Lyndon Johnson, in a speech to Congress after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, say, "We shall overcome," appropriating words made famous by the civil rights movement. Meir Kahane, sitting in Jerusalem, must have at least smirked in satisfaction when he heard an American president uttering the expression he had made famous.

At Solidarity Sunday, also the day of the Bitburg visit, Elie Wiesel made explicit what had suddenly motivated an unprecedented 240,000 people to attend: "Is there a connection between Bitburg and this rally? Yes, there is. What was attempted at Bitburg—a denial of the past, a disregard of Jewish agony—the same but on a larger scale has been attempted in Russia." The memory of the Holocaust, which had always been an emotional engine of the movement, was invoked again and again in the service of freeing Soviet Jewry. One man had a sign with a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the words
INHUMANITY IS INHUMANITY. LET MY PEOPLE GO.
The
New York Times
ran a large photograph of a Holocaust survivor crying and holding a sign that said
LET SOVIET JEWS EMIGRATE
. Fair or not, the analogy was real for many American Jews. The shame and rage that had driven a group of scientists in Cleveland and students at Yeshiva University to start a movement back in 1964 were now shared by an entire community.