When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (34 page)

We cannot gear our foreign policy to the
transformation of other societies.

RICHARD M. NIXON

I
T STARTED WITH
Molotov cocktails. As the sixties curdled into the seventies, the teenage boys of Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League, like many other disaffected and angry young men of the time, found the flash and heat of violence irresistible. Dressing up in their bar mitzvah suits to lob balloons filled with chicken blood at the ballerinas of the touring Bolshoi didn't cut it anymore. They began building crude pipe bombs and exploding them at the bottom of a drained pool at Kahane's summer camp in the Catskills. These were the kind of bombs they placed in the doorways of the Aeroflot and Intourist offices in Manhattan in the fall of 1970, causing a minor diplomatic crisis between the superpowers. The informers and the undercover police officers that swelled the ranks of the JDL were warning their superiors that something bigger and more dangerous was in the works. One officer from the NYPD's intelligence unit who had infiltrated the group gained access to its cache of weapons, which were hidden in closets all over Brooklyn. The JDL had enough shotguns and rifles to arm a small militia.

The narcissistic, theatrical, publicity-hungry rabbi seemed barely able to control the resentful young men, many from dysfunctional backgrounds, who swam around him like parasitic fish. His office on Fifth Avenue was a reflection of the chaos—a jumble of mismatched desks and tables, all piled high with unopened bills, placards, old newspapers, and rolls of duct tape. Over Kahane's desk was scrawled
Office of the Reb,
next to a photo of the bespectacled and jug-eared Jabotinsky. But out of the emotions he had unleashed—most of his followers were studies in Jewish inferiority complex—Kahane had built an organization that claimed seven thousand members. Where so many others had floundered, he had found a simple and direct response to the problem of Soviet Jewry: Never Again. The two-word slogan perfectly captured the allure Kahane held for American Jews: it simultaneously stirred the memory of their historic helplessness and unblinkingly asserted a newfound strength.

His simple doctrine of confrontation resonated at a moment when the shifting politics of the Cold War were presenting a new challenge for Soviet Jewry activists. Early in his first term, Richard Nixon had hewed largely to his Cold Warrior reputation, carrying out controversial bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos and dragging out arms limitations talks with the Soviets in the hope of giving the United States time to reach the Russians' number of offensive missiles. But with the country convulsing with violent antiwar rallies and a difficult reelection campaign ahead of him, the president began to see the wisdom in a new approach. His national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, wanted to alter the relationship between the superpowers by weaving what he called "an intersecting web of interests"—increased trade, strategic arms limitation talks (SALT, as they were known), cultural and scientific exchanges. A scaled-down Cold War would allow the Soviets to shift resources away from defense and toward their growing economic problems. Nixon would have the leverage he needed to end the war in Vietnam and stabilize the United States after a decade of political and cultural revolution. But the warming trend, which became known as détente, presented a problem for Soviet Jewry activists. The belligerent anti-Communism of the last decade had at least provided a context for their cause. Détente, based purely on realpolitik, threatened to pave over the problems of Soviet Jews with a new amicability that would be blind to such moral questions as the right to emigrate.

Kahane, however, saw an opportunity. Nixon and Brezhnev clearly wanted something—namely, calm—and he could take that something away. As he told the
New York Times
in a long profile (testament in itself to his growing celebrity): "The most important thing to the Soviet Union at this moment is détente with the West. So what we are basically trying to do is give the Russians a hard enough time on something they want badly—and then trade with them: 'Look, you want your détente, take your détente. Build your bridges. Pay us off. Give us 8,000 Jews, 10,000 Jews, 12,000 Jews....' How does the U.S. come into this? The U.S. wants exactly the same thing right now—a détente. What we want the president and the Soviets to know is it doesn't take much to plunge the world into a terrible, terrible crisis." How exactly did he intend to get his message to Russian and American leaders? By doing, as he put it, "outrageous things."

News of the hijacking made many young people take another look at the JDL. Such a suicidal act seemed to demand the kind of response that only Kahane could provide. One such young person was Yossi Klein, the blond-haired, baby-faced boy from Borough Park, now a senior at the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy. He had remained throughout his teenage years an avid follower of Yaakov Birnbaum and his Student Struggle. And he still regarded Birnbaum as a sort of messianic figure, an eccentric convinced he could achieve with righteous indignation what Kahane was now accomplishing with bombs. But after letters dramatically pleading for action started to emerge from the Soviet Union, Klein began to feel like Birnbaum's responsible resistance was insufficient. When he asked his mentor about Kahane, Klein heard only bitterness. "I know Meir," Birnbaum told him, laughing disdainfully. "He came to a few of our rallies in the beginning, made a speech or two, very passionate and all the rest of it. But no substance, you see. He's ruining
years
of our work with wild acts of self-aggrandizement. Meir is a violent soul, he dreams of chasms of blood."

On the evening of December 27, two days after the death sentences of Dymshits and Kuznetsov were announced, Kahane held an emergency rally at Hunter College, a block away from the Soviet mission. Klein, agitated by the news, showed up ready to join the Jewish Defense League. On his shirt he had carefully fastened a button that read up
AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHER RUSSIA
. When he found his friends, they awkwardly greeted each other with the black power salute. Hundreds packed the college's auditorium, most of them young men, and Kahane whipped them into a frenzy. His public speaking had improved over the past two years. He could control his stutter, and he declaimed with simple, strong sentences. "Never again will Jews watch silently while other Jews die. Never again!" he yelled. "We must break every law to save three million Soviet Jews. The time has come for us to bury our respectability before it buries us," he continued, echoing Jabotinsky. The
New York Daily News
described the ecstatic reaction: "Pandemonium erupted in the hall. It turned into a sea of clenched fists and waving placards and Israeli flags as chants broke out again and again: 'Never Again!' 'Freedom Now' and 'Am Yisrael Hai!'" By the end of his speech, fist slamming against the lectern, Kahane made a threat he knew the papers would have to print: "Listen, Brezhnev, and listen well: If Dymshits and Kuznetsov die, Russian diplomats will die in New York. Two Russians for every Jew!" The crowd repeated after him, and Klein along with them, "Two Russians for every Jew! Two Russians for every Jew!"

When the rally was over, a mob of almost twenty-five hundred people rushed down the block toward the Soviet mission. Klein was running too. When they arrived at the barricades, Kahane shoved his way to the front and charged into a line of riot police. The cops swung their clubs around haphazardly as young demonstrators pushed closer to the mission's white façade and threw stones at the windows. Eventually a bottle of red paint smashed through the building's glass doors. The last thing Klein saw before hurrying home was someone stumbling down the street with a bloodied head. By the time the fracas was over, eleven people had been arrested, including Kahane, who happily spent the night in jail.

The whole world seemed to respond to the verdict in Leningrad; the death sentences only further emphasized the reckless courage of the initial act. Italian longshoremen in Genoa went on a twenty-four-hour strike. The president of Switzerland made an impassioned plea. Protests took place in every major city, including one in Rome that interrupted the pope's weekly address from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. Schoolchildren in Stockholm marched with torches through the streets. The Knesset met on a Friday night for only the second time in its history, and air-raid sirens blasted through the cities of Israel. Nobel Prize winners and congresspeople sent telegrams and sponsored resolutions. The
Washington Post
titled its lead editorial on the sentencing "Murder." Even Nahum Goldmann, the infamously cautious Jewish leader, frantically called his contacts in the Kremlin, only to learn that they were all at their dachas for the New Year's holiday.

Most unexpected, and most troubling for the Soviets, was the criticism coming from the Communist parties in the West. Salvador Allende, the Socialist leader of Chile, demanded leniency as a "highly humanitarian gesture." Complicating matters was another death sentence making headlines that week. In Spain on December 28, six Basque separatists were sentenced to hang for the murder of a Spanish policeman. Protest greeted this verdict as well. The Fascist regime was being criticized for its lack of transparency in the trial, and Francisco Franco was being pressured to commute the penalty. It would have been sheer hypocrisy for Communists not to condemn on the left what they were so vigorously denouncing on the right.

New York, as always, was the center of the action. In addition to Kahane's well-publicized theatrics, other demonstrations were occurring. Yaakov Birnbaum led solemn Student Struggle protests opposite the UN building, the students carrying oversize black-and-white photos of the condemned—Zalmanson, Khnokh, Mendelevich. Mayor John Lindsay declared a Day of Concern and held a rally of two thousand people at the base of the giant neoclassical columns of New York's supreme court. The patrician mayor with the WASPy good looks addressed the crowd in impassioned tones: "We meet this afternoon as Jew and Gentile, black and white, young and old, not to plead our own interests, but to speak out for thousands of Soviet Jews who cannot speak for themselves."

It was clear that more was at stake than just the fate of the two condemned men. Soviet Jewry itself now became the central issue. And the problem, as it was framed, was Jews' right to emigrate—not simply the preservation of their culture and religion. A
New York Times
editorial following the verdict powerfully accentuated this sudden shift in focus. "This was one of the most important political trials held in the Soviet Union since World War II," the
Times
declared. "The real defendants in the court were not the handful of accused, but the tens of thousands of Soviet Jews who have courageously demanded the right to emigrate to Israel."

On December 30, Richard Nixon felt compelled to meet with a troika of Jewish leaders at the White House. Though he and Kissinger had hoped to avoid any move that might alienate their new partners in détente, they had to at least make a symbolic gesture, something to quell the surge of anger coming at them from all directions. Nixon appeared appropriately dismayed and angry, but in the end, after a forty-minute discussion, he promised nothing. Still, such a high-level meeting was unprecedented. Never before had an American president invited anyone from the Jewish community into the Oval Office to discuss Soviet Jewry. The embattled leaders of the Jewish establishment took it as a small victory.

***

At ten in the evening on December 31, Eduard Kuznetsov sat in his prison cell and toasted the new year with a mug of warm water. A few minutes later, as he smoked the day's final cigarette, the door opened and four uniformed guards stepped inside. They ordered him to stand up, put his hands behind his back, and start walking down the dark hallway. The looks on the guards' faces convinced Kuznetsov that he was being taken out to be shot. A few weeks later he wrote in his secret prison diary, "I cannot remember my heart beating. I cannot remember what thoughts were in my head—it was someone else this was happening to. It wasn't I who slowly stepped down that corridor with my hands behind my back, it wasn't I who painstakingly avoided stepping on the heels of the guard in front of me or bumping into the guards on either side or treading on the feet of the guards behind me." Terrified, he was led into the office of the prison's warden, who stood there in his epaulettes with a smile on his face. "A humanitarian gesture has been made on your behalf," he announced. "The sentence of death passed against you has been commuted to fifteen years on special regime. May I wish you a Happy New Year." "Tears of humiliation and hatred" started running down Kuznetsov's cheeks. He was confused. Was he being deceived again? Someone had once told him that in the moments before execution, prisoners were usually lied to in order to prevent resistance. When the warden handed him a telegram from Sakharov and Elena Bonner congratulating him on the good news, he wondered if it had been forged. The terror took weeks to subside.

Never before in Soviet history had an appeal been heard and decided so quickly. It usually took at least two months. Earlier that day, hardly a week after the trial's end, with Sakharov present in the courtroom and a dozen freezing activists waiting in the snow outside, the supreme court of the Russian Republic had commuted Kuznetsov's and Dymshits's death sentences to fifteen years. A few of the other hijackers also got reduced time, including Mendelevich, who now had to serve just twelve years. The court's official reason, reported by TASS, was that "the hijacking attempt was averted in time and that under Soviet law, the death penalty is an exceptional measure of punishment."