When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (27 page)

By 1969, more and more letters from Soviet Jews were reaching the West. Letters from Riga. Letters from Leningrad. A few from Moscow. All pleading to get out. The fear of speaking that Elie Wiesel had described seemed to be dissipating—at least to some degree. The Israelis had lost their outpost in Moscow after the Six-Day War, but they had still been wary of picking a fight with a superpower that could easily send more arms to Egypt and Syria. Yet in 1969, the news of the heart-wrenching letter from the eighteen Georgian Jewish families made it impossible for the head of the Jewish State not to comment. Golda Meir read their letter on television, and then, in a major address opening the seventh Knesset at the end of November, she announced a shift in policy. The days of "quiet talks and quiet diplomacy" were over. Not only was Israel declaring itself opposed to the Soviet Union's treatment of Jews, it was demanding that the Soviets "allow every Jew who wants to leave the country to come here to us."

To the grassroots groups in America, even this new, public engagement on Israel's part did not go far enough. Lou Rosenblum, for one, continued to be frustrated. His web of contacts was growing wider and wider. He had a student in Los Angeles who had started an organization at UCLA. There were two small groups in San Francisco, one just starting up in Washington, and a handful of other isolated activists. And here he was, still working a full-time job at NASA, playing the role of linchpin and drawing on the help of volunteers to do it.

Rosenblum's tenuous connection to the Israeli Lishka—the nature of which was still a mystery to him—had by late 1967 almost completely snapped. The disenchantment had begun after a strange meeting with Nehemiah Levanon in September of that year. The Israeli representative of the secret office had flown to Cleveland to deliver a directive. He arrived on a Sunday morning while Rosenblum was still teaching Hebrew school at his synagogue. Levanon, a man used to being treated deferentially, was made to wait. When they finally sat down to talk, he was curt and gruff, thoroughly annoyed. He had just acquired ten thousand dollars for the cause, he told Rosenblum, and he wanted to start an academic committee for Soviet Jewry, an association of hundreds of college professors who would sign petitions and place ads. Levanon wanted Rosenblum to take a prominent role in organizing the committee. Rosenblum, sure this would be a waste of money, refused. Four years of grassroots activism had taught him that Jewish academics were not the best way to publicize the problem. He could think of at least a dozen better ways to use the funds, he said. Levanon got upset and insistent. Few people ever turned him down. In Israel, Zionist authority was not questioned, and Levanon, who took orders from the prime minister only, was being rejected by this little scientist. He left angry. And Rosenblum was confused. He began wondering about Levanon's identity—who was this man to demand such unquestioned authority? And he wondered too about the Israeli's judgment. With so much pressing work to do, why propose such an uninspired and futile organization as an academic committee? Why these overly cautious steps?

A few months after the meeting with Levanon, Rosenblum turned his attention to the third biennial meeting of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, to be held in April of 1968. He once again prepared to show up and agitate for a national organization with teeth. This time he had real numbers. He figured it would take half a million dollars a year. This would fund a newsletter and a full-time staff, including people to develop community groups and do public relations. He had calculated that this amount constituted only about 0.5 percent of what was collected annually by the American Jewish Welfare Fund Appeal. Just as he was getting ready to present all this information, he received a letter that made him realize the full extent of the anger that was building in the grass roots. Hillel Levine was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary who was studying under Abraham Joshua Heschel, and he had just returned from a clandestine trip to the Soviet Union—Wiesel himself had asked Levine to go. He wrote to Rosenblum about a sit-in he had just staged at one of the planning meetings for the conference: He'd burst in with six students, declared that the seven of them were the Emergency Committee for Soviet Jewry, and demanded, as he wrote in his letter, that "should they not provide for a budget for the AJCSJ, we will picket and expose them to the press." The students' anger, Levine wrote, was treated as "youthful rebellion" and they were kicked out.

Rosenblum wanted to send a message to Jewish organizations that unless they acted, they would have an insurrection on their hands. He wrote to his closest collaborators around the country, including Yaakov Birnbaum. He specifically included Meir Rosenne and Moshe Decter, the two Israeli agents, because he wanted Jewish leaders to get word of his maneuverings. He invited them all to his hotel room on the second evening of the biennial conference for a discussion about the future of the Soviet Jewry movement. He called it his "shot across the bow." He would present them with an idea he had been considering for some time now: the creation of an independent Soviet Jewry organization, a federation of groups from different cities that worked together to fulfill the task the establishment was shirking.

That meeting in April during the biennial was largely a chance to vent among like-minded friends. They talked about how little they felt was being accomplished and how pathetic it was to attend one more biennial without any serious change to the organization, and they imagined how they might do things differently. The meeting closed inconclusively. A month later, on May 11, Rosenblum called his friends together for a smaller, closed gathering with only the grass roots. He'd fleshed out his earlier idea. He even brought an organizational flow-chart to show how it could all work—how all the Soviet Jewry groups could maintain their independence but also pool their resources. This time, the meeting ended with Rosenblum offering to chair a "committee of correspondence"—he loved the allusion to the Revolutionary War—so they could stay in touch and keep developing the idea. When the time was right, they decided, they would make it happen, start another organization to rival and outdo anything the establishment could ever dream of.

On a cold New York morning in December 1969, a year and a half after Kahane first formed the JDL, he received an Israeli visitor in his Fifth Avenue office. Geula Cohen was a woman with a reputation in Israel as a right-wing fighter, an extremist with big hair who strode into the Knesset wearing tall black boots and a large Jewish star around her neck. In the 1940s, she had been a member of the Stern Gang, the most violent of the militias operating in Palestine before Israel's independence. Responsible for bombings and assassinations of British diplomats, the Stern Gang, or Lehi, as it was also known, was considered by both the embryonic Jewish government and the United Nations to be a terrorist organization. Cohen had initially been involved with Menachem Begin's Irgun—the bombers of the King David Hotel in 1946, an attack that killed ninety-one people—but left the group because she thought it was too moderate. By the late 1960s, this revisionist fringe had long since dismantled its militias and become the long-suffering opposition in parliament, centered around Begin's Herut Party, which Cohen had also joined.

The revisionists were vehemently opposed to almost every Labor government policy. Among these was its approach to Soviet Jewry, Cohen's pet cause. The strategy of working through back channels and using quiet diplomacy disgusted her, and Golda Meir's decision to come out following the Georgian Jews' letter felt to her like too little too late. Of the few Soviet Jews who had arrived in Israel by 1969, most were of the militant Riga variety, like Lydia and Boris Slovin, and they too were frustrated by the government's silence. This catapulted them into the arms of Herut and the right. Geula Cohen's trip to New York at the end of 1969 was funded by a group of older Jabotinskyites and Holocaust survivors. They wanted to know what more could be done. Cohen was aware of the stir Kahane was causing among American Jews and she asked for a meeting with him. In the cluttered, dirty office the JDL called home, Geula Cohen had one question for Kahane: "Why are you wasting time fighting the
schvartzes
?"

She proposed that he turn his attention to Soviet Jewry. They began discussing the possibilities of a terror campaign against the Soviet presence in New York, with Cohen offering to provide clandestine training. Together with Yitzhak Shamir, the short and rambunctious former chief of operations at the Mossad and one-time leader of the Stern Gang, she offered to supply resources if he would turn his publicity-generating powers to Soviet Jewry. The idea immediately appealed to Kahane. He had built up a group of committed followers, gained a small degree of fame, and upset the Jewish establishment. But what next? He had been wondering how best to use this accumulated capital. Any consideration he'd had of the plight of Soviet Jews in the past had simply been an offshoot of his general anti-Communism. When he announced the day after his meeting with Cohen that Soviet Jewry would now be his central concern, it took the group by surprise. But by then, whatever the Reb said, they did.

In the months after the Jewish Boys ad in June of 1969, Kahane had continued to increase both his following and his notoriety. That summer, he had opened a paramilitary training camp in the Catskills. Camp JEDEL was located not far from Grossinger's, the famed resort that was once the heart of the Borscht Belt. The fifty campers who attended the nine-week program woke at five in the morning and then spent their days learning karate from two black belts, shooting pistols and automatic weapons on a firing range, and being indoctrinated by courses like History of Anti-Semitism. His tougher and older boys, the elite
chayas
unit, made pipe bombs and threw them into the bottom of a pool that Kahane had drained for that purpose. So sensational was the notion of the camp that the
New York Times
ran an article headlined "Jewish Militants Step Up Activity."

In the city, the JDL still acted like a gang, provoking so many fights with the Black Panthers that September that the FBI contemplated using the JDL in its attempt to undermine the black militants. Street fights between the
chayas
and local black youths took place regularly. The toughness of these characters was attracting more and more notice. Young Yossi Klein, a dedicated Student Struggle member who spent his afternoons selling
FREE KOCHUBIEVSKY
buttons at high schools and giving speeches to local synagogues, could not resist the draw of the JDL. On Halloween of that year, he rode along on a JDL patrol, scouring the streets of Borough Park for black gangs that might be causing trouble. Yossi clutched a baseball bat in his small, cold hands, terrified that if the situation called for it he wouldn't be strong enough to bring it down on a sinister head. Even though he was still mostly enthralled by Yaakov Birnbaum's more spiritual and nonviolent approach, he, like other young newly empowered Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn and Queens, felt a definite pull in the direction of Kahane.

It wasn't just blacks on the receiving end of this new Jewish rage. Kahane expanded his constituency by striking out aggressively at anyone who committed an offense against Jews. On August 29, the left-wing Palestinian militia PFLP hijacked TWA flight 840 from Rome (mistakenly thinking that Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, was on board), and the JDL went on a rampage. They broke into the PLO's offices on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, wrecking the place and stealing files that they later handed over to Israeli authorities. In September, Kahane led a threatening protest of five hundred supporters on a tour of the UN missions of five Arab countries.

Not a week went by without another Jewish group denouncing him. In October of 1969, Theodore Bikel, the actor who was then on Broadway playing Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof,
wrote a letter to the editor of the
New York Times
that summed up the fearful backlash Kahane was provoking: "During the long history of the Jewish people we have faced anti-Semites, anti-Zionists, Jew-baiters and Jew-haters. We have fought them and we survived. But we did so on our terms; we never allowed ourselves to become like our enemies, unintelligent and unreasoning hate-mongers."

Nothing, however, prepared the Jewish world for what Kahane would do in the last days of 1969, just three weeks after talking with Geula Cohen. First, he held a one-hundred-hour vigil on the block next to the Soviet mission to the United Nations on Sixty-seventh Street, where groups like Student Struggle had been protesting for years. Then, on the afternoon of December 29, Kahane launched a three-pronged attack. Between 12:30 and 1:00, he and three teenagers broke into the Rockefeller Center office of TASS, the Soviet wire service; two other groups stormed the offices of Aeroflot, the Russian airline, and Intourist, the tourist service; and, most dramatic of all, a group of JDL members ran out onto the tarmac at JFK Airport to vandalize and then handcuff themselves to a giant Ilyushin II-62 passenger plane that had just arrived from Moscow.

They were all quickly arrested, but not before grabbing major publicity. At the TASS office, Kahane's group had ordered the two journalists present to shut up, then pulled out cans of red spray paint and wrote the words
Am Yisrael Chai
in large, dripping Hebrew letters on the walls. Avraham Herkowitz, a twenty-five-year-old from Brooklyn leading the Intourist takeover, told all the Soviet officials that they could leave if they wanted, and then he slammed a drawer on the hand of one who was reaching for a pair of scissors. At the airport, two teenagers (one of them fourteen) handcuffed themselves to the nose wheel. As stewardesses stared out the window, the other league members, all dressed in army coats and wearing sunglasses, ran alongside the plane, pulled out spray-paint cans, and scrawled on both sides of the fuselage the same words, this time in English letters:
Am Yisrael Chai.