When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (72 page)

These families, no more than a few dozen, created their own devout world in hundreds of different ways. For circumcisions, a well-known Jewish heart surgeon was willing to make house calls on Sundays; he performed the
brit milah
on adults in living rooms all over Moscow. Not all the elements of Jewish tradition were possible to keep. In the entire Soviet Union, for example, there were only three working mikvahs, the ritual bath that religious women were obligated to take at least once a month following menstruation. Women would go to great lengths to visit these, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles. Essas wanted to create a kind of Jewish bubble around the children of these newly religious refuseniks, guarding them from Soviet society and passing on a new awareness. Classes for children began in apartments, taught by parents who had only recently become religious themselves. Essas eventually hit on the idea of summer camps, the standard solution for any activity that seemed too dangerous for the city. Starting in the summer of 1980, Essas brought his part of this burgeoning little community (fifteen children and ten adults that first year) to a two-story wooden house in the town of Bykovo, forty kilometers outside Moscow. They prayed in the morning, studied Torah during the day, and ran around the forest in the late afternoon. Back in Moscow, Essas started a weekly kindergarten for the younger children. After two summers in Bykovo, the camps were moved to the forest just outside Riga (the same forest where the Rumbuli memorial had been erected twenty years earlier). In 1982, forty people spent the summer together, eating kosher food, praying three times a day, and swimming in the Baltic. At the end of the summer, the children showed their parents what they had learned in a ceremony where each child recited a Torah commentary he or she had written.

What elevated Essas's work in the 1980s were the contacts he made with the Orthodox community outside the Soviet Union. He started receiving spiritual and, more important, material support from Ernie Hirsch, a redheaded English businessman who had first visited Moscow in 1980 and was shocked to discover Essas and his little, observant community. Hirsch immediately began raising money in England and America. He sent emissaries, or
shlichim,
as they were called in Hebrew, to provide classes and other training to Essas's flock. They were mostly American or English rabbis (or Israelis with foreign passports), and about once every two weeks, one of them would arrive in Moscow, call Essas on a public pay phone, and identify himself with a password (any one of the twelve tribes, from Asher to Zebulon). Then he would take the subway to the Sokol station, where Essas would be waiting for him to emerge from the first car. During the day, the
shaliach
(the singular form of
shlichim
) would train members of the community in ritual slaughter or in the calligraphic art of copying out holy texts like the Torah, and at night he would teach classes. The emissaries usually brought with them coveted consumer goods, like blank videocassettes and Japanese cameras, which were sold to provide funds for maintaining the supply of kosher food or to run the summer camps. Hirsch, who became known in the community as Gingy (a Hebrew diminutive for someone with red hair), got the Orthodox institutional world interested in these Soviet
baal teshuva.
After Agudath Israel, the international coordinating body for Orthodox Judaism, took on Essas as a project, he had a steady stream of books and funds to try to expand his circle.

Moscow wasn't the only city that saw religious revival in this otherwise oppressive period. Essas soon connected with Grisha Vasserman in Leningrad. Vasserman's apartment was the one raided in May of 1981, bringing the cultural seminar to an end. Like Essas, Vasserman had started out engaging in the same activities as the other refuseniks but soon discovered that he was drawn to the study and practice of Ju daism. When the community acquired a library from a departing Jew, the religious books were funneled to him. For years before he could properly read Hebrew, Vasserman carried a prayer book in his pocket, taking it everywhere he went so he could practice sounding out the letters. Eventually, he found an older man at the Leningrad synagogue to instruct him, and he slowly began the process of becoming an observant Jew. He struggled to keep all the tenets at first—he relished the memory of the last film he ever saw, in 1976, a documentary about African elephants—but, like Essas, he immersed himself in a small community devoted to the same lifestyle. Vasserman's contribution to the religious movement, besides providing Torah classes in Leningrad, was figuring out a way to get more of the books of prayer and commentary needed for study. He cultivated a whole network of underground samizdat producers who either typed out his translations of Hebrew and English texts or photographed pages that could then be developed multiple times and collated. With tourists bringing in one or two books at a time, he was able to supply hundreds of texts to feed the hunger of this new community.

The KGB never tried to crush the community of
baal teshuva
refuseniks. With the exception of an occasional house search, the Torah lessons and recitations of Mishnah were never interrupted, even though Hebrew teachers were being arrested. Perhaps the agents in charge of monitoring Jewish activists simply weren't threatened by the sight of young men with wispy beards sitting around a table, poring over the multiple meanings of ancient words. The information supplied by the bugs placed in the apartments of people like Essas and Vasserman was probably boring and mystifying to the KGB. Raised to see religion as superstition, the Soviets likely considered the activities of the religious refuseniks as an eccentric throwback that could never take hold in the general population. There was an echo of the 1940s and early 1950s, when Stalin did everything to eradicate secular Jewish culture but seemed less focused on rooting out religion. Even though these devout Jews represented only a small subset of refuseniks, their existence was significant. They pushed the bounds of being Jewish to the ultimate extreme. Their survival was a kind of symbolic victory: even this most ill-suited and exotic flower could find a way to bloom in the Soviet Union. And ironically, at a time when much milder forms of Jewish expression were being brutally repressed, the authorities in their ignorance allowed this Orthodoxy to thrive.

The Soviet Union was not supposed to last until 1984. At least that's what the dissident Andrei Amalrik had predicted in the 1970s (it was his refusenik friend Vitaly Rubin who had given Amalrik the idea of using Orwell's year in his book title:
Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?).
But now both Amalrik and Rubin were dead—killed in separate car crashes. The Sinologist refusenik Rubin had met his end in the Negev Desert, years after reaching Israel. Amalrik's accident had occurred on his way to Madrid, where another Helsinki follow-up conference was taking place. As one cruel guard reminded Tolya Shcharansky, then still at Chistopol in his seventh year of imprisonment, 1984 had arrived and while the Soviet Union had survived, his friends had not.

For Jews in the Soviet Union, and especially the activists and refuseniks, the government's determination to destroy their movement seemed to increase as the new year dawned. Emigration in 1983 had reached a record low of thirteen hundred. It might as well have been zero. The number of those arrested and exiled had grown. It was now impossible for certain Hebrew teachers to continue giving classes. The protests and petitions of the 1970s were a distant memory, remnants of a time when détente provided at least some protection. Now, in addition to the pounding meted out by the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee, new provisions had been added to the Russian Criminal Code that were specifically aimed at Jewish activists. It was now illegal to receive gifts from foreigners, the primary source of sustenance for refuseniks. If "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" was carried out "with the use of money or valuables received from foreign organizations or from persons acting in the interests of these organizations," the punishment could be up to
fifteen years
of imprisonment and exile. That January, another decree was announced, this one mandating eight years of prison for anyone who passed "work-related secrets" to foreigners. The description of what fell into that category was broad but seemed to cover any talk of one's profession.

In February of 1984, after just fifteen months as general secretary, most of which he spent seriously ill with kidney problems, Andropov died. His replacement did not inspire any more confidence than he had. Konstantin Chernenko was another old-guard Communist, also in his seventies, who had climbed the ranks as one of Brezhnev's proté- gés. He was old and sickly, and his ascension only added to the impression of an unstable leadership out of touch and desperate to maintain control. At Andropov's funeral, Chernenko was too weak to descend the stairs of the Lenin mausoleum by himself (a newly installed elevator had taken him up).

Soon there were more anti-refusenik decrees. In May, a rule was announced forbidding foreigners to spend the night at a Soviet citizen's apartment without official permission. The penalty was a hundred rubles. It was now illegal for a Soviet to give a foreigner a ride in his car. The next decree seemed bureaucratic on the surface but struck at the heart of how "parasitic" refuseniks managed to support themselves without stable income: the receiver of any package entering the Soviet Union from abroad had to pay the customs duties himself. Prior to that, an activist in New York could send clothing or even electronics and prepay the huge custom tax him- or herself. No longer. This defeated the purpose of sending the goods to the refuseniks to sell; they simply couldn't afford to receive the packages. All lines of contact and support from the West, established over many years of trial and error, were being brutally cut.

In spite of this onslaught, the ambitious Hebrew outreach coordinated from Moscow by Yuli Kosharovsky continued apace. His project to create a sprawling network of Hebrew learning had set up teachers in the farthest corners of the empire. At the organization's height, at least two classes were running in each of thirty cities. But these too would soon go dark. The KGB was no longer interested in charging people with anti-Soviet activity. It took too much time to build a case in court, and the negative international publicity was irritating. They resorted to cruder means. One by one, each of Kosharovsky's main collaborators was arrested on all kinds of made-up charges, some so preposterous that even the KGB agents themselves could hardly contain a smirk when they came knocking.

Sasha Kholmiansky, one of four main leaders in the network, was arrested in the summer of 1984 in southern Estonia, where he was running a Hebrew camp. At first he was charged with petty hooliganism for allegedly stepping on flowers and destroying a mailbox. A few days later he was taken into an interrogation room where a high-ranking officer presented him with a pistol he said was found in a search of Kholmiansky's apartment, as was anti-Soviet literature. A quick trial ensued in a small Estonian town where all the phones had been disconnected. Kholmiansky was found guilty of possessing gun cartridges and sentenced to a year and a half. Weakened from a prolonged hunger strike and injured from forced feedings, he served out his term in a hospital in the Urals.

Yuli Edelstein, the youngest of the Hebrew leaders, had overseen instructors in the city of Kharkov and the region of Belarus. He was part of a new generation of refuseniks. In his late twenties, he had come to the movement not out of a strong Zionist desire but because he couldn't stand living in the Soviet Union anymore. He had begun teaching himself Hebrew at nineteen so that he could one day live in Israel. After becoming a refusenik, in 1979, he started instructing others and quickly gained a reputation as one of the more dynamic and engaging educators. His problems began after he joined forces with Kosharovsky and the other teachers. He was followed. His apartment was regularly searched. Then, one day in the fall of 1984, a few months after Kholmiansky's arrest and trial, a knock on the door turned Kafkaesque when a group of KGB agents searching his apartment dramatically presented him with a matchbox filled with hashish that they said was his. Within months he was in a labor camp on the Mongolian border.

Throughout the second half of 1984, Jewish activists and Hebrew teachers were arrested on all kinds of trumped-up charges—pushing someone, sexual assault, illegal drug possession. The KGB was replenishing their stock of Jewish prisoners as a way of paralyzing the movement. To the refuseniks, it was just one more sign that everything was getting worse. All the letters and phone calls to the West—when they could get through—were an unrelenting stream of bad news issued by exhausted, demoralized, and scared Jews. One letter in December, signed by nearly forty refuseniks in Leningrad, captured the despair. Addressed to the "Jews of the West," it was an accusatory rant that revealed the depth of their hopelessness. "We call on you, the Jews of the West, those who spend their efforts on the paperwork of endless conferences and 'races' and 'picnics in the grass' in defense of Soviet Jewry, and those who are still full of illusions and see solidarity in philanthropy expressed in gifts of jeans—we call on you to show your solidarity by your deeds," the letter lashed out. "Enough, brothers and sisters, of chewing over our despair while lunching at Lindy's. Enough of flaming cocktail party declarations and touching 'twin Bar-Mitzvah' shows. There have been enough warning statements. The time has come to sound the alarm ... You, the sons and daughters of a nation which has suffered the most terrible blows that human madness can inflict, take the truth of the Messiah out of the sheaths of your souls and beat it into the iron will of deeds. Who, if not you, can help us remove the stone from the mouth of the well."