When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (36 page)

Then Dinstein targeted Zev Yaroslavsky, a young Los Angeles college student whose group, California Students for Soviet Jewry, was part of the initial Union of Councils. Yaroslavsky was splitting his time between grassroots activism and a job at the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, the establishment's local arm. About two months after Dinstein and Rosenblum's strange car ride, Dinstein called Yaroslavsky. As Yaroslavsky recounted in a letter to Rosenblum the next day: "He went on to inform me that if I did not find some way to eliminate the CSSJ's name from the stationery, I could no longer be working for the Federation. He said that this was a 'declaration of war' on my part, and that I could not expect to be working for the Federation after a period of two or three weeks."

By the end of the month, Yaroslavsky had lost his job, and Rosenblum wrote to his fellow activists that Yaroslavsky was "the first martyr on our side to fall in this new Jewish holy war.... There is little that such stupidity can do other than polarize the situation to a greater extent. We are, in our respective communities, the de facto leaders in matters of Soviet Jewry. The initiative has been and will remain ours."

Rosenblum was incensed. But he was also worried. Dinstein's aggressiveness suggested that the Lishka really did intend to destroy his nascent grassroots group. In the beginning of May, Rosenblum decided to send a letter to Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States. In his note, he described what he called the "tiresome bullying tactics" of Dinstein, listing the many instances when he had carried out "an overzealous discharge of his instructions."And Rosenblum presented a threat of his own. The Lishka's actions in America made Israel susceptible to charges of illegal foreign intervention, a potential diplomatic disaster if its full scale was discovered. Rosenblum wanted to hint to Rabin that the Lishka was leaving obvious tracks, that Dinstein's heavy-handedness was making the Israeli government's manipulation of the American Jewish community that much more transparent. "Dr. Dinstein's behavior is calculated to exacerbate the issue of Israeli control of American Jewish organizations," Rosenblum wrote. "Certainly, in view of the above, there will be interest in observing the role played by the Israeli government representative."

Rabin did not answer beyond confirming that Rosenblum's letter had been received. But that summer, Nehemiah Levanon, not known for conciliatory gestures, invited Rosenblum to Washington for a talk. Feeling like he had the upper hand, Rosenblum brought three demands. He wanted lists of those who had applied for exit visas; telephone numbers so he could make calls; and names of recent Russian immigrants to Israel who could tour the United States, as Bershadskaya had. Levanon begrudgingly offered to send over a list with several hundred names. But he said telephone calls were out of the question, that they put Jews in danger. And as for activists who could speak to American audiences, he thought this could be arranged as long as it was done in a low-key manner, without television cameras or journalists—the emigrants often said bombastic, imprudent things about the Soviet Union (and about their reception in Israel) and he didn't want these broadcast. The differences in approach couldn't have been more stark. It was the last time Rosenblum and Levanon would ever meet.

The Leningrad trials altered the landscape. There now seemed to be a potentially massive base of support for the movement, and Levanon felt the time had come for an international conference, one that would make the plight of Soviet Jews a global issue. Internationalizing the movement would also deny the Soviets the chance to treat the issue as just another front in the Cold War, subject to the state of relations between the superpowers. Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel until early 1969, never liked the idea. But his successor, Golda Meir, eventually, cautiously, told Levanon to go forward.

In spite of early skepticism about it, the Brussels conference, as it came to be known, took on a life of its own. The conference was planned for February 24 through 27, 1971, and the timing of the recent death sentence and commutation in Leningrad gave it an urgent feel. There would be almost eight hundred delegates from thirty-eight countries meeting at the stately Palais des Congrès in the Belgian capital, including representatives of Jewish French youth groups and British parliamentarians, American writers and film directors, Argentinean community organizers, and two of the lodestars of the Israeli political establishment: right-wing leader Menachem Begin and the ailing eighty-five-year-old David Ben-Gurion, who was to give the closing speech.

The Soviets inadvertently helped publicize the conference by responding to it with a barrage of anti-Zionist propaganda filled with blatant threats not heard since Stalin's time.
Pravda
warned that anyone expressing Zionist beliefs would "automatically become an agent of international Zionism and hence an enemy of the Soviet people." This was followed by a two-part "research" article arguing that Jews were behind the Prague Spring—the sole backers of the liberal Dubcek regime. Belgium was soon under attack for hosting the event, and the Soviets even threatened to cut diplomatic ties. A few Soviet Jewish personalities, those the activists referred to as "court Jews," were sent to Brussels to talk to any journalist who would listen. Among them was David Dragunsky, a sixty-year-old three-star general of the Soviet army, who announced that the conference organizers had personally insulted him by planning this festival of Soviet slander to fall exactly on Red Army Day. A week before the conference, only a handful of press passes had been issued. But by February 23, after all the Soviet commotion, 255 journalists had been accredited. There would be one reporter for every four delegates.

The conference officially opened the following day. And it seemed to progress according to plan—a showy event full of grandiloquent speeches. The American delegation, two hundred and fifty strong, was particularly large and eclectic. It included Albert Shanker, the head of the New York teachers union, recently embroiled in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute; film director Otto Preminger; and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. Elie Wiesel, of course, was there, as was Gershom Scholem, the Jewish philosopher who'd helped popularize the study of kabbalah. The first day was filled with more ceremony than substance and included a performance of Russian Jewish folk songs. Levanon planned a more substantive program—to discuss a series of nonbinding recommendations—for the following day.

But just as the last speaker was about to address the room that morning, a scuffle broke out. Morris Brafman, the Holocaust survivor and charismatic Jabotinskyite with the Manhattan lingerie business, jumped on the stage, grabbed the microphone, and began yelling, "Meir Kahane has been arrested! I demand to know who ordered Meir Kahane's arrest!"

The day before, Kahane had been standing in a suit and tie in a Manhattan courtroom listening to the verdict in his first Soviet Jewry-related trial. He was found guilty of "obstructing government administration" and disorderly conduct for storming through the police barricade blocking off the Soviet mission during the December 1969 rally. The judge released him to await sentencing, at which point he raced to the airport to catch a plane for Brussels. It didn't matter that he hadn't actually been invited. As he saw it, he was saving the conference from irrelevance. Kahane entered the Palais des Congrès carrying a list of ten demands that he intended to present to the delegates. These were not recommendations but strict guidelines for getting the Soviets to buckle on emigration. He knew that his hero Menachem Begin would be present, and so would a handful of revisionists, including a group of French Betar youth; he thought he had nothing to lose by disrupting the proceedings. As he later wrote, "If I could speak and outline my ideas, I knew that a large number of the delegates would agree."

As soon as he walked into the lobby, he was surrounded. Kahane asked to send a note to the head of the American delegation demanding permission to address the floor. When the inevitable response was issued, Kahane turned to a few journalists and denounced the meeting as undemocratic. He said he would be holding a press conference in his hotel room later that afternoon to lay out his ten-point plan. That might have been the extent of the interruption. But when he stepped out of the building Kahane was grabbed by three plainclothes Belgian policemen and taken to a local station for questioning. He was told that he was a security risk, held there all day, and then driven to the airport and directed to leave the country.

To the dismay of Levanon and the Israelis, the conference ground to a halt. All anyone could talk about was Kahane and whether he should have been allowed to speak. This only heightened the feeling that little would be accomplished. At one point, Paddy Chayefsky took to the stage and said, "I have listened to your moans but I have not heard your ideas for action." He later told journalists he thought the conference was as tame as "a Wednesday night Hadassah meeting." When the official recommendations were finally presented, the next day, they validated his assessment. The conference leadership proposed either quiet diplomacy—calling for direct contacts with Kremlin officials—or inoffensive forms of action, like establishing a world conference of Jewish youth for Soviet Jewry and designing a symbol for the movement.

There was one moment of grace at the closing ceremony, when the stooped eighty-five-year-old Israeli patriarch David Ben-Gurion slowly made his way to the stage as people stood and cheered. His white hair billowing above him like a halo, he spoke for only a couple of minutes, uniting the delegates for a few brief moments, and then returned to his hotel room where he had been lying sick with a cold for three days. The mood quickly became gloomy again. Herb Caron, the early Cleveland activist, wrote that the conference could be summed up in two words: "lost opportunity." Even the
New York Times
had to note the "sense of frustration" that "hung over the proceedings," and the fact that the conference's resolution "disappointed a large number of delegates, particularly younger ones, who had hoped for more militancy." Menachem Begin, encountering a distraught Nehemiah Levanon brooding in the hallway outside the conference hall, tried to reassure him that history would not record the Kahane incident, only the progress that had been made in the cause of Soviet Jewry.

In the short term, however, Kahane had won again. When he landed in New York, he laid out his ten-point plan—a series of harsh measures meant to isolate the Russians—for the reporters gathered at JFK. Among other things, he demanded "an immediate end to all Western talks with the USSR, including disarmament, space, cultural and trade talks" and called for "legal harassment of Soviet officials, including picketing of private residences and mass telephone calls to embassies, consulates, etc." Almost every article about Brussels included this list of demands. And his detention, whether ordered by the Israelis or not, gave him the chance to present himself as a martyr. He later wrote:

I went to Brussels because I feared the conference would content itself with platitudes. It did. I went to Brussels because I sensed that concrete programs would not even be on the agenda. They were not. I went to Brussels because, if playwrights and producers and authors and architects who have had little or no share in the struggle for Soviet Jewry were allowed hallowed entry, representatives of an organization that has literally spilled its blood on barricades and gone to prison for our oppressed brethren had a moral and natural right to speak.... Brussels, where dissent was stifled, where fearful men kept out Jewish militancy, where a Jew was seized by the Belgian police and expelled by force with the knowledge and approval of Jews. This was the story of Brussels. And more it was the story of the Jewish Establishment and why JDL came into being.

***

It was Kahane's moment and he grabbed it. In the weeks leading up to and following the Brussels conference, he brought unprecedented attention to Soviet Jewry. His methods were, as always, surprisingly simple but ferociously provocative. After the New Year's Eve commutation of the death sentences in Leningrad—which Kahane considered a personal victory—he launched his campaign of harassment. Soviet diplomats everywhere would be targeted—spat on, followed, cursed at, and generally driven crazy by his young followers. "The life of each Russian will be made miserable," Kahane told reporters in the first days of 1971. Yossi Klein, the former Student Struggle member turned JDLer, was one of the harassers. He would skip school and stand near the Soviet mission, which he and his new friends now referred to simply as "the mission." When a black limousine with telltale DPL (diplomat) license plates turned the corner onto Sixty-seventh Street, they would surround the car, spit at the windows, and flash their middle fingers. If a Russian man in a fur hat was spotted walking down the street, Yossi would start following him. "Hey, Igor! Got one of those hats for me?" Moving in closer, the gang would hiss and call out, "
Roosky khoy!
," a popular Russian curse that meant "Russian prick." One of their favorite pranks was posting the mission's phone number in public bathrooms below the words
For a good time, call Sonya.

Amazingly, within days the actions of this small group of teens provoked a full-blown diplomatic crisis. On January 5, 1971, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, delivered a terse note to the State Department protesting the lack of security for Russians in America and threatening that if the situation did not improve, Americans in Russia could expect similar treatment. Sure enough, by the end of the week, American diplomats were being manhandled in the streets of Moscow. Three young people surrounded an embassy worker and his wife outside a theater, grabbing the man by his lapels and asking how he would like to be beaten. A series of Soviet citizens' delegations visited the U.S. embassy in Moscow bearing petitions protesting the "Zionist hooligans." And as payback for the protests over the Leningrad trials, the Soviets staged demonstrations to denounce the trial of Angela Davis, a Black Panther and a Communist being tried in a California courtroom for the murder of a judge that past summer. Feebly mimicking the activity in the wake of the Leningrad arrests,
Izvestia
published a letter by a group of Soviet intellectuals addressed to Nixon and demanding that the president spare Davis's life.