When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (77 page)

Indication of Soviet willingness to make a quick deal came in July, when a confidential report sent from Paris to Jerusalem was leaked to Israeli radio. It contained notes from a secret meeting between the Israeli and Soviet ambassadors to France held at the Paris apartment of the pianist-conductor Daniel Barenboim. The Soviets had taken the initiative, and it appeared they were ready to make what the Soviet ambassador Yuli Vorontsov called a "package deal." He was willing to offer diplomatic relations and unfettered emigration of Soviet Jews on three conditions. First, Israel would have to retreat from part of the Golan Heights—a concession to the Soviets' Syrian allies. Second, all the emigrants would need to go to Israel and not, as most of them had in the past, to the West. Third and most remarkable: the Soviets were demanding that Israel get American Jews to shut up about Soviet Jewry.

The leak was met with astonishment. Not only were the two countries engaging for the first time since 1967, but the conversation was a serious give-and-take about the core issues. The promise of some kind of linkage resulting in an exodus seemed almost too good to be true. Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, was interviewed on Israeli radio the day after the news broke. He was ecstatic—not an everyday emotion for Rabin—and admitted that the talks contained "several amazing things." Obliquely referring to the agitating work of the Lishka, he offered that those activities could easily be stopped if the Soviets were serious: "I am convinced that if the Soviet Union were to open its gates to an exit of Soviet Jews—a mass exit to Israel—that activity which was designed to bring this about would no longer be necessary."

The Paris meeting led to nothing. As soon as news of it leaked, the Soviets announced that the supposed top-secret negotiations were nothing but a figment of the Israeli imagination. They wouldn't even admit the two ambassadors had met. But the idea of some kind of linkage that would serve both Israel and the Soviet Union did not die. Throughout that spring, rumors of secret meetings between diplomats continued. And there were some signs that the countries were moving closer to each other. Shimon Peres sent a friendly note to Gorbachev—Israel "is not an enemy of the Soviet Union," he wrote—and had an amicable conversation at the United Nations with the new Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze (a refreshing replacement for the long-serving Comrade Nyet, Andrei Gromyko). In October, Poland unexpectedly announced that it would be restoring some diplomatic relations with Israel. Given the tight control Moscow held over its Warsaw Pact countries—following 1967, only Romania had maintained ties with Israel—this was another sign that Gorbachev was opening up to the Israelis, or at least using his relationship with Israel (and world Jewry) to impress the West.

Edgar Bronfman was at the center of much of this activity. In early September, he landed in his private jet at Moscow's Sheremetyevo air-port—a rare privilege accorded the billionaire philanthropist. He had been trumpeting his planned meeting with Soviet leaders for a year. But since he was accountable to no one, at first it was hard to tell what had come of his quiet diplomacy. All anyone knew was that he had carried a note from Shimon Peres, a man Bronfman counted as a close personal friend. In the weeks following the trip, the rumors multiplied: Peres's note contained an offer of a seat at the peace conference in exchange for normalization of relations and free emigration to Israel; if Gorbachev could deliver Syria to the negotiating table, Israel would withdraw from the Golan Heights.

The most bizarre but promising development by far was the beginning of a plan for a Soviet Jewish airlift. About twenty thousand Jews would be moved to Poland, and French planes would collect them there and deliver them to Israel. At first written off as an exaggeration by Bronfman, the plan, or at least its substance, was confirmed when Peres visited France a month later, at the end of October. After a lunch meeting with François Mitterrand, he told reporters that there was indeed an airlift in the works and that France had offered planes and pilots.

After a few months, it became clear that the airlift idea was dead. The Soviets lost interest. The only concrete result of Bronfman's freelance diplomacy was the eventual emigration of Ilya Essas. Bronfman made a special plea for Essas, who had been leading the small movement of Orthodox Soviet Jews. In a profile for the
Washington Post
a few months after Bronfman's trip, in response to another Jewish leader's jokingly—and anonymously—saying Bronfman thought of himself as "king of the Jews," he laid out what he thought had been accomplished. He had spoken mostly with Anatoly Dobrynin, who had been moved back to Moscow to run the Kremlin's international department after spending decades as the Soviet ambassador to the United States. "I think my friend Anatoly's going to invite a lot of people over there to talk. There's going to be a buildup of pressure through the business community. The Russians know the Soviet Jewry issue is tied to trade ... My guess is that over a period of time, five to 10 years, some of our goals will be achieved."

The talk of a Jewish airlift, the courting of Bronfman, and the overtures to Israel were all read as signs of Soviet softening in the run-up to the first summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. The meeting was to take place in Geneva on November 19, and it was a chance to test the theory that Gorbachev represented a new direction. It would be not only the first encounter in six years between the superpowers but also the first time that Reagan, the ultimate Cold Warrior, would meet face to face with a Communist leader. Just as they had in the 1970s in the months before the Nixon summits, the Soviets believed that a few token human rights gestures would ensure a more cordial atmosphere. As a result, Elena Bonner, Sakharov's wife, was finally given permission to leave their isolation in the sealed-off city of Gorky to get medical treatment in the West for her heart condition. But there were few other signs that the cause would be advanced. Asked publicly about the issue for the first time—during his October trip to France—Gorbachev answered that the issue of human rights was "artificially played up by Western propaganda and exploited to poison relations among peoples and countries." As for Jews: "I would be glad to hear of Jews enjoying anywhere such political and other rights as they have in our country."

Gorbachev, like his predecessors, may have been trying to change the subject, but the activist forces that had been waiting years for such an opportunity were just gearing up. The lead-in to the summit was full of articles presenting human rights as a giant obstacle for both men. "Summit Parley Overshadowed by Rights Issue" read one headline. "Soviets Trying to Ignore Question That Won't Go Away: Human Rights" read another. The Soviet Jewry organizations came to life, planning dozens of local protests, letter-writing campaigns, and advertisements exhorting the president to make an issue of Soviet Jewry. The Soviets were doing their part to keep the focus on human rights by continuing the tactic first used at the Ottawa conference: trying to turn the tables on the United States. One typical article by TASS gave this assessment of Reagan's America: "Rampant racism in many states, a policy of genocide against the native peoples, Indians, and harassment of dissidents, up to and including their being gunned down and bombed as in Philadelphia, are facts of life in the U.S. today." The news agency Novosti even carried a petition asking for an end to the "wave of anti-Semitism sweeping the U.S."

George Shultz, sensitive to human rights and now well known as a defender of refuseniks, had constructed a new argument for liberalized emigration that he thought might resonate with Gorbachev. In Shultz's first meetings with Shevardnadze, the new foreign minister let Shultz know that he would have to find a way to make the case for human rights in more Soviet-centered terms. The Soviet Union would not open up simply in response to the moral indignation of the West. Shultz's response came in early November when he flew to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev in preparation for the upcoming summit. Carefully sidestepping an argument about competing ideologies, Shultz painted a picture of a world headed quickly toward a new "information age" that would replace the "industrial age." This new world, he explained to Gorbachev, would be smaller. Information and innovation would be the ultimate commodity and could be passed in seconds from one side of the globe to the other. "Closed and compartmented societies cannot take advantage of the information age," Shultz explained. "People must be free to express themselves, move around, emigrate and travel if they want to, challenge accepted ways without fear." Rather than blow up at what was clearly a lecture—Shultz's advisers had warned that he would be seen as condescending—Gorbachev lit up. "You should take up the planning office here in Moscow," he told him. "You have more ideas than they have." Once again, Shultz had the impression that he was dealing with a man who wanted to embrace change.

During this meeting, Shultz asked Gorbachev point-blank if he could take Shcharansky and Ida Nudel back with him on his plane. This received cold stares. But the connection was clear. Dealing with the Soviet Jewry problem would be a good first step toward reform. This idea had already been floated in Gorbachev's circle. In a diary entry around this time, one of the Soviet leader's closest advisers, Anatoly Chernyaev, wrote that he hoped Gorbachev's efforts to change the West's "perception" of the Soviet Union would be matched by an effort to shift the policies away from what he called "ideological intolerance." In order to achieve that, he wrote, "we have to resolve the Jewish question, the most burning among human-rights problems."

An unprecedented three thousand journalists showed up in Geneva for the summit. Soviet Jewry activists hoped to steal some of this spotlight, and none was more determined than Avi Weiss. He arrived in Switzerland with a handful of activists intent on engaging in some kind of civil disobedience. Among them was Yosef Mendelevich, gaunt and with a long, wispy beard, still soft-spoken and looking even more like a prophet than he had in his days as a serious young man in Riga, before the Gulag. Weiss announced his presence the first day during a press conference organized by American Jewish leaders. Edgar Bronfman was there, the incarnation of Nahum Goldmann as he made the point that any protests should remain free of anti-Soviet rhetoric. Weiss, posing as a journalist for the
Jewish Press
—Kahane's old paper—asked Bronfman if he had money invested in the Soviet Union and, if so, how he could credibly claim to represent the Jews. Bronfman tried to defuse the question with humor, claiming he didn't "make enough money in the Soviet Union to pay for gas from here to the airport." Soon, Weiss and Mendelevich found their protest target. On the opening day of the summit, together with three other activists, they staged a sit-in at the offices of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline. Weiss walked up to the ticket counter and asked to book a flight for Anatoly Shcharansky, and then all the activists sat down, unfurled banners, tacked photos of refoseniks to the walls, and began to study Torah loudly. When Russian security men weren't able to dislodge the protesters, the Swiss police were called in and arrested the group. The activists spent the next two days in jail, enduring conditions that Weiss would describe two weeks later in a
New York Times
op-ed: "We were held in a maximum security prison, stripped and body searched, placed in isolation in small cubicles for extended periods of time, denied kosher food, and locked in cells with thieves, murderers and drug dealers." If Weiss and Mendelevich's objective was to focus attention on the refuseniks and prisoners, they got their wish.

Avital Shcharansky was also in Geneva. Even though her protest was much less flamboyant, she too was briefly detained by the Swiss police for blocking the entrance to the Soviet mission. Media savvy now after years of campaigning, she said her only goal at the summit was to deliver a letter to Raisa Gorbachev pleading for her husband's release and saying that "if your love for the General Secretary means sharing with him the joys of children and grandchildren, of planning and living a life together, then you must know, Mrs. Gorbachev, that these joys are all denied to me." She was a forlorn presence at the summit as she stood for hours in the snow outside the barbed-wire barricade that blocked off the Soviet mission, her head covered by a shawl. To the many journalists who swarmed around her knowing she was a reliable producer of dramatic quotes, she handed out copies of her letter.

The issue of Soviet Jewry was everywhere present at the summit, a kind of shorthand that came to represent all that was repressive and evil about Soviet society. Without even referring to the actual individual refuseniks and prisoners at the heart of the movement, the words
Soviet Jewry
were the quickest—maybe even trendiest—way to level an argument about human rights at the Soviets. The strangest example of this came with the highest-profile public invocation of Soviet Jewry during the summit: an impromptu exchange between Gorbachev and Jesse Jackson. The civil rights leader and former Democratic presidential candidate along with a group of antinuclear peace activists had invited the Soviet leader to a meeting in the lobby of the Soviet mission. To their surprise, not only did Gorbachev show up but Dobrynin and Shevardnadze came as well, all of them fresh from their first session with the Americans. For forty-five minutes, three feet apart and surrounded by Russian security and a tight ring of activists, Gorbachev and Jackson engaged each other in a debate while television cameras broadcast the exchange live. Jackson, who the previous year had become a controversial figure for American Jews when he described New York as "Hymietown," almost immediately brought up "the plight of Soviet Jews." Gorbachev was smiling and unfazed. "Jews are a part of the Soviet people," he said through his translator. "They are a fine people. They contribute a lot to disarmament. They are a very talented people and they are very valued in the Soviet Union." When Jackson pushed him on the question again, Gorbachev fell back on the standard Soviet response: "The problem—the so-called problem—in the Soviet Union does not exist. Perhaps this problem only exists with those who would like to mar the relations with us, who cast doubts and aspersions." Jackson later announced that Gorbachev's answer had been "not adequate." He had "recognized no problem."