When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (74 page)

Soviet Jewry was ubiquitous, so much so that the National Conference on Soviet Jewry gave out awards in 1985 to both George Shultz and Jane Fonda. It's hard to imagine another cause that could celebrate in the same breath both Hanoi Jane and the Cold War cowboy's secretary of state.

The political power of American Jews was also on the rise. The legislative victories of the past decade, such as Jackson-Vanik, had greatly increased the community's confidence about its strength. American Jews were creating powerful lobbies and were responsible in large part for the tightening of the relationship between America and Israel. In 1974, after spending the previous two years fighting with Richard Perle for the Jackson-Vanik amendment, Morris Amitay, an aide to Senator Arthur Ribicoff, was made head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Amitay took what was a small, passive outfit with a handful of staff members and over the next few years turned it into a lobbying powerhouse, expanding a meager list of contacts to eleven thousand names and increasing the budget to $1.2 million. Drawing on his neoconservative connections in the new Reagan administration and using money to lock in support from much of Congress, Amitay helped the group become a force in government. AIPAC's potency first became apparent in a fight they lost. In the early months of Reagan's presidency, they tried to stop the sale of five spy planes to Saudi Arabia, and they failed. But the administration's staff members were so impressed by the pressure AIPAC applied to Congress that they immediately invited AIPAC to help plan future government policy. Soon the group was working so closely with Reagan's people that they were even lobbying for issues unrelated to Israel, at the president's request, with the hope that it would garner goodwill for Israel's concerns. The first major payoff came in December 1981 at a low-key ceremony at the National Geographic Society in Washington when Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon and his American counterpart, Caspar Weinberger, signed a memorandum of understanding. It bound the two countries as allies, each committed to "act cooperatively and in a timely manner" against any threat to the other. Billions of dollars in foreign aid followed, along with extremely close intelligence and technology sharing.

AIPAC helped make these new commitments profitable for American lawmakers. Israel needed the American Jewish community more than ever, especially after June of 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, bombed Beirut, and had to deal with the public relations catastrophe of its Lebanese Christian allies' massacre of eight hundred Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. American Jews as a constituency were still extremely liberal (Reagan's capture of nearly 40 percent of the Jewish vote in 1980 was a surprising anomaly, not repeated in 1984). Still, the consistent backing of Israeli policy by an influential lobby made Israel much more beholden to American Jews as a whole.

This inevitably changed the dynamics in the fraught relationship between the grass roots in America and the Lishka. Already by the late 1970s, Nehemiah Levanon's grip on the movement had begun to loosen. He had lost the monopoly on information coming out of the Soviet Union, which had been his greatest form of leverage. Now, individuals, such as Michael Sherbourne, the London schoolteacher turned Russian-speaking activist, had just as much if not more contact with refuseniks and activists and were willing to disseminate their messages without any filter. The Union of Councils and other groups watched closely over all this information; they kept voluminous files on thousands of Soviet Jews, maintained lists of those in refusal, and regularly got updates on who was sick, who needed financial help, and who the KGB was harassing. Shcharansky was the ultimate example of this new dynamic. Levanon hadn't wanted to focus a campaign around his case, but once Avital, backed by members of the religious-right settler movement and the Union of Councils, began getting media attention, there was nothing the Israelis could do but jump onboard. They could no longer dictate the message. The Lishka still had the power to set the agenda of the National Conference, but there were still influential establishment groups, like the council of wealthy, local Jewish federations, that had their own opinions and interests. On the issue of dropouts, for example, a vast majority of the American Jewish community had turned on Israel, favoring freedom of choice for Soviet Jewish emigrants. In 1981, the Lishka and the Jewish Agency tried once again to cut off funding and support for those who wanted to go to the West—even going so far as to bypass HIAS and the Joint and sticking the dropouts in a detention camp in Naples until they changed their minds. American Jews were outraged, and the Israeli plan was abandoned after a couple of months. Now that their American cousins possessed the money and the power to influence foreign policy, Israel couldn't really put up much of a fight.

William Orbach, who wrote a book describing the first years of the movement, captured the soured mood of many American Soviet Jewry activists in the winter of 1980: "Israel's urge to dominate is quite natural, and perhaps beneficial in many areas, for a state can do things which individuals cannot—yet in the Soviet Jewry movement that urge is nothing less than catastrophic, for here individuals and groups possess certain inherent advantages over states—especially spontaneity. Israel should provide information and resources to the movement; its shading into guidance and control cripples the movement. Activist resources, instead of addressing Soviet oppression, must be squandered on squabbles with the Israeli government. If this continues, the Israeli 'Office Without a Name,' not the Soviet regime, may well destroy the Soviet Jewry campaign."

In December of 1980, Nehemiah Levanon resigned as head of the Lishka. With him went the notion of an all-powerful, secretive office that aspired to be the central point of command for the Soviet Jewry movement. No longer would Israel devote as much energy to tearing down the vibrant American grass roots or hoarding information on refuseniks.

And yet even the complete integration of the Soviet Jewry cause into American Jewish life could not do anything to relieve the stagnancy of the Cold War. It minimized urgency. In the absence of real progress, the competition between the grass roots and establishment, which had once spurred both to greater success, devolved into petty and personal sniping. The two largest groups, the National Conference and the Union of Councils, spent their time arguing about how the other was undermining their work. With a membership of fifty thousand people all over the country and contacts with dozens of sympathetic lawmakers, the grassroots coalition presented more than just an annoyance to the establishment. In an op-ed in early 1985, Jerry Goodman, the longtime executive director of the National Conference, complained that since the two groups were "addressing the same issues and serving basically the same constituency," their "duplication of efforts," especially when it came to Washington lobbying, was seeding "confusion," which meant in the end that the Soviet Jews would "lose out." The activists, of course, would never concede that their efforts overlapped with those of the establishment. Everything was different, they claimed, from their tactics to their loyalties. And so the debilitating fighting and the feeling of impotence continued.

For a few Jewish leaders, however, even the slightest shift in relations between the superpowers was enough to convince them that American Jews needed to make some kind of gesture. Leading this charge was the unlikely figure of Edgar Bronfman, the liquor mogul. Tall, dapper, and with the air of entitlement that comes from being born into vast wealth, Bronfman had recently become an influential force in the world of Jewish politics. Heir to the multibillion-dollar Seagram Company—the world's biggest producer of distilled spirits and wines—Bronfman metamorphosed into a global Jewish diplomat as a way of eclipsing his father, an authoritarian who bought the Canadian-based distiller in the 1920s and built it into a powerhouse on the back of Prohibition. He had taken over the business upon his father's death, in 1971, but spent a few years playing the part of the prodigal son. He was a playboy, marrying and divorcing women every few years, dabbling in the movie business, and making headlines for the first time in 1975 in a bizarre kidnapping involving his son Sam. But after the recession of the mid-1970s, Bronfman woke up to the needs of the business and became involved as never before. The decision in 1980 to sell Seagram's oil and gas assets proved to be a brilliant move. Suddenly he was sitting on top of a two-billion-dollar war chest.

In 1981, he was named president of the World Jewish Congress, the independent organization that saw itself as representing the interests of global Jewry. The transformation of Bronfman was complete. His wealth bought him contacts all over the world. In his office on Park Avenue in the Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram Building, he sat amid Rodin sculptures and Miro tapestries and talked on the phone to businesspeople and world leaders who knew he was a man with money to invest and causes he believed in. His first bit of publicity after taking over the presidency of the World Jewish Congress came when he used his connection to Anatoly Dobrynin in the Soviet embassy to secure the early release of Yosef Mendelevich.

Bronfman had a businessman's understanding of the Soviet Jewish issue. It was all a matter of negotiation, of coldly calculating what the Russians really wanted and leveraging that against emigration. This thinking put him in line with Nahum Goldmann, the equally headstrong founder of the World Jewish Congress and Bronfman's predecessor. For Soviet Jewry activists, Goldmann remained a totemic figure, symbolizing Old World Jewish cautiousness at its worst. As late as 1979 (he would die two years after) Goldmann was writing that public protest was "dangerous and immoral" because it might put Russian Jews at risk rather than help them. The best bet was secret diplomacy. "It is impossible to force the Russians to do something, and the most that can be done is to persuade them." Goldmann had been ridiculed since the 1960s for his consistent claim that the best way to solve the emigration problem was to get him alone in a room with Brezhnev. But Brezhnev, Goldmann never seemed to realize, had no interest in dealing with him. Bronfman was another matter.

Bronfman's secret contacts with the Soviets were always mysterious. What was he really talking to Dobrynin about? Was he mentioning his interest in distributing Stolichnaya vodka in America? Maybe dangling the possibility that he could invest in Russia's oil industry? Or was he talking about the refuseniks? Or all of the above? This mix of business and human rights made him someone Gorbachev or Gromyko would be interested in speaking with. In 1983, at one of the coldest moments in Soviet-American relations, Bronfman suggested on the op-ed page of the
New York Times
that American Jews should abandon their strongest weapon, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, "as a sign of goodwill that challenges the Soviets to respond in kind." Someone, he wrote, "had to take the first step." This idea, clouded not a little by his own potential business interests in reigniting trade, was met in both grassroots and establishment circles as absurd. There was nothing to indicate that the Soviets would respond in good faith. But now, with Gorbachev's ascension and the promise of a more liberal regime, there were signs that Bronfman's approach was resonating. Many people in the Jewish establishment thought that American Jews should have responded more positively in 1979 when the Soviets had increased emigration to an unprecedented fifty-one thousand in the hope of getting Jackson-Vanik repealed. If they had, the thinking went, maybe the doors wouldn't have slammed shut so firmly in 1980. Some in the establishment wanted to be careful not to miss another opportunity if it presented itself. A Soviet delegation visiting the United States in early March, days after Gorbachev's assumption of power, was met with an ad in the
Washington Post
placed by the National Conference that dangled, if not exactly a repeal of the amendment, then at least a willingness to bargain again: "Many people in this country would be responsive to positive changes, especially in your emigration policy. Why should emigration continue to be a barrier to improved trade and investment relations?"

In early 1985, Bronfman managed to secure the very thing Nahum Goldmann had always dreamed about: an invitation to the Kremlin. He announced in late January that he would be making an official trip to meet with Soviet leaders, probably in March, to talk about Jews. Chernenko's death postponed the visit, but Bronfman was convinced that his personal intervention would break the impasse over Soviet Jewry, heralding a new détente.

The grassroots activists were not impressed with Bronfman's invitation. They would hear of no compromise unless the Soviets acted first. Gorbachev was just a newer, friendlier mask hiding the same monstrous face. The community was demoralized and lethargic. The wall seemed higher every day. No one felt this more profoundly than Avital Shcharansky. In March 1985, it had been eight years since Tolya's arrest, and she had spent that time in perpetual motion, living in hotel rooms as she traveled the world on a never-ending campaign to free her husband. Her message had not altered. There should be no negotiating, no compromising, not an inch of movement until her husband and all Soviet Jews were free. When expectant talk of a summit between Reagan and Gorbachev began circulating, Avital told Anthony Lewis, the
New York Times
columnist, that the United States should insist that four hundred thousand Soviet Jews be allowed to leave before any meeting took place.

Advocacy became Avital's life, despite the fact that she told her close friends that she detested the public spotlight and would happily retreat into a domesticity once Tolya was released. In the meantime she was extremely effective, one of the strongest voices for Soviet Jewry. She was independent, able to fundraise based on her own popularity; she didn't have to abide by the dictates of the Israelis. By the mid- 1980s, she had made Shcharansky into a household name. For most young people coming of age at the time, the Soviet Jewry movement
was
Shcharansky. Every Jewish schoolchild could recognize his face. No camper managed to spend a summer in the Catskills without at least a few dozen times putting his arms around his friends' shoulders and swaying and singing along to the American Jewish band Safam's "Leaving Mother Russia":