When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (19 page)

Without realizing it, the authorities had also solved a technical problem for the activists. OVIR demanded that any application be accompanied by a formal invitation from a family member in Israel, preserving the illusion that all emigration was for the purpose of family reunification. Letting the Israelis know to whom they should send an invitation was always a difficult business, but now every departing Jew brought out coded lists with dozens of names. And once in Israel, these former activists became important contact people and advocates for those left behind.

In Leningrad, even as people held invitations in their hands, actually applying still seemed like a frightening step. As long as the Zionists operated underground, they could feel part of normal society. They could still work or study and raise families in relative quiet. But once they declared their desire to leave, they crossed a psychological rubicon and jeopardized their fragile existence. Moreover, in spite of the thaw, any encounter with the authorities still inspired deep fear. Grisha Vertlib, the first of the Leningrad group to go to OVIR and present his invitation, in early 1969, called his close friends beforehand and asked that his family be taken care of should he fail to return. It was not unusual for a man to assume he wouldn't emerge safely from a government office.

Still, one by one, throughout the next year, most of the members of the Leningrad organization did apply to leave. They quickly became familiar with the formal process of requesting an exit visa, a set of steps that seemed designed to deter even the most ardent Zionist. After having received an invitation and contacting OVIR, an applicant had to gain a special recommendation, called a
kharikteristika,
from his place of work. This involved informing his supervisor of his desire to emigrate. In a few cases, the boss was annoyed but signed off on a standard recommendation. But it was more common for a factory- or office-or unionwide meeting to be held to debate the request. The applicant would be in attendance, and every effort would be made to persuade him of the insanity of going to Israel. And then, once this
kharikteristika
was obtained, the applicant was usually fired from his job or expelled from his school. As if this weren't burden enough, anyone seeking to emigrate also had to obtain permission from any dependents, such as elderly parents or in-laws. Often this added a further indignity, as poor older relatives, afraid of being abandoned, sometimes denied their children permission.

In a very short time, committed Zionists learned this story line well. Every person who went through the process made it easier for the next. They all knew what to expect. Bosses became less surprised when their Jewish employees asked them for
kharikteristikas;
local Communist Party secretaries less frantic when they received phone calls from factory managers asking what to do with a Jew who wanted to leave. And eventually, OVIR offices were transformed from places of fear into Jewish clubs where applicants stood in line for hours with their documents, sharing information and complaining to one another about how long they had been waiting.

But those who started applying in 1969—after seeing the brief exodus of the older activists—were not getting permission. In fact, they were uniformly being refused. As Andropov's directive made clear, the leadership did not want to fling open the gates. They were taking a gamble that letting out a small number of Zionists would solve the problem. Refusal usually came in the form of a phone call from OVIR a few months after a person had filed an application: The state does not presently find it convenient to grant your request.

Yosef Mendelevich received his invitation by sending a postcard to a woman from Riga who had recently left for Israel. "Dear uncle," he wrote her. "Have you forgotten us? Send the documents as soon as possible." Two months later, in November of 1968, he received an invitation from a Yaakov Mendelevich (a made-up relative) in Bat Yam inviting him and his family to Israel. He held on to the invitation for a month, waiting for the right moment to approach OVIR and begin the process. Then, in late December, Mark Blum, mentor to Mendelevich and many of Riga's Zionist youth, got permission to leave. He spent his last evening in Riga with Mendelevich, and before leaving, Blum promised him that they would see each other soon, in Israel. The next morning Mendelevich woke up early and made his way to OVIR.

He had a fairly easy time getting his
kharikteristika.
The manager at the factory where he worked, more curious than angry, asked only that Mendelevich tell him everything he knew about Israel. He happily obliged. In February of 1969, he received a letter telling him that he and his family had been refused, that OVIR had decided that he did not need to emigrate. Mendelevich went to the Interior Ministry to talk to someone about the decision and found a man who handled applications. He smiled at the pale, bespectacled twenty-one-year-old. You're young, the ministry worker told him, and you'll probably be drafted if you go there and then you'll have to fight against the Arabs who are now our allies. Now why would we want to supply manpower to our allies' enemy?

The refusal hit Mendelevich hard. He couldn't bring himself to work or study. He could no longer pretend that anything mattered to him more than being in Israel. Even though he was still very young, he was becoming a forceful presence in the small community. At the most recent Rumbuli memorial ceremony, in the fall of 1968, he had been asked to be a kind of master of ceremonies, reciting poems and giving a lecture he had memorized on the history of Riga's Jews written by a local historian. He was moved by the moment, by the sacredness of the place and the silence in the forest broken only by his booming voice telling the story of the massacre of his people. He had to hold back tears. And when the ceremony was finished, he quickly walked off on his own. His friends thought he was being pretentious, but he just couldn't bring himself to talk. As he walked under the fir trees, he made a vow: he would begin following Jewish law, eat kosher as much as possible, not work on the Sabbath, keep the fast days. His performance at the ceremony had made him a recognizable leader to the Zionist Jews of Riga, but it had also made him decide to pursue his own spiritual route. This decision isolated him even more, not just from the Latvians and Russians around him but also from his fellow Jews.

After OVIR's refusal in February, Mendelevich dropped out of school. He decided to devote himself fully to the struggle. But as soon as he quit the university, he lost his exemption from military service and was immediately drafted. Nothing could have been worse for Mendelevich than to join the Red Army. He showed up at the recruitment office with his stepmother, who told the officer in charge that she was pretty sure something was wrong with Mendelevich. He had stopped studying and had fallen into a deep depression. The officer sent him for a psychiatric analysis, and sensing that this was his chance to get out of service, Mendelevich mumbled his way through the interview, blurting non sequiturs and generally trying to appear crazy. The psychiatrist decided that he should be admitted to the local psychiatric hospital for observation.

For a few weeks, Mendelevich lived in the hospital. He brought with him a copy of the
Iliad
and a book on learning English, both of which were taken away when he refused to engage in the menial tasks required of patients, such as licking envelopes, which Mendelevich found demeaning. The food was terrible. He avoided the other patients, who all seemed to be sedated. His father came to visit him and brought along a radio, and the two listened to Kol Israel. For a few minutes, he could imagine that he was somewhere else. In his isolation, Mendelevich began talking with God. He decided that if he somehow managed to cheat the regime and get out of military service and the hospital, he would deepen his religious commitment. He would begin to study Torah as best he could, and he would pray. He didn't quite know who would teach him Torah, but he was willing to make this bargain with God. If God helped him, then Mendelevich would devote his life to being a devout Jew.

After a month, the doctors at the hospital issued their verdict: though his antisocial behavior made him ineligible for the army, Mendelevich posed no threat and could be released. The next day, he went to the synagogue in Riga's old quarter, where his father had taken him as a boy, and he began to pray.

Many Jews had been inspired to try to leave after the Six-Day War, and now most were stuck, unable to return to life as it was before or to look forward to a life somewhere else. Seemingly out of options, many finally took to writing impassioned letters to the Soviet authorities or Western leaders or both, demanding that the Soviet Union abide by international law and allow free emigration. The idea was not new—Lydia and Boris Slovin, Butman, and others had all considered it at one time or another—but letter writing had always seemed dangerous. Until Yasha Kazakov. His letter had gotten him out. With
Khronika,
the dissidents offered an example of the power of a movement that was engaged in a totally open struggle.

One of the first letters written by a group of Jews was dated February 15, 1969, and came from a few academics in Vilnius, Lithuania; it was addressed to the Lithuanian Communist Party. It detailed examples of state-sponsored anti-Semitism and demanded that these be controlled. It did not insist on emigration, only the resolution of that paradox: "We are not wanted here, we are completely oppressed, forcibly denationalized, and even publicly insulted in the press while at the same time we are forcibly kept here. As the Lithuanian proverb goes, 'He beats and he screams at the same time.'" But the signers decided it was best to leave their names off the letter, writing that "we know well how people who had at one time or another protested against flourishing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union were summarily dealt with. The Party has taught us to be watchful, and we have to be watchful now as we write to the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party. What painful irony."

But very soon, people were signing their names to individual letters renouncing their Soviet citizenship. One of these was Mendel Gordin, Mendelevich's cousin, now graduated from Riga's medical school and a rising young researcher at the Central Bacteriological Institute. His request for an exit visa in February was quickly denied a month later. So on June 1, he sent a letter to Nikolai Podgorny, one of the three men running the Soviet Union. "I categorically declare that it is my will to live only in my own motherland, and I regard Israel as such," he wrote. "Taking this into account, I hereby give up my Soviet citizenship and enclose herewith my passport." Few things could be more dangerous in the Soviet Union than not having an internal passport. It was grounds for immediate arrest and prosecution.

Many such individual petitions followed in the first half of 1969, others from Riga and a few from Moscow, all making similar points. But the authorities saw these as nothing more than small nuisances. Then in August, a letter arrived from an unlikely place, written with such overwhelming poetry that it was impossible to ignore.

The ancient Georgian Jewish community is thought to have arrived in the region following the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 770 BCE, which would make them one of the ten lost tribes. Some date their arrival a little later, to the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. No historian thinks they came later than the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in the first century CE. They had lived in Georgia for centuries by then and developed their own unique Judeo-Georgian language, Gruzinic, along with separate literature and liturgical traditions. They managed to isolate themselves and their culture in enclaves of tightly bound traditional communities. The czars respected their skills as small traders and artisans—with a firm monopoly on the production and sale of Georgian wine—and exempted them from having to live within the Pale of Settlement, the western region of the Russian Empire where most Jews were confined from the time of Catherine the Great until 1917.

Not even the Bolshevik Revolution changed their lives. They managed to keep their synagogues open. In the late 1960s, no more than fifty or sixty synagogues remained in the whole of the Soviet Union, but half of them were in Georgia. And this even though Georgian Jews actually made up a very small percentage of Soviet Jewry. According to the 1959 census, only around fifty thousand of the roughly two and half million Jews in the empire were Georgian Jews. But they held on to their tradition fiercely. In the town of Kutaisi, the Jews famously lay down in the road that led to the synagogue in order to block the local Communist Party's attempt to turn their house of worship into a Komsomol club. These communities continued to keep kosher and, remarkably, circumcised all their male children. There was even some prosperity under the Soviet regime. Flower and fruit sellers had enough money to fly to Leningrad and Moscow each morning to sell their fresh goods in the city streets.

And yet, they wanted to go to Israel. The kind of Judaism practiced by the Georgians was messianic. It preached the ingathering of the exiles, even after more than twenty centuries of Diaspora. They felt that one of the holiest expressions in Judaism was the sentence spoken at the end of the Passover Seder and the Day of Atonement: "Next year in Jerusalem." And so it wasn't surprising that Andropov's directive to allow very limited emigration permitted the departure of the forty-nine Georgian Jewish families who had previously applied. They left in late 1968 and early 1969; these families, along with Riga's Jewish activists, represented the majority of the fifteen hundred exit visas the regime decided to distribute.

As they had in Riga and Leningrad, these Jewish departures inspired hope in others. And as had happened there too, the next applications were followed by mass refusals. Hundreds of families who had believed something miraculous was taking place were left disillusioned and despondent. Some wrote individual letters, and a few made contact with Zionist activists in Moscow. But it was a letter written by eighteen families on August 6, 1969, and addressed to the UN Human Rights Commission, with a copy sent to the prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, that had the greatest impact. It was a petition in almost biblically poetic form. The Georgian Jews took a long historical view on the state of the Jewish people in exile: