When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (11 page)

The rabbis at JTS, more concerned with parsing the meaning of Talmudic and Mishnaic passages, never accepted Heschel's eccentricities, his deep love of the spiritual, his desire to make Jewish law come alive. They treated him as an outcast, not even allowing him to teach classes in mysticism, the subject for which he was renowned. He was constantly lamenting to his students that they were being trained simply for synagogue administration. How was it possible, he wondered aloud, for them to complete the entire curriculum without taking a single course on the Jewish conception of God? "Intellectual evasion is the greatest sin of contemporary Jewish teaching," he warned. "Urgent problems are shunned, the difficulties of faith are ignored ... Jewish thought is sterile. We appeal to Jewish loyalties, we have little to say to the imagination." Through his books
Man Is Not Alone
(1951) and
God in Search of Man
(1955) and in his lectures, he tried to show another way, one that might help Jews confront a post-Holocaust world in which God's love, even among his believers, could not be taken for granted. Rather than waiting for God to seek out the faithful for revelation, Jews were urged to find a state of awareness in which they could more easily be reached by him. Social action was a way to achieve this: through bearing witness, exposing oneself to the sins of the world and then rectifying them. This, Heschel told his students, had to be at the center of Judaism: "A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does."

The year 1963 was a big one for Heschel. In January he made his first foray into the civil rights struggle and met Martin Luther King Jr. (a friendship that would provide the most enduring and endearing image of the black-Jewish alliance: the two walking arm in arm to Selma in 1965 with leis around their necks). At the Conference on Religion and Race, a gathering in Chicago of almost a thousand clergy, Heschel made a memorable speech, striking some of the same chords as King. They both quoted Amos: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." They both referred to the famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a personal friend of Heschel's and one of King's intellectual idols. When King told the delegates that "one must not only preach a sermon with his voice. He must preach it with his life," it was a concept that Heschel understood. For Heschel's part, he spoke much as Joachim Prinz would at the March on Washington, seeing the black struggle as an extension of the Jewish one. "The exodus began," he said, "but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses."

For Heschel, however, the problem of Jewish identity was not going to be solved solely by securing black civil rights. He lamented the fact that American Jews seemed to be so alienated from their past, unaware of the tradition from which they descended. And he was also racked with Holocaust guilt. Though he had narrowly escaped death, much of his family hadn't. When a reporter from the Yiddish newspaper the
Day-Morning Journal
asked him where he had been in 1943, Heschel answered, mournfully, that he had just arrived in America, did not speak the language well, and commanded no attention from the Jewish leadership. Still, he said, "This does not mean that I consider myself innocent. I am very guilty. I have no rest."

In that interview, conducted one night in the fall of 1963 in the book-lined living room of Heschel's Riverside Drive apartment, he revealed his bitterness about American Jews' ignorance of Soviet Jewry. "Russian Jews are an abstraction for Americans. They know about Florence, Naples, Miami, [the] Waldorf Astoria, but what do they know about Berdichev, Odessa, Vilna, Warsaw! This exemplifies the indifference."

Out of this anger emerged a sermon. Heschel could not contain his frustration any longer, and on September 4, at a conference at the Jewish Theological Seminary examining the moral responsibilities of the rabbinate, he delivered an impassioned plea for action:

If we are ready to go to jail in order to destroy the blight of racial bigotry, if we are ready to march off to Washington in order to demonstrate our identification with those who are deprived of equal rights, should we not be ready to go to jail in order to end the martyrdom of our Russian brethren? To arrange sit-ins, protests, days of fasting and prayer, public demonstrations to which every Russian leader will not remain indifferent? The voice of our brother's agony is crying out to us! How can we have peace of mind or live with our conscience?

What is called for is not a silent sigh but a voice of moral compassion and indignation, the sublime and inspired screaming of a prophet uttered by a whole community.

The six million are no more. Now three million face spiritual extinction.

We have been guilty more than once of failure to be concerned, of a failure to cry out, and failure may have become our habit.

The test of the humanity of a human being is the degree to which he is sensitive to other people's suffering.

This is the deepest meaning of our history: The destiny of all Jews is at stake in the destiny of every Jew; the destiny of all men is at stake in the destiny of every man.

Heschel was appealing to the universal and the particular at the same time. Like the Israelis and Decter, who had been trying to graft the cause onto a more general fight for minority rights, Heschel described his reasons as humanitarian and just as important as civil rights for blacks. But he also spoke at another register, a lower, deeper one, calling on Jews as Jews. "We have been guilty," he said, using words that had hardly ever been uttered. The Holocaust was an American Jewish "failure." This was the guilt that was pushing Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron in Cleveland. Saving Soviet Jewry was not just about man's responsibility to man but also about a Jew's responsibility to Jews.

Heschel's sermon was deeply affecting. It was sent out to two thousand Conservative rabbis, repeated in synagogues all over the country on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that year, and reprinted in Jewish newsletters and bulletins. He assumed that these stinging, accusatory words would provide the necessary spur for action. Initially, some meetings did take place, including one with the Synagogue Council of America that explored ways of initiating a national campaign. Among the proposals was one similar to Arthur Goldberg's: a massive conference. But as soon as the meeting ended, the plans dissolved. Unbeknownst to Heschel, the concurrent efforts to involve the government—now reeling from the Kennedy assassination—were also going nowhere. The Presidents Conference was paralyzed. On the last day of December 1963, Heschel, impatient and frustrated, wrote a letter to major Jewish leaders in which he issued a threat: if they didn't come up with a plan of action soon, he would publicly call for one himself.

Shame accomplished what reasoning and pleading had not. Not long after Heschel's ultimatum, the national Jewish leadership began preparing for a major conference to be held the spring of 1964 in Washington. The gathering would be as broadly representative as possible, bringing together religious leaders, Jewish
machers,
congresspeople, and civil rights activists: an American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry.

Before they even arrived in Washington, Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron—who had had no trouble getting themselves invited as delegates from Cleveland—were convinced that the conference was going to be just another exercise in Jewish handwringing. They had received a booklet in the mail that included fourteen resolutions that were expected to emerge from the two-day meeting. It was a laundry list of toothless actions—prayer vigils and loosely defined educational activities—not the sustained effort the Cleveland group was hoping would be established. The closest any of them came to that goal was in the fourteenth resolution, which stated vaguely that "immediately upon the adjournment of this Conference, the Presidents of the co-sponsoring national Jewish organizations will meet for the purpose of considering how best to assure that the plans set herein will be systematically implemented."

Rosenblum and Caron decided to agitate. With nothing to lose and few contacts they could draw on, they wrote a letter to the other delegates rallying them to oppose the resolutions: "The question is not whether the coming Conference will denounce Soviet anti-Semitism in sufficiently strong terms. (They will denounce it and this is known to all in advance.) The crucial question is: Will the Conference provide the mechanism for bringing the information to the millions, now uninformed and silent, so that their outcry can be brought to bear." The letter continued, "If we cannot take the step of establishing an 'ad hoc' committee, funded and staffed to coordinate and implement this protest, the Conference may well frustrate the hopes of thousands of persons expecting definitive results. Any plan short of the creation of such an 'ad hoc' group is unthinkable."

The stately but placid vision that greeted them at the Willard Hotel on Sunday, April 5, the conference's opening day, was not promising for men looking for revolution. Every exclamation mark and cocktail seemed scripted. The five hundred delegates, comprising all the major leaders of American Jewry, sat inside the main ballroom flipping through folders of information on the Soviet Jewish plight. The carpet and curtains were a creamy salmon pink; faux-marble columns flanked the doors; a pastoral fresco covered the ceiling. Journalists from every major news organization crammed the back of the hall, with even
Pravda
and
Izvestia
represented. The conference opened with the reading of telegrams of support from prominent Americans, among them Martin Luther King Jr. and George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO.

Conspicuously absent was Nahum Goldmann. He wished the conference well but had serious concerns that it might be counterproductive. Two months before the gathering he had written from Geneva to Lewis Weinstein, the newly appointed chairman of the Presidents Conference, chastising him with a paternalistic slap that only a man in his position could deliver: "Knowing how responsible a man you are, I am sure you will see to it that the conference acts in a responsible way. Demagogic speeches and exaggerated resolutions may do a lot of harm, not only to the demands for which we fight but to the three million Soviet Jews." He went on to warn that "any formal intervention by the USA will probably be rejected by the State Department, and rightly so, and may be very harmful to the very sensitive Soviets. Just imagine if the Soviet Union would hold a conference on the civil rights situation of Negroes and send a formal delegation to Krutchev
[sic],
asking him to intervene. What would be the reaction in America to such a procedure? And the Russians have the right to react in the same way."

Also absent in any public way were the Israelis. They declined to send a representative to speak at the conference. Outwardly, they were still maintaining a face of passivity. Behind the scenes, however, Israelis were everywhere. The representative of the Lishka in New York was Meir Rosenne (formerly Meir Rosenkampf), the man who had been their contact in Paris, and he was a part of the planning at every level. So was the Israelis' American operative Moshe Decter.

Rosenblum and Caron began lobbying among the delegates. And they found, to their surprise, that people were receptive. Many were still reeling from
Judaism Without Embellishment,
a book that had recently been published in Kiev by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Written by one Trofim Kichko, a Soviet academic, it was anti-Semitism of the crudest sort, filled with caricatures that would have been at home in Julius Streicher's
Der Stürmer.
Lishka agents got hold of a copy and passed it to Decter, who had portions of the book and the captions to the worst cartoons translated. At a press conference at the end of February, Morris Abram, the famed civil rights lawyer (three years earlier, he had gotten Martin Luther King Jr. released from his first jail sentence) and president of the American Jewish Committee, held up the book and proclaimed it a "hodgepodge of misinformation, distortion, malicious gossip and insulting references to Judaism." He read aloud passages to the scribbling reporters: "'No matter what they do—selling matzohs or parts of the Torah, carrying out the rites of burial or circumcision, wedding or divorce, they think above all of money and they despise productive work.'"

The building crescendo of matzo deprivation, the economic trials, and the Kichko book sensitized many delegates. And in rhetoric, the conference strayed from Goldmann's brand of cautiousness. Speaker after speaker railed against the Soviets. But Rosenblum and Caron moved around the room pushing for more. They met with delegates in coffee shops, in the lobby, in their rooms, asking them to think beyond the conference. "What's next?" Rosenblum asked. "When you go back to your community, what are you going to be able to tell the people back there they should be doing? There's no national organization you'll be able to turn to. There's nobody you can turn to for support."

They were convincing. And on the final day of the conference, when the hour came to vote on the resolutions, Rosenblum and Caron shouted from the floor of the ballroom that they had an addition to the list, a fifteenth resolution. Morris Abram, who was acting as chairman, tried to explain from the dais that they could not add resolutions, that the motions were already decided and closed to further discussion. People began yelling in protest. One man shouted, "Is this democratic or not?" There was enough commotion that Abram had to turn around and confer with the other leaders and then with Rosenblum and Caron. When Abram addressed the crowd again, he read out the proposed fifteenth resolution composed by the Cleveland group but asked that it be admitted as an addendum to the already written fourteenth resolution, which he then read in its final version: "'Immediately upon the adjournment of this Conference, the presidents of the co-sponsoring national Jewish organizations will meet for the purpose of considering how best to assure that the plans set out herein will be systematically implemented.
It is our further proposal that the presidents develop the means of continuing this Conference on an ongoing basis, adequately staffed and financed, to coordinate and implement the resolutions of this Conference.
'"