When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (26 page)

On Friday evening, May 9, when Forman was to present his grievances, Kahane stood guard at the synagogue with forty of his toughest-looking kids, telling each of the reporters who gathered there that if Forman should show up, he personally would break both his legs. The
chayas
were all dressed in combat fatigues and berets and carried assorted weapons, from iron pipes to nunchucks. As it happened, Forman never arrived. But Jewish leaders were horrified by the appearance of these Jewish gang members. The head of the Anti-Defamation League immediately issued a statement saying, "The Jewish Defense League is a self-appointed group of vigilantes whose protection the Jewish community does not need or want." The head of Reform Judaism in America, quoted in the
New York Times,
went a step further: "Jews, carrying baseball bats and chains, standing in phalanxes, like goon squads, in front of synagogues are no less offensive and, in essence, no different from whites wearing robes and hoods, led by self-styled ministers of the gospel, standing in front of burning crosses."

Kahane knew that he had stabbed the Jewish establishment where it hurt most: their respectability. And now he wanted to turn the knife a bit. On June 24, more than a month after the Temple Emanu-El incident, Kahane placed an advertisement in the
Times
that contained a photo of six of his
chayas
standing with their bats in front of the synagogue doors beneath the words
Is This Any Way for a Nice Jewish Boy to Behave?
It was targeted at the Jewish leadership, at the "rich and respectable Jews," as Kahane referred to them. He wanted to humiliate them, and he wanted to gain publicity by presenting to the world another image of the American Jew, a mixture of militaristic Israeli and lawless Black Panther. Enough of the "nice Irving"—Kahane's term for the obsequious Jew. "Maybe there are times when there is no other way to get across to the extremist that the Jew is not quite the patsy some think he is" was Kahane's answer in the ad. "Maybe some people and organizations are too nice. Maybe in times of crisis, Jewish boys should not be that nice. Maybe—just maybe—nice people build their own road to Auschwitz."

The Jewish establishment got his message—as did everyone else. The prospect of Jews joining the ranks of bomb-wielding youths, committing violence as a way of upsetting the social order—riots were then burning through American cities—was horrifying, and not just to Jewish leaders. The
New York Times,
in an editorial that took up the question of whether this was appropriate behavior for Jewish boys, said, "No—not Jewish boys, nor Christian boys, nor white boys, nor black boys, nor any other kind of boys." Referring to Kahane's hysterical exclamations in the ad—"We are speaking of Jewish survival! We are speaking of the American Dream!"—the
Times
' editors had their own exclamation for what this vision of Jewish vigilantism would herald: "It's more like an American nightmare."

For Jewish leaders, this "American nightmare" making headlines almost every week seemed to have emerged from nowhere. Like Shlomo Carlebach, who combined a distinct tradition—Hasidism—with early 1960s counterculture, Kahane blended the political philosophy of revisionism with the extreme identity politics of the late 1960s. Kahane was born in Brooklyn in 1932, the son of revisionists. In 1940, at the age of eight, he had seen Vladimir Jabotinsky drink a cup of tea in his parents' Flatbush, Brooklyn, living room, hours after delivering a speech calling for a Jewish army to fight alongside the allies in the war.

Martin David Kahane's father had become deeply involved with the revisionist freedom fighters (or terrorists, depending on how one perceived them) struggling to free Palestine from its British protectors and predominantly Arab inhabitants. During the war, he was one of the main American operatives of the Irgun, the right-wing pre-state Jewish militia, raising money to buy rifles and bullets that he would then smuggle to Palestine. Even as a boy, Kahane echoed the passions of his father, a popular rabbi at a local synagogue on West First Street. In addition to dinner guests from the Jewish underground, the war in Europe was a constant presence, and at the age of seven, Kahane drew a comic strip,
The Adventures of Bagelman,
in which a bagel in a cape saves Jews from Nazi Germany.

His penchant for flamboyance showed early, with his first arrest at fifteen. Kahane had joined Betar. Upon hearing that Ernest Bevin, the British foreign minister, was coming to speak at the United Nations, he and his friends gathered at the docks to pelt Bevin's boat with eggs and tomatoes. The police caught the boys, and a photo of Kahane with a cop's arm around his neck appeared in the
New York Daily News
the next day.

All the paradoxes that would define the adult later were present in the young man. While he was always ambitious, Kahane had a hard time carrying out the simple tasks of daily life. He was a daydreamer and a narcissist, deeply convinced of his own chosenness. Even his parents loaded him with a kind of messianic weight. Interviewed just as the JDL was gaining notice, Charles Kahane said of his son that "maybe destiny sent him to bring redemption to his tortured people throughout the world." He had striking features—bushy eyebrows, a thick wavy pile of black hair, and a long, brooding face—and other students seemed to be attracted to him.

After five years at the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, he tried attending a secular school, Abraham Lincoln High School, but quickly returned to his religious world. Betar played an important role in his youth and he was often dressed in the blue pants and brown shirts of the Betari (the same uniform the young Riga Jews had worn back in the twenties). And his father even encouraged him to help the group load crates with weapons that were being smuggled from the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, to Israel. As he would in later years with his young JDL followers, Kahane often rode through Brooklyn in a sound truck, Hebrew songs and the speeches of Jabotinsky blaring into the night. Even as a teenager, he saw himself as a future leader, the eventual prime minister of Israel.

In the fifties, while continuing his Betar activities (the FBI opened a file on him in 1955), he earned a number of degrees, first graduating with his bachelor's from Brooklyn College and then receiving, in the same year, a law degree from New York Law School (though he never managed to pass the bar exam), a master's in international affairs from NYU, and his rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva Mirrer in Brooklyn. It was at the yeshiva where he changed his name from Martin to Meir.

In 1958, he took a job at a Conservative congregation in Howard Beach, a working-class section of Queens, more to support his new family—he had gotten married to a local girl, Libby Blum, in 1956—than out of any real desire. His idealism immediately made itself known and he set out to move the members of the synagogue toward Orthodoxy. He loudly critiqued the bourgeois Judaism of the suburbs, where Jews attended synagogue only on the High Holy Days and ignored most of the commandments. The teenagers in the congregation listened, and he discovered here his effect on young people, many of whom eventually announced to their parents that they had decided to keep kosher and not use electricity on the Sabbath. In 1960 he tried to put up a
mehitza,
the traditional dividing wall between men and women, and the congregation finally ousted him.

Thus began nearly a decade of floundering and the start of a strange double life, full of secrets and dealings with the government. He was lost, convinced of his own greatness but unable to convince others. His first job after leaving the rabbinate, and the one that he would maintain for the rest of his life, was as a writer for the
Jewish Press,
an influential Orthodox weekly with a circulation of a hundred and thirty thousand. Kahane started as a sportswriter, working out of the paper's rundown Coney Island office, covering the Yankees during the 1961 World Series. Then, restless and disconnected from the political life he wanted to pursue, he went to Israel, telling people before he left that the next time they heard from him he would be a member of the Israeli cabinet. After a few frustrating months during which he struggled through his stutter to speak Hebrew, he returned to the United States. Needing money to supplement his
Jewish Press
income, he took a paper route in his neighborhood in Queens. Now over thirty and with children at home to feed, he was ashamed at how little he had accomplished despite his big dreams.

When he was asked in 1963 to join one of his old neighborhood Betar buddies, Joseph Churba, in a moneymaking political scheme, Kahane jumped at the opportunity. The idea was to start a research and intelligence-gathering business in Washington, D.C., where they could offer their services to government agencies. Churba, a shady figure, had already forged ties with the CIA and the Mossad. Soon, Kahane was developing a new persona and new contacts. He began using the name Michael King and splitting his week between Washington and Queens. The enterprise was called the Institute for Research in Foreign Affairs, and the two received a few ghostwriting jobs, once putting together a position paper on Cyprus for Senator Javits.

Kahane effectively had two lives. He rented an apartment on the Upper East Side, on Eighty-fifth Street, which he kept secret from his family. During this period, he resembled a con man more than a respected rabbi. He would often meet people at parties and introduce himself as a foreign correspondent who worked for a wire service in Africa. He told more than a few people that he was Presbyterian. And there were women. In June of 1966, Kahane, using his Michael King pseudonym, met a twenty-two-year-old model in a Second Avenue bar. Gloria Jean D'Argenio, who sometimes used the name Estelle Donna Evans, had come to the city seeking fame. Captivated by her beauty (olive skin and long black hair), Kahane fell in love. And without revealing the fact that he was a rabbi or that he had a wife and four children living in Queens, he proposed; they set a wedding date of August 1, 1966—his thirty-fourth birthday. Two days before the wedding, he dropped off a letter at her apartment demanding an end to the affair. Evans, distraught, walked around the city that night with her roommate, and at four thirty in the morning climbed up the beams of the Queensboro Bridge and jumped into the East River, three hundred and fifty feet below, his letter stuffed into a purse slung over her shoulder. Incredibly, she survived the fall. A photo of her broken body being pulled out of the water made the front page of the
New York Daily News
the next morning. She died later that day, and Kahane—according to the 1971
New York Times
article that exposed the story—was heartbroken. "In the year after she died," the article revealed, "he would sometimes place roses on her grave."

But women were not the only secret part of Kahane's life during this period. He also worked for the FBI. In 1963, the agency asked him and Churba to infiltrate the John Birch Society, the extreme right-wing anti-Communist group that also happened to be virulently anti-Semitic. They took on the job, traveling periodically throughout the West, where most of the members lived, and providing names to the government. This lasted until 1965, when they began working covertly in a different capacity: they started another front group, Consultant Research Associates, whose goal was to promote the Vietnam War among American Jews, something Kahane was already doing in his
Jewish Press
columns. Through this group they set up what they called the July Fourth Movement, which was an attempt, funded by the government, to counter antiwar activism on college campuses.

The rising tide of anti-Vietnam sentiment among Jews and college students was too powerful to counter, though they did try, publishing a book in 1967 titled
The Jewish Stake in Vietnam,
based partly on Kahane's columns. The listed coauthors were Churba, Meir Kahane, and Michael King. In the introduction, Kahane delineated the source of his virulent anti-Communism: "All Americans have a stake in this grim war, but Jews have a very special interest in the successful outcome of this struggle. For whenever the Communist machine achieves power, not only are political, social, and economic rights swept away, but spiritual persecution is inevitable and mercilessly practiced. Because of this, it is vital that Jews realize the danger to their very survival as free human beings should Communism ever achieve victory." And the dedication of the book? "To the enslaved Jews of Russia, with the fervent prayer for redemption."

Not long after the book was published, Kahane left Churba's company, dropped the King persona, and took a job as a rabbi back in Queens. He hadn't yet found a true outlet for his unbridled ambition or a large enough audience for his gospel of Jewish pride and purity. But within the year, he would start the JDL, and with young disaffected Jewish men as his shock troops, he would quickly have all he wanted, as well as one more new identity: the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane.

In mid-1969, Kahane and his Jewish Defense League were on a collision course with the Soviet Jewry movement. But before he could grab the movement and mold it into his image, it was already beginning to change. After the Six-Day War, the Jews of Silence stopped being so silent. The letters that came out, first from Kazakov and then from Kochubievsky, were covered in the major American newspapers. When Kochubievsky's plea was reprinted in the
New York Times
and his arrest and ultimate sentencing were later reported in detail, the protest stopped being abstract. Here was a real man, inspired by the Six-Day War, who was answering back, saying that he did want to leave and providing the student activists of SSSJ with a human face. That face was soon plastered on posters and made into buttons that demanded
FREE KOCHUBIEVSKY!
He was their first political prisoner. Yaakov Birnbaum felt vindicated. The publication of Kazakov's letter in the West had earned him a quick exit visa. Kochubievsky's story didn't emerge in time, and he was arrested and imprisoned for three years. More noise, not less, was what the Soviet Jews needed.