When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (85 page)

On their flight from Vienna, the Slepaks opened a bottle of champagne when they saw Tel Aviv in the distance. Masha would not let go of her son Sanya, whom she had not seen in ten years. Volodya looked out the window at the blue of the Mediterranean Sea as it lapped up against the Israeli coastline. He could still not believe his struggle had ended. Two weeks later they flew to the United States, where at John F. Kennedy Airport they met their five grandchildren for the first time.

Scenes of reunion, images of redemption, proliferated that fall, most of them much less public. One by one, the people who had given the last decade or two of their lives to open the doors were getting out. Ironically, these activists were the last people willing to accept that their departures held a deeper meaning about the direction of the Soviet Union. "If they do something, it is a concession made under the pressure of the West," Volodya Slepak said during a press conference in Vienna, his first words after leaving the Soviet Union. "If there were no pressure or if the Soviet Union was strong enough, they would do nothing.... They are tyrants." And for all the prominent people leaving, there were many who were still stuck. It took another two months before Alexander Lerner, the grandfatherly doyen of the refuseniks, received his exit visa. At the end of 1987, the few activists who were left, like Yuli Kosharovsky, felt that their struggle had gotten much lonelier.

At the same time, the space for unhindered protest continued to expand. In November, a group of a hundred refuseniks gathered in the apartment of Vladimir Kislik for a conference to discuss the problem of state secrecy, the most common excuse for denying exit visas. The symposium met for three days without interruption. Kislik, who twenty-one years before had worked at a plutonium production plant and was first refused an exit visa in 1973, bore into the issue with legalistic acuity and led an attempt to devise a more rational policy. Also in November, a former refusenik, Alexander Goldfarb, paid a return visit to Moscow. Goldfarb had left in 1975—his job as unofficial spokesman of the refuseniks was the one Shcharansky took over—and he eventually became a professor of microbiology at Columbia University. The fact that he was allowed to come back as a tourist after twelve years was shocking to the Moscow activists and dissidents. Goldfarb himself saw his visit as a "test case," as he later put it in a long essay in the
New York Times Magazine.
Though he thought the forces of glasnost and perestroika were moving too slowly and headed for a terrible confrontation with a vast Communist bureaucracy unwilling to part with its centralized power, he had to admit that "the socio-ideological atmosphere in Moscow" had been completely transformed. In anecdote after anecdote, he showed how people were vastly freer to express themselves and were doing so, voicing frustration that their material lives had not improved as promised.

As part of glasnost, Gorbachev had permitted the founding of nongovernmental organizations. By the fall of 1987, over thirty thousand had been created, reflecting the full range of Soviet society. On one end was Memorial, a group of young dissidents who initially came together to try to build a memorial to the victims of Stalin and ended up supporting the clear-eyed examination of Soviet history. And then there was Pamyat (Russian for "memory"). Started in May as a "historical and patriotic association," the group was almost uniquely and virulently focused on the "Zionist (that is Jewish) Masonic conspiracy" against the Russian people. At increasingly loud demonstrations with hundreds of Muscovites, Pamyat leaders blamed Jews for every ill of Soviet society, promoting the oldest of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The most disturbing aspect of the group was that it seemed to have the support of some conservative elements in the government who were angry at the fast pace of Gorbachev's reforms.

It was beginning to look like this new freedom might contain as many dangers as the old authoritarian system had. Soviet Jews glanced around at the end of 1987. They saw the sudden opening up of emigration and heard the stories of friends and family who had started new lives. Set against the uncertainty of a society whose foundation was shifting beneath their feet, leaving became a viable option even for those who had never considered it before. They began to reassess—just as refuseniks had for the last twenty years—whether Russia could ever really be their home or if they had to look elsewhere.

While he was planning for the Washington rally, David Harris had the thought, ironic though it was, that his job would be much easier if things were worse for Soviet Jews. He still faced the challenge of fashioning an appropriate theme for the rally. A consensus, however, soon emerged, almost universally accepted even by the activists, that the gathering should not be a protest but rather a way of offering encouragement to Reagan and reminding Gorbachev that they were still there, watching. The rally would be positive, celebratory, a show of unity bringing together the entire community and the many elements that made up the movement. For this reason, it would take place the day before the start of the summit so as not to distract or impede what they saw as a good process. With the first nuclear disarmament agreement in the history of the Cold War on the table, they didn't want to be seen as spoilers.

As November progressed and Harris and his many collaborators spread the word, the event began to take on a life of its own. Maybe it was because Shcharansky himself traveled from city to city for weeks trying to drum up participation, and his presence was persuasive. But thousands of rabbis pleaded with their congregations to go. Little girls saved up their babysitting money. Jewish groups from as far away as Anchorage, Alaska, chartered planes. It was as if the community's collective identity depended on making sure there was a respectable number of Jews present when Gorbachev arrived. All the elements that had animated the movement from the beginning, from Holocaust guilt and anti-Communism to tribal identity and humanist principles, all coalesced and hurtled toward Washington.

This momentum did not facilitate Harris's task. Working with a budget of half a million dollars collected from local Jewish federations all over the country, he still had to find a way to make the rally represent the wide coalition of people it was bringing together. The National Conference and the Union of Councils were cooperating with each other, which was a big achievement in itself. The organizers had unanimously agreed to avoid criticizing the administration, especially for its rejection of any kind of formal linkage between arms deals and human rights. The speakers needed to be on the same page about this. And most were. The only problem was the refuseniks. Harris let them decide for themselves who would speak, amused that there were as many divisions among them as among the American groups. Mendelevich, still considered a brave early leader, was chosen as one of the few who would address the rally, and there was no question that he would speak his mind in aggressive terms, as he had at Solidarity Sunday. Avi Weiss and Student Struggle were even planning to engage with him in some act of civil disobedience, convinced that the gathering would be too docile.

Harris also had to deal with the question of political representation. He had initially invited Jane Fonda and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary. But both women had histories of being perceived as supporting Communist forces (Fonda in Hanoi, Travers in Managua) and their presence would alienate the right. There was talk of disinviting them, but then Fonda canceled and Harris came up with another solution. One of his fellow organizers called Pearl Bailey, the black singer who also happened to be Republican. She would provide some balance. This triggered another problem. It was against Orthodox Jewish law for a woman to sing in public. Would Bailey alienate the Orthodox members of the audience? These complexities went on and on. In addition to all this, the rally was going to take place on a freezing December day. Would the weather keep people away? Even though all reports indicated a big turnout, Harris was kept up at night by the thought that a pathetically small group of Jews would show up and the Soviets would be able to laugh them off. So insecure were the organizers that they were only willing to predict that it would be the biggest rally ever in the capital for a Jewish cause, which wasn't saying much.

As it turned out, tens of thousands arrived, by the busload and planeload and trainload, and then tens of thousands more. In New York City alone, eleven hundred buses were chartered, nearly the entire fleet of available buses in the city. Three jumbo jets full of Jews from Chicago arrived. Every place with a sizable Jewish population was represented, from Houston to Palm Beach to Orange County. And these were not all activists—in fact, the majority weren't. They were just ordinary American Jews, most of whom had never marched for anything as Jews. They simply felt compelled, swept up by the feeling that they could make some collective statement just by being there. Parents wanted to bring their children. Lenore Weinstein from Minneapolis captured the mood of many of those making the trek. Walking with her two children and husband, she said, "We came here for the weekend to give our children an education. I feel much more strongly about this than I did during the war in Vietnam. Then I felt very American, but now I feel very American and very Jewish."

They came pouring down Constitution Avenue and onto the National Mall, dressed warmly in parkas and jackets, scarves and hats. There were older women in full-length furs, and babies swaddled in their strollers. A strong sun burned off some of the cold. People carried banners that included the names of the cities they represented, such as "Houston Stands Tall for Soviet Jewry." Children had the names of their Soviet bar or bat mitzvah twins taped to their shirts. It was hard to believe that the vast ocean of people stretching out in all directions was here for a Jewish cause. A quarter of a million people had shown up, far exceeding David Harris's most hopeful expectation.

The program was perfectly choreographed and projected onto large screens. First, Morris Abram read a supportive letter from the president. Then Pearl Bailey stretched out her arms and sang the spiritual "Let My People Go." A roster of speakers followed. Harris tried to keep everyone's comments short, setting up stage lights that would flash when time was up, but it was useless. Even the rabbi giving the invocation, which he'd promised would take up no more than ninety seconds, decided to make his own remarks, speaking for four minutes. Most of the main political contenders for the following year's presidential election were there. Vice President George Bush, the early but widely acknowledged front-runner, gave a forceful speech that echoed Reagan's recent exhortation to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall: "Let's see not five or six or 10 or 20 refuseniks released at a time, but thousands, tens of thousands. Mr. Gorbachev, let these people go!" Ed Koch went unscripted and as usual made a gaffe by saying that Gorbachev was acting like "Joe Stalin." John Lewis represented the civil rights movement. Elie Wiesel reminded everyone who wasn't already thinking about it that this type of mass gathering had not happened during the Holocaust—or ever. "Too many of us were silent then. We are not silent today." Then a group of refuseniks spoke. All the prominent activists, people who had only been known as names and depressed faces on posters, were there, and it was stirring to see them all, some with large fur hats on their heads, standing on a stage together: Shcharansky, Nudel, Begun, Slepak. Mendelevich, of course, broke away from the day's otherwise upbeat tone and yelled, "Linkage, linkage, linkage!" into the microphone during his turn, demanding that the United States not give an inch until all Jews were freed.

Many questions hung in the freezing air that day. Would the Soviet Union ever really allow free emigration? That year, eight thousand had gotten out, a vast improvement over the past decade but nowhere near the fifty-one thousand that had left in 1979. Would it open the doors completely? Would Gorbachev be allowed to continue his project of humanizing the Communist system, or would something stop him? And if the Soviets did allow the Jews to leave, how many would actually go? The activists had always assumed that if emigration was unfettered, hundreds of thousands would choose to make their lives somewhere else. The number four hundred thousand had been thrown around for a long time. Would this many leave? And if they did, where would they go? More than 80 percent of emigrants were now dropping out, heading to the United States or Western Europe. Was this sustainable? Would the Israelis succeed, by argument or by force, in making any exodus out of the Soviet Union a Zionist exodus? And if the Israelis didn't, would these Soviet Jews headed to the West remain Jews, or would they assimilate and become Americans or Germans? Would the movement to rescue a Jewish identity succeed or would it prove to be just a dream shared by a few thousand brave activists and not by the vast majority of Soviet Jews?

All these unknowns. And yet, in the closing moments of the rally, with all the people who had given years of their lives to a struggle that felt historic to them—biblical almost—there seemed to be a strong feeling of victory. Yaakov Birnbaum, now in his sixties, sat in a chair in the back, bitter that he had not been given a bigger role. He thought he should get more credit for being the father of this movement. But as he looked at the American Jews stretched out on the Mall as far as he could see, he nevertheless had a sense of fulfillment. This is what he had been struggling for, after all, the idea that Jews would not be afraid to defend other Jews, publicly, loudly, that they should be invested in the survival of their people. And the most stunning aspect of that moment was the feeling of collective strength, the unabashed reveling in their ability, as a community, to turn the attention of the world's two superpowers to their concerns. It simply would have been impossible twenty-five years before.