When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (22 page)

Resentment and disappointment with the Jewish establishment added fuel to the self-generated motivation of Birnbaum and his students. For Lou Rosenblum, Herb Caron, and the professional middle-aged men who made up the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism, it shaped their identity. The group who found inspiration in the Cassandra-like wartime prophecies of Jabotinsky expected the slowness of American Jewish organizations. But that didn't alleviate their feeling that an unconscionable neglect was taking place. "We don't have much hope at this time that the existing Jewish community organizations will do the job that is required," Rosenblum wrote in a May 1965 letter. "At the national level, the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry is a paper organization ... The whole operation reflects compromise and indecision; in a word, it is a farce." This feeling came through month after month in the publication Rosenblum and Caron started,
Spotlight,
a simple compilation of as much Soviet Jewry news as they could get their hands on. In the November 1965 issue, Rosenblum editorialized: "From its inception in April 1964, to the present, the Conference has given the appearance of action without the effect of action. Possibly this shadow organization may serve to salve the conscience of our Jewish leaders. In truth, however, the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry has a been a sorry response to the impending religious and cultural genocide of three million Jews."

After Rosenblum and Caron returned from the Washington conference in 1964, the Cleveland group decided that it would have to fill the void. Rosenblum, the NASA scientist, soon eclipsed Herb Caron as the leader of the organization, which had changed its name in early 1965 to the more permanent Cleveland
Council
on Soviet Anti-Semitism. And with the change, a new seriousness and productivity came to characterize the activists. Rosenblum was a meticulous and organized man who immediately grasped that the struggle would be a long-term one. Where Caron was emotional and impassioned, Rosenblum was more concerned with the logistics of building an organization. In a May 1965 letter to Louis Nemzer, a Sovietologist at Ohio State University, Rosenblum set out his goals: the CCSA was "operating under the premise that vital to a solution of this problem is 1) the U.S. government on record as condemning Soviet anti-Semitic practices and 2) the U.S. government prepared to exact concessions, at an appropriate time, from Soviet leaders involving cessation of their anti-Jewish policies."

The second step, Rosenblum knew, could not be achieved without the first, without increasing—as Moshe Decter implored the students to do—public awareness. It would take more than a hundred or even a thousand voices of protest. He needed to excite the whole community if he wanted to create any real pressure. But unlike Birnbaum, who had the advantage of New York City's huge Jewish population, the UN Soviet mission, and national media, Rosenblum did not have the resources of public protest at his disposal.

He decided to focus on two fronts: create educational materials and build a network of like-minded individuals in other cities. The objectives would feed off each other. The materials started pouring out first. He developed a kind of Soviet Jewry handbook, forty pages in length, that provided lists of possible activities that any community could undertake (prayers to incorporate into services, tools for teachers, and so on). He commissioned an artistically inclined member of Beth Israel to create a dramatic logo that could be used for buttons and seals. As it turned out, that drawing, a collection of sad-looking Russian Jews in peddler caps and babushkas drawn in Communist red, was compelling enough that Rosenblum sold sheets of seals for fifty cents each. Yaakov Birnbaum bought them by the box.

In 1966, Rosenblum coordinated the filming of a short movie. Up until that point, the only available film relating to Soviet Jewry was a twenty-nine-minute piece narrated by the gangstery actor Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg of Romania), who played the role of a prosecutor putting the Soviet Union on trial for its treatment of Jews. Rosenblum set out to make a more streamlined film. It took a few months, but he convinced the local Jewish federation to fund the cost of the camera rentals and got Abraham Joshua Heschel to narrate from behind his desk at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The finished film jumped between Heschel's rumpled-looking face and scenes of a fake Russian family, who were portrayed by Rosenblum's young daughter Miriam and members of Beth Israel.

All these materials were featured in
Spotlight,
which acted as a key resource for far-flung communities that wanted to be involved. Through it, Rosenblum made contact with other activists, who saw in him an adviser and guide. He even received a letter from a Jewish community in South Africa ordering half a dozen copies of the film. Rosenblum set up distribution points where he could send a few hundred copies of
Spotlight
at a time—three hundred to Los Angeles, a hundred to Houston. Then when he traveled to these cities for work—as he increasingly did once he was promoted to section head and then branch chief of his lab—he arranged to meet new contacts. By the mid-1960s, he had a mailing list of twelve hundred people, half of whom came from outside Cleveland.

Rosenblum and his CCSA were serving a different function than Birnbaum with his singing students in New York were. They were developing the rudimentary infrastructure of an alternative national organization made up entirely of volunteers. Even though Rosenblum worked full-time at NASA and had a family with young children, he committed himself obsessively. Evenings he would come home, kiss his wife, Evy, wave to the kids, and then descend to the basement to type answers to the hundreds of letters he received weekly. From 1966 on he was so busy with the Soviet Jewry work that he hired a full-time office manager to help him.

Rosenblum's and Birnbaum's anger at the Jewish establishment was often overwrought. But it wasn't entirely misplaced. The organization that had been launched with much fanfare at the April 1964 conference in Washington was useless. Supplied with neither budget nor staff, it spent its first two years in a dysfunctional rotation system that passed responsibility to a different Jewish organization every six months. This left no time for any one person to take the initiative. Eventually, the National Jewish Community Relations Council, the umbrella group that coordinated the activities of hundreds of centers of Jewish life all over the country, adopted the orphaned entity.

When representatives of the composite organizations met in April of 1966 to mark two years of the American Jewish Conference's existence, the language was lofty. Gathered at Congress Hall, the site of the birth of the Bill of Rights, the Jewish leaders read out a Declaration of Rights for Soviet Jewry that was then voted on and adopted. "We, the representatives of American Jewry, are met today in a Hall hallowed by history, echoing with the voices of men who made the age-old dream of liberty the law of these United State of America ... The year was 1791. Nearly two centuries later countless millions throughout the world still wait. Among them are three million of our fellow-Jews in the USSR."

Lou Rosenblum once again crashed the proceedings and tried to push through yet another resolution providing permanent resources to the organization. As in 1964, he found wide support among the delegates. But there was still no will among the leadership to move beyond rhetoric. Disappointed, Lou wrote in the next issue of
Spotlight
that the "event was merely a reshaping of previous pronouncements and no means were provided for carrying out the suggested actions."

In spite of Rosenblum's disenchantment, the establishment was not completely silent or irrelevant. It was impossible to ignore the growing clamor among American Jews to get at least some information on Soviet Jewry, if not a response to the problem. And in fact, when it did act, the Jewish leadership could harness incredible manpower and resources. The first two public events organized by the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry dwarfed Birnbaum's student demonstrations. A rally in Madison Square Garden in June 1965 drew nearly twenty thousand people. In Washington, the Eternal Light Vigil in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, brought ten thousand people from more than one hundred communities. The "Matzoh of Oppression" program of Passover 1966 was very popular. In two hundred and fifty thousand distributed booklets, the AJCSJ instructed American Jews to include an extra matzo in their Seders to represent the oppression of Soviet Jews.

The establishment also had the clout. The Madison Square Garden rally drew the likes of Mayor Robert Wagner—who declared the day, June 3, Conference on Soviet Jewry Day in New York City—as well as the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph and Senators Jacob Javits and Robert Kennedy; there was even a message of solidarity from President Johnson. But, like the general atmosphere of the rally, the president's tone was absent much passion: "In a spirit of peace and reason, we express our earnest hope that the Soviet leadership will ameliorate the situation of its Jewish minority. Doing so would go a long way toward removing a moral and emotional barrier between us and contribute to a relaxation of tensions."

For the establishment, there was still a very strong kinship between the struggle for civil rights and the support of Soviet Jewry. Morris Abram, then the U.S. representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, told the Madison Square Garden rally, "We shall protest; we shall march; we shall overcome." At one Philadelphia rally in March of 1965, a banner read
SELMA OR MOSCOW: HUMAN LIBERTY IS INDIVISIBLE. END SOVIET ANTI-SEMITISM.

Jewish leaders maintained close connections to those older, now mainstream civil rights leaders—even while younger and more militant activists were taking over. Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington, a moderating force and a genuine believer in the black-Jewish coalition, frequently participated at Soviet Jewry demonstrations. At the Eternal Light Vigil in front of the White House—an event that was almost postponed because some Jewish leaders thought it was too provocative — Rustin used one of Dr. King's favorite lines, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," and said that he would therefore not be silent "about what happens to my brothers and sisters who happen to be Jews in the USSR." King himself frequently spoke on the issue, a result partly of his close friendship with Heschel. In December of 1966, from his home in Atlanta, King addressed thirty-two Soviet Jewry protests simultaneously by phone hookup. He told them that "the sincere and genuine concern felt by so many people around the world for this problem should impel the Soviet government not only to effect a solution, but to do it with all deliberate speed." The last line was an echo of the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision.

Maintaining this analogy, civil rights for both blacks and Soviet Jews, appealed to the establishment because it had a way of neutering the struggle. If the goal of the civil rights movement was to pressure the U.S. government to change its laws, than that of the Soviet Jewry movement was to pressure the Soviet Union. This avoided the conclusion that Lou Rosenblum and Yaakov Birnbaum had come to—that the real pressure had to be directed at the American government, that only an American president had the carrots and the sticks to make a Kosygin or a Brezhnev change his policies. It was this fundamental tactical difference that began to divide the activists and the establishment. For all the rhetorical flourish of Morris Abram wanting to "overcome," these Jewish leaders were reluctant to put the onus for change on the U.S. government. They did not want to be confrontational. It was easier to complain to the deaf and distant Soviet Union.

These limited objectives put the Jewish establishment in lockstep with an administration that was unwilling to open up another front in the Cold War, especially given the escalation in Vietnam. In one memo, Walt Rostow, a close adviser to Johnson, noted that leaders of the Jewish community had met on August 4, 1966, with Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, and been told that "the current Vietnam situation was a limiting factor on how much influence he or the President might have with Soviet leaders on the Jewish problem." Speaking at the Madison Square Garden rally, Dr. Max Nussbaum, the head of the American Zionist Council, emphasized, as many others had before him, that "it is not the purpose of the American Jewish community to add to East-West difficulties and to make the 'cold' war hotter." At the same time, Rosenblum and Birnbaum had decided that this was precisely what they should be doing.

Then there was Nahum Goldmann, an aging but still influential voice in the Jewish community, who refused to condemn the Soviet Union. When he heard about the Madison Square Garden rally, he quickly released a statement disassociating himself from some of the more emotional rhetoric of the speakers. "To compare in any way the policy of the Soviet government with the Nazis is not only a hideous distortion, but highly unfair to Soviet Russia, which has saved hundred of thousands of Jews when they escaped from the Nazis at the beginning of the Second World War," he huffed.

Goldmann had heard that some of the younger people at the rally, Birnbaum's students, were carrying placards that read
LET MY PEOPLE GO.
The implication was too provocative for him. It would offend the Soviets and would be seen as an affront to their sovereignty. It was also, he felt, naive to assume that it was what the Soviet Jews themselves desired. This was increasingly the official line of the Jewish establishment, whose members insisted in all their pronouncements that family reunification was their concern, not wide-scale emigration. In his famous December 1966 statement that had stimulated demands for visas, Kosygin had promised his government would try to accommodate these requests. But as the slogan—a powerful allusion to the biblical story of Exodus—made clear, there were many who were starting to think that simply allowing people to study Talmud or eat matzo was not enough. They were beginning to feel—even before they heard from Soviet Jews themselves—that there was only one solution to this problem.