When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (23 page)

Interestingly, Rosenblum and Birnbaum weren't the only ones frustrated by what they saw as the
shtadlonus
of the American Jewish community. The Israelis also were growing increasingly impatient. Still working secretly through Lishkat Hakesher, the almost completely unknown office in Tel Aviv run by Shaul Avigur, Israel used its emissaries in London, Paris, and New York to push its agenda. In the United States, Meir Rosenne had been working since 1961 as the consul-general in New York and had at his side the indefatigable and ornery intellectual Moshe Decter. The message the two were trying to impart was that the Jewish establishment needed to do more. In his typically eviscerating tone, Decter wrote in April of 1965 to the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the coordinating body of Reform Judaism, berating it for its passivity, or what he described as a "wait-and-see ostrich policy while Soviet Jewry continues to be spiritually atomized and pulverized." He continued, "Doesn't your conscience, and perhaps even some slight vision of history's judgment, intrude ever so slightly on your ill-informed and unwarranted complacence?"

The two most active groups, Rosenblum's in Cleveland and Birnbaum's in New York, were perfect foils for prodding the establishment toward deeper involvement. Through Rosenne and Decter, Israel gave subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle direction, helped the groups find funding, and provided information. Starting in 1965, the Lishka had a forceful leader running its operations out of Washington, Nehemiah Levanon. A brusque, barrel-chested Israeli, Levanon had been with the Nativ operation practically since its inception, and with Avigur now aging and increasingly detached, he was taking on more responsibility. Levanon was born in Estonia and had grown up in the Zionist socialist youth movements of the Baltics, immigrating to Israel in 1938 and starting a kibbutz in the upper Galilee, Kfar Blum, where he happily worked as a farm manager until 1952. That's when the head of the Mossad, Isser Harel, personally recruited him and sent him to Moscow with the first group of Nativ secret agents—his cover at the Israeli embassy was agricultural attaché—where he traveled the country trying to connect with Jews. So began his career with the Lishka. In 1955, he helped set up Bar, the secret campaign to foment an international movement, and ten years later he was directing most of its activities—including overseeing Decter and Rosenne in New York—from his perch in the American capital. In 1965, not long after his move to Washington, Levanon flew to Cleveland to met with Rosenblum at his suburban home, but he didn't reveal to him then or subsequently the nature of the Lishka. Rosenblum was under the impression that the hearty Israeli sitting in his living room and drinking coffee was simply an expert on Soviet Jews, perhaps a case officer at the Soviet desk of the Foreign Office, one privy to a lot of information. He would never have guessed that Levanon answered directly to the prime minister of Israel.

In a letter to Rosenblum in November of 1965, Decter made cryptic reference to his bosses and expressed what must have been Levanon's opinion of the midwestern agitators' usefulness: "Let me again for the nth time—and I shall never tire of repeating it—tell you how deeply impressed and moved I am (and this goes also for some of our mutual Jewish friends from abroad) with the devotion, intelligence and energy that you and your colleagues in Cleveland have demonstrated for so long against such frustrating odds. I believe, and please convey this to Herb and the others, that when some day the history of the rescue of Russian Jewry will be written, the Cleveland group will occupy an honorable place in it. What higher aspiration can there be for us who are members of so history-conscious and so historic-laden a people?"

Decter was a mysterious figure to Rosenblum and Birnbaum. They had a vague sense that he was connected to the Israelis but had no real understanding of the source of his authority, why he was able to sit in on the most important establishment meetings, why his letters sounded more like directives than the musings of a one-man operation. His letters in fact strongly reflect the balancing act the Israelis were performing. While they were committed to working through the establishment, sensing that only these respected Jewish leaders could attract real attention to the issue, they also saw the passion of the grassroots groups and wanted desperately to harness it for their own purposes. In Decter's correspondence with the CCSA he disparaged the establishment over and over again in solidarity with a frustrated Rosenblum, describing the "nearly Byzantine bureaucratic and organizational red tape" that had begun to "dominate [the] thinking and actions" of the current head of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, or painting Hillel, the national campus association for Jewish students, as a "top-heavy, tired and moribund organization of empty rabbis." The letters were filled with a growing anger: "But after all these years and all the alleged brains at their disposal and with the enormous budgets at their command, they can still ask, like simpletons, what is there for us to do."

At the same time, though, Decter tried to moderate the ardor that was coming out of Cleveland, telling them to simplify and be more realistic, to exercise "circumspection and caution," and discounting the idea that the establishment could be written off. In a revealing letter to Herb Caron on December 16, 1965, Decter wrote,

As you well know, these past six years have provided me with enough bitterness and frustration in dealing with Jewish lay and professional "leaders" to last a lifetime; were it not for this cause, I would continue to be, as I was when I began, the alienated, aloof American Jewish intellectual which all my friends are.... Yet despite my long-range detachment, at least from the leadership high and low, the bedrock fact with which I must live in this work—
and that goes for anyone else in this work
—is that we must work with and through the Jewish community, which unfortunately but inescapably means
coexistence
with the leadership. As Weizmann is reputed to have said, "such are my Jews; I have no better ones."

He ends the letter with a PS that is the clearest articulation of the role he envisioned for the Cleveland group: "I continue to regard the existence and activity of the CCSA not only as invaluable in themselves but also as goads to the Establishment. Thus, I am fully aware of the tricky and delicate task involved in being a goad which at the same time does not entirely alienate the goadee—but this is what I believe your path must be."

Decter traveled the country in 1965 and 1966 trying to motivate other communities to follow the Cleveland model, with only moderate success, and he had some hesitation about how well he could control a whole legion of Rosenblums or Birnbaums. At the same time, he worried his activities might alienate the establishment. In a letter to a Rabbi Shimon Paskow in Northridge, California, Decter advised that "it is time for you to create an ad hoc committee in your community along the lines of the Cleveland group." But he ended his letter on an ominous note, indicative of how hamstrung Decter and the Israelis behind him were in their manipulation of the American Jewish community. "I ask you with the utmost seriousness to destroy this letter, for despite everything and regardless of even the most optimistic of eventualities, I must willy-nilly continue to cooperate with the Establishment, to seek ends which only the official power structure can achieve. As you see, each instrument has its tone and its own function in the overall orchestra."

One of Meir Rosenne's duties as an Israeli agent of the Lishka was to brief and debrief the few people who visited the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1965, Rosenne sat down at the Israeli consulate in Manhattan with a thin, sallow-looking man who had sunken eyes and wisps of thin hair plastered against his wide forehead. Rosenne was to give him advice for his upcoming trip to Russia. Since the publication in 1960 of the English translation of his minimalist Holocaust memoir
Night,
Elie Wiesel had fashioned himself into a
maggid,
a kind of Hasidic storytelling preacher that was common in his childhood shtetl of Sighet, Romania. And though the point of his preaching was to "give testimony for the dead," he was now on a mission that would make him, as he put it in his typically self-aggrandizing and slightly overblown style, "a messenger of the living." The jovial Rosenne, faced with the seriousness of the thirty-eight-year-old writer, told him to beware of beautiful Russian women who might suddenly show up naked in his hotel room or train compartment. They could be KGB agents. Wiesel did not laugh.

Night
began life as an eight-hundred-page Yiddish account of Wiesel's family's war story, starting in 1941 when he was thirteen and ending with his lonely liberation by American soldiers from Buchenwald, where he had watched his father slowly die. The book was clearly influenced by the existentialist writers then popular in France, where Wiesel lived following the war, working as a journalist for the Israeli newspaper
Yediot Aharonot.
Championed by his friend the French writer François Mauriac, who once said about Wiesel that "he has the look of Lazarus about him," he cut down his text to 121 pages, transforming a long, anguished screed into a novel with the cool, spare detachment of Camus. The book was extremely popular; its power lay in its simplicity, the horror distilled to a fine, sharpened point. In America, where Wiesel moved in order to become UN correspondent for
Yediot,
Wiesel's book found as much success as it had in France. He was soon churning out books at a rapid rate, adding
L'Aube
and
Le Jour
to form a trilogy with
La Nuit,
and gaining many accolades for writing about the Holocaust at a time when very few were (a reviewer in
Commentary
declared
Night
"almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism"). The awards began arriving in the mid-1960s. By 1965, Wiesel had become more than just another memoirist: he represented the Holocaust. Just as the genocide was beginning to become an accepted topic of thought for Americans, Wiesel's mournful face, which he presented at an endless stream of readings and moralizing lectures, became the image of the quintessential survivor, righteous in his insistence that we never forget.

In September of 1965, during the High Holy Days, Wiesel began his personal fact-finding mission to the Soviet Union, traveling to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Tbilisi. As he would write in his popular account of the trip,
The Jews of Silence,
he had been skeptical for many years about the true state of Soviet Jewry.

I refused to believe it. Like many people, I was alive to the reports of Jewish suffering in Russia. I read all the books and articles and heard testimony given at public meetings or behind closed doors. Yet I was unwilling, or unable, to believe it. I had too many questions, too many doubts and misgivings—not about the fact of Jewish suffering in the Soviet Union but about its scope ... If synagogues are being closed in Russia, I reasoned, Jews will simply go on praying in the ones that remain open. Are families prevented from reuniting? A new regime will soon come to power and the policy will change. Does the press conduct a campaign of anti-Semitism? Does it portray Jews as black marketers, swindlers, drunkards? Does it disparage the state of Israel and malign the Zionist movement? This, too, will pass.... The essential thing is that they be permitted to live, that their existence itself not be endangered, that there be no pogroms. And in Russia there are no pogroms; no one will dispute that. There are no detention camps. The situation, in other words, is not so unbearable.

Wiesel's few weeks in the Soviet Union changed his mind. He was bewildered and agitated in equal measure by the Jews he met. Some of these encounters were as mystical as Shlomo Carlebach's account of the spontaneous weeping of the young Jews of Prague. On Wiesel's first day in Moscow, a man came up to him, tightly wrapped in a coat and wearing a hat pulled down so far that his face was obscured. In a voice "choked and fearful" he whispered to the writer in Yiddish, "Do you know what is happening to us?" and then quickly scurried away. In Wiesel's telling, the whole trip had this quality, a cross between a Hasidic tale and the work of Kafka. The Jews he discovered were fearful to the point of paralysis. "Time after time, people with whom I had been talking slipped away without saying good-by or left me in the middle of a sentence." The book the trip produced was an examination of this fear, an attempt to penetrate it. "Why do they behave like a community of terrorized captives, on the brink of some awful abyss?"

Wiesel didn't really know what to make of these furtive Jews because, counterbalanced with this mysterious secretiveness, there was also great exuberance. Present at the annual Simchat Torah celebrations in front of the Great Choral Synagogue in Moscow, Wiesel was filled with awe. "Where did they all come from?" Wiesel wondered.

Who sent them here? How did they know it was to be tonight on Arkhipova Street near the Great Synagogue? Who told them that tens of thousands of boys and girls would gather here to sing and dance and rejoice in the joy of the Torah? They who barely know each other and know even less of Judaism—how did they know that? I spent hours among them, dazed and excited, agitated by an ancient dream. I forgot the depression that had been building up over the past weeks. I forgot everything except the present and the future. I have seldom felt so proud, so happy, so optimistic. The purest light is born in darkness. Here there is darkness; here there will be light. There must be—it has already begun to burn.

It was the highlight of his visit, but a confusing one. He stood amid the swirling dancing and singing, and in his book he described a moment that exemplified the incongruousness of all this light suddenly emerging out of darkness. He observed a young woman, "dark-haired and vivacious," standing in the middle of a circle and leading a chorus. "Who are we?" she shouted. "Jews!" the group answered. "What are we?" "Jews!" "What shall we remain?" "Jews!" Wiesel was moved by such a pure expression of passionate identification—this when he could hardly get random Soviet Jews he met on the street to admit they were, indeed, Jewish. Later on, he found the young woman. He peppered her with questions, but it was clear that she knew nothing about Judaism and even regurgitated some of the state propaganda (Israel, she said, was "aggressive, racist, and capitalist"). When he asked her finally why she wanted so much to be a Jew, she answered, "I'll tell you why I'm a Jew. Because I like to sing."