When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (14 page)

Only a month after the May 1 protest, Birnbaum made it into the papers again with a weeklong interfaith fast in front of the Soviet mission. A Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a rabbi each fasted for a day. Images of the group linking arms and singing Hebrew freedom songs appeared in all the major dailies. Eventually, Abram and the other Jewish leaders began paying more attention to the man behind the protests. It was difficult to believe that in such a short time, this newcomer, this total unknown, had managed to organize such a wide array of events.

On the morning of October 16, Birnbaum realized he had a problem. His bedroom was full of placards that read
KHRUSHCHEV, LET MY PEOPLE LIVE,
which the group members were planning to use in two days at a rally near Seward Park in the Lower East Side. But that morning, Birnbaum and the rest of the world learned that after eleven years, Khrushchev had been ousted. Birnbaum gathered his volunteers in his room. "Listen," he told them. "We cross off
Khrushchev
and we replace it with
Moscow
."

This was an important rally, the culmination of a half a year of work, and Birnbaum wanted it to be perfect. As he saw it, he had finally infiltrated the White House. Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community, was coming with a message from Johnson himself. And Birnbaum's correspondence with Senator Jacob Javits was paying off. Birnbaum had written to Javits in July with a harsh critique of the conference. "Who is leading whom?" Birnbaum wrote. "This is leadership in a vacuum, quite lacking in a grass roots basis. Most notable is its remoteness from the future of American Jewry sitting on the campus right now—more than 300,000 of them who [don't] have the vaguest notion of who they are or what they are doing or supposed to be doing."

Not only did Javits show up to speak on October 18, he also brought the non-Jewish senator Kenneth Keating. The rally drew more than two thousand people to a long program with speeches by many of the rabbis and university professors who had been supporting the students' work since May. Birnbaum wanted to give everyone a chance to speak. Only ten months had passed since the rainy day in January when he'd arrived in Washington Heights. He had managed to build an organization from scratch, a dynamic one with dozens of passionate students. But he wanted to grow beyond the solid core of religious and socially conscious New Yorkers who had kept it going so far. The summer kits and the news coverage had provided national exposure. The fact that two of the Jewish establishment's most prized commodities, Javits and Feldman, were attending the rally suggested that his activist approach had captured a spirit that had eluded the movement thus far.

The moment was almost religious. Here were Jewish politicians, professors, and students unabashedly singing Hebrew songs in public in support of unseen Jews on the other side of the world. For him, it was both a cry of conscience and an inkling of the Jewish reawakening it might bring about. Birnbaum's ultimate hope was that this surge of enthusiasm would be met by Soviet Jews themselves, that they too might begin protesting their fate. The world didn't know, after all, exactly what it was these Jews wanted. But for Birnbaum, it didn't really matter. He looked out at the chanting, applauding, exuberant crowd. A lifetime of searching for sparks and here he was, suddenly feeling the warmth rising off hundreds of individual flames.

T
HE SIX
MEN
met on the evening before the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Factories and offices were closed in preparation for this forty-ninth anniversary of the 1917 Communist take-over—a blizzard of red flags, rolling tanks, and speeches piped over loudspeakers declaiming the glory of the Bolsheviks. The men could get away without attracting attention. For a gathering spot, they had chosen Pushkin, a small town just south of Leningrad; they met in a park near the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the nineteenth-century boarding school that had once educated the ruling elite of czarist Russia, including the young Alexander Pushkin. Fall had stripped the trees bare, and when they finally sat down at a lone wooden picnic table—three friends on one side, a group of three others facing them—it was cold and they shivered, pressing their shoulders together.

Anyone who saw the six middle-aged men in caps and scarves with their shoulders hunched together would have thought they'd chosen an unusual site to meet on such a miserable, gray day but nothing worth reporting to the local KGB bureau. And yet, what the men were discussing was the height of sedition. They were making a verbal pact to form an underground Zionist organization—primarily for the long-term goal of aliyah, but more immediately to increase Jewish self-awareness in their city.

This was not so different from what other small groups of Jews were working toward in most major cities in the mid-1960s. But there was one important—and dangerous—distinction. Instead of meeting at someone's house and sharing samizdat, they were starting an organization. They would collect dues and, most risky of all, write up a constitution for their group. This instantly made their activities illegal and gave the authorities grounds for prosecuting them. Other than State-and Party-mandated groups, such as the Komsomol, independent organizations were illegal in the Soviet Union. The six men debated briefly about whether to take this step. In other cities, such as Riga and Moscow, Jews had purposely avoided formalizing their activities. The Leningrad group, however, decided that there was much to gain from acting together. They would be more efficient; everyone would know what everyone else was doing. And they were seduced, like Mendelevich in Riga with his small group of friends, by the Leninist model of ideologically committed cells, each working independently but in a coordinated way toward the same radical objective.

That this risky leap was taking place in Leningrad made it even more significant. The men sitting around the picnic table were—unlike the Jews of the Baltics—pure products of the Communist experiment, now almost fifty years old. In Yosef Mendelevich's home in Riga, the memory of Jewish communal life persisted, a Passover Seder was not an oddity, and the sound of Yiddish was still heard, if only between those four walls—the Soviet occupation of Latvia was, after all, only two decades old. But Jews in the heart of the Soviet Union—living in a state that denigrated religious identity as a principle and among a people who had always been suspicious of them—had experienced a complete and total disconnect, one that had placed them at a three-generation remove from any positive sense of Jewishness.

Leading the group that sat on one side of the table was Gilya Butman, small and loud, a mischievous jokester with eyes that squinted to thin slits when he smiled. Next to him was his childhood friend Soyma Dreizner, a man with the massive shoulders and the stoic quiet of a longshoreman. They had grown up in thoroughly assimilated Leningrad Jewish families, becoming aware of their Jewish identity only when they were taunted in elementary school (a problem Dreizner always solved with his fists). Their parents explained that there was no shame in being called a Jew. They should take pride in defending themselves. But this is where the conversation usually ended. From elementary school onward, Butman and Dreizner were constantly reminded of their Jewishness, though it meant almost nothing to them. Even the ancient names that appeared on their birth certificates, Hillel and Solomon, respectively, were unknown to them until they were older.

It took Butman many years to turn against the system and become a Zionist. First, he had to experience anti-Semitism, the whispering kind that existed in Soviet society, of unspoken quotas, constant insinuations, and
zhid
(kike) spoken just loud enough for the intended target to hear. When he applied to universities, he was rejected, first by the Institute of Foreign Languages and then by the city's journalism school—both times because of the fifth line on his passport. When he finally got to the head of the registration line at the journalism school, the tired-looking admissions secretary looked at his unmistakably Jewish face and said, "I advise you not to apply. You won't pass." When he tried to enter the air force in 1953, enrolling in a fighter-pilot program that the Komsomol was desperately recruiting for, he came under strange questioning by the credentials committee. He was asked for his nationality and his patronymic, which was Izraylevich. An older man, the only one in civilian clothes and surely from state security, asked Butman if he had any relatives abroad. Butman wasn't sure, but he answered no. "Do you know why I am asking you in particular about this?" the man queried Butman. "The Jewish people are dispersed throughout the world. Many have relatives in various countries. Intelligence agencies of imperialist powers utilize this and we must take it into consideration." Butman never made it into a fighter jet.

These incidents scarred Butman, each one turning his thoughts more and more dissident. He eventually went to law school, worked as a criminal investigator in a far-off northern Soviet republic, spent some time unemployed and hungry, got a job as a proofreader in a publishing house, and, in 1957, found some stability as a detective in the Leningrad Criminal Investigation Department, where he was given a pistol and a locker to keep it in. And all this time, the feeling of alienation that overtook him every time he saw
Jew
underlined on his application forms continued to grow. Every limitation made him despise the state more. He realized that he was surrounding himself only with Jews, that he had no more Russian friends, that he no longer sought their approval the way he had as a boy. Instead, he and his friend Dreizner found themselves talking about Israel, trying to gather as much information as they could. During the 1956 Sinai campaign, Butman would go to the public library and stare at issues of the London
Times.
He couldn't read English but he would gaze jealously at the photos of bearded Israeli paratroopers smiling widely.

The men's curiosity grew. It eventually drove them to visit the city's Central Synagogue on Lermentovsky Prospect one night. It was Simchat Torah, the holiday celebrating the end of the Torah reading cycle. It was a joyous day on which religious Jews were commanded to dance and sing and drink. Starting in the mid-1950s, outside the major remaining synagogues of the Soviet Union—the Grand Choral Synagogue in Moscow, the Great Synagogue in Leningrad, and of course the narrow street in front of the Riga synagogue—Jews had begun an annual tradition of gathering on this night. Someone, usually an older person, one of those Stalin-era Zionists, a former Gulag prisoner, would lead a dancing of the hora. Songs in Hebrew and Yiddish would be sung. Young people would come, more as a way to meet other young Jews than out of any religious conviction. They came because it was a good time, because they might find a future husband or wife. Most had never set foot near the synagogue before. On the Simchat Torah when Butman and Dreizner went to the synagogue, they found small clusters of people gathered in front of the ornate but faded concrete Moorish-style façade. In the center of one group was a woman who seemed to be talking about an uncle who was sending her letters from Israel. Butman was intrigued. He approached her, but she quickly became quiet and started to walk away. Butman followed her. He walked behind her block after block, aware that the woman was frightened of him. When he finally managed to stop her, she signaled to him not to say too much in the street and handed him her address and phone number.

They eventually found a mentor in this woman, Leah Lurie, and an entry into the small and elderly circle of Zionists in the city. Over the next few years, Butman and Dreizner listened to Israeli music and read samizdat together, practicing Hebrew with the help of a text the Israelis had put into underground circulation,
Elef Millim
(A Thousand Words). They loved the other world they found in the little apartments of these aging Zionists, many of them former Gulag inmates. They managed to keep it all secret until 1960, when they were questioned by the KGB in connection with the arrest of Natan Tsirulnikov, a World War II veteran and engineer who had been caught with multiple copies of two innocuous little magazines produced by the Israeli embassy,
Vestnik Israilya (Israel Herald)
and
Ariel,
covering mostly arts and literature. The Israelis had kept the writing completely clean of politics. But this mattered little to the KGB. Butman and Dreizner were swept up in the investigation and subjected to three days of questioning. Butman lost his job with the police. But he seemed to care less now about all the turbulence Zionism was bringing to his life. He became a refrigerator repairman, work that gave him an excuse to visit the houses of other Jews. He discussed Israel with those who would listen, offered to teach them Hebrew (he had managed to secure a samizdat copy of
Elef Millim),
and sometimes even invited them over to listen to radio broadcasts. He had no real hope of leaving the Soviet Union. No one was even talking about emigrating in 1960. But he knew that he had ceased to be a normal Soviet citizen.

This kind of radical break wasn't unique to Butman. Sitting across the table from him in that park in Pushkin was Arkady Shpilberg, who led the other cell. A true bon vivant, he had a strong jaw, thick dark hair, and a barrel chest, the kind of man who spent his summers snorkeling in the Black Sea, always accompanied by a beautiful girl. But he too was restless. He wanted to do more than just feel different; he wanted to understand what his difference meant. In the summer of 1965, while standing in line to buy a plane ticket for a vacation in the Crimea, he overheard someone say the Hebrew word
Palmach.
Shpilberg struck up a conversation with the man, a Jew from Riga, who went on to tell him about what was taking place there. That man gave him the name of Mark Blum, the militant activist organizing the gatherings at Rumbuli.