When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (8 page)

Even the Conservative rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who believed in the liberalization of American society, who was at the March on Washington, and who would be present with King on Bloody Sunday in March of 1965, came to the conclusion in the summer of 1964 that, as the title of his essay in the
Jewish Frontier
put it, "America Is Galut [Diaspora]": "The Jew cannot settle down in freedom to be himself, 'just like everybody else.' When in his own inner consciousness he begins to approach a real feeling of at-homeness within the larger society, what remains of his Jewish identity is too little and too personalized to sustain a community. It inevitably follows that there is only one possible mode for the survival of a Jewish community in a free society. It can live only by emphasizing what is unique to itself and by convincing its children that that uniqueness is worth having."

When Lou Rosenblum first arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), few Jews lived in his part of town. German Jewish merchants from Bavaria had moved to the midwestern city in 1839 and built the ornate, domed Reform synagogues of Anshe Chesed and Tifereth Israel. Many more Eastern European Jews followed at the turn of the twentieth century. But they always lived east of the Cuyahoga River, which split the city in two. And the Jews kept moving even farther east as the century progressed, eventually settling in the suburbs of Cleveland and in Shaker Heights. By the early 1960s, this community had firmly established itself. The Jews of Cleveland numbered seventy thousand and had an active federation that included branches of all the major national Jewish organizations; a collection of well-attended synagogues; and even a famous national Jewish leader—Abba Hillel Silver, the Zionist defender and brilliant orator who as chairman of the Jewish Agency had stood before the United Nations in 1947 and argued the case for Israeli independence. Although by 1963 he was aging and sick, Silver still preached every Friday night from the pulpit of Tifereth Israel, as he had since 1917.

All this was in the east, while NACA's lab was in the far west, near the city's airport. This part of the city contained only one small, ailing synagogue; it had been around since 1910 but had suffered during the Depression and never recovered. Its walls were peeling, and the congregation could hardly afford to pay a rabbi's salary.

Rosenblum moved to the city in 1952, hired by the government to work in the fuel research department of the NACA lab. He had grown up on the distinctly Jewish streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn; barely survived the battle of Okinawa in the Pacific; eventually graduated from Brooklyn College; and then went to Ohio University and earned a PhD in organic chemistry. He decided to work for the government because he'd been told that as a Jew, he'd have a hard time finding work with a private corporation (at the time, companies like DuPont still had an unspoken quota system). Also, his wife, Evy—whom he'd met in Brooklyn College at an evening of Palestinian folk dancing—had family in Cleveland.

But the loss of a Jewish community in those western suburbs was palpable. Even though he'd never been religious, Rosenblum missed the social role that a synagogue provided. Driving to the east side of the city for services was almost impossible. It took an hour over roads that were still cobbled. Rosenblum was stuck. Yet many of the almost twelve hundred people working at the NACA lab were Jews, including the lab's director, Abe Silverstein. Rosenblum realized that this was a large enough pool of young Jewish families to feed a new congregation. With the help of his boss, who would become the first temple president, Rosenblum and twenty-five families started Beth Israel in 1954.

The congregation grew throughout the fifties, taking on more and more young families and eventually acquiring the building of the older west side synagogue. Cut off from the established Jewish center of Cleveland, the congregants had to build their community from scratch. If they wanted a day school for the children, they had to create one themselves. They developed a culture of self-sufficiency and volunteerism.

It was out of this congregation that Rosenblum and a few other men formed their study group in 1962. It included people like Herb Caron, a clinical psychologist who worked at the local VA hospital treating veterans. Caron, a logical, academic-minded man, broke down in tears when he first read
Perfidy.
Many of the men had similar reactions. If they had been part of a larger community, perhaps the anger and pain they felt would never have risen to the surface. But in their small, isolated congregation, they encouraged one another and convinced themselves that they needed to do something productive with their outrage.

At the same time, they began examining what could rightly be called the "Passion of Jabotinsky." With more force than any other Zionist leader, Jabotinsky had warned his fellow Jews about what Hitler's rise to power would mean for them. Joseph Schechtman's biography, the second and last volume of which,
Fighter and Prophet,
was published at the end of 1961, describes the tragic, final years of Zionism's most hard-line leader. Jabotinsky traveled widely, desperate to convince anyone who would listen that horrors awaited European Jewry. In an address given in Warsaw in 1937, on the mournful ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, Jabotinsky warned that "the catastrophe is coming closer. I become gray and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano that will soon begin to spit out its all consuming lava." All that was left to do, Jabotinsky said, was "eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you." He died of a stroke in the Catskills, in upstate New York, in August of 1940. He was visiting a Betar summer camp as part of this campaign to preach his warning to the Western world.

Jabotinsky's words and, even more, the facts of his life had a strong effect on the group of middle-aged Jewish men in Cleveland. His ferocity stood in stark contrast to what they were coming to see as the shameful inaction of the Jewish establishment during the war. Those venerable leaders, some of whom were still alive and leading, had been too scared to push hard for fear of undermining their own positions. They were too cautious, too respectable. They fought one another more than they fought the government. They weren't desperate enough. They never got down on their hands and knees and pleaded. They never lay down in the streets and refused to move. Jabotinsky's legacy was the opposite. He fought. And—quite conveniently for his legend—he died so early in the war that, though proxies carried on his work, it is impossible for history to judge whether his more vocal efforts might have saved more Jews than the supposedly perfidious Jewish leadership did.

All this reading stirred the Cleveland men to action. What they needed was a cause. As it happened, Rosenblum and Caron came across an article published in the January 1963 issue of
Foreign Affairs
by Moshe Decter, a man described only as the head of an organization that neither of them had ever heard of: Jewish Minorities Research. The article, written in an authoritative and dispassionate tone and filled with facts, was titled "The Status of the Jews in the Soviet Union."

Fiddler on the Roof
opened in the fall of 1964 at the Imperial Theater on Broadway with the round, robust Zero Mostel sweating and swiveling his hips in the lead role of Tevye the milkman. Based on the folktales of Sholem Aleichem, the show was heartily embraced by the emergent Jewish middle class as a kind of origin myth. They loved it. It was their own story—a family in the old country suffers and struggles with "Tradition!" but then, as the curtain descends at the end of the show, their bags are packed and some are off to America. Even though most American Jews were descended from little shtetls like the play's Anatevka—poor Jewish villages in the Russian Pale of Settlement—this sweetened musical version of their history was the closest the vast majority had come to thinking about these roots, let alone imagining that any Jews might still be living there. Only a contrarian intellectual warrior like Irving Howe, writing in
Commentary
weeks after the musical's premiere, could wring a cultural critique out of something as schmaltzy and heartwarming as "Sunrise, Sunset." He saw beneath this light entertainment a "spiritual anemia." He hated the effect Broadway had on Sholem Aleichem's bittersweet tales, twisting "everything into the gross, the sentimental, the mammoth, and the blatant." And Howe had a bigger point about the Jewish community, about the sad reasons why they might love the show so: "American Jews suffer these days from a feeling of guilt because they have lost touch with the past from which they derive, and often they compound this guilt by indulging themselves in an unearned nostalgia."

Howe was frustrated with American Jews' ignorance of their origins, the necessary amnesia that had accompanied speedy assimilation. But
Fiddler
also exposed their ignorance of Soviet Jewry. For most of these Jews sitting comfortably in their red, plush seats at the Imperial, the thought that Jewish life continued long after the mournful closing number, a goodbye to "intimate, obstinate Anatevka," seemed almost unbelievable.

In the late fifties and early sixties, there was only one force struggling to make sure that the Jews behind the iron curtain were not completely forgotten: the Israeli government. It had its reasons, of course. In order for the Jewish State to stay both Jewish and democratic, there needed to be a consistently large Jewish majority. It was clear that American Jews would not be leaving their streets of gold anytime soon. That left the Russian Jews, who, at two to three million, constituted the second-largest Diaspora population in the world. As early as February of 1952, with Stalin still in the Kremlin, David Ben-Gurion read to the Knesset the text of a diplomatic note he had sent to the Soviet leader that made it clear Israel's main goal was "the return of Jews to their historic homeland." Later, in 1960, Golda Meir specifically referred to 9,236 Russian Jews who wanted to be reunited with their families. She was responding to an earlier, characteristically flip comment by Khrushchev that there were no Jews in the Soviet Union who wanted to emigrate.

But there was a problem—namely, the Cold War. Israel was still a fragile new state, and it put supreme value on maintaining its shaky diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had long courted the Arab countries, and relations with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt had grown increasingly warm following the 1956 Sinai campaign. In May of 1964, Khrushchev even paid a visit to Nasser, celebrating the progress made on the joint Aswan Dam project and awarding the Egyptian leader the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, and the Soviet Golden Star.

So Israel was reluctant to make any hostile moves toward the Arabs while the blue and white Star of David flew precariously over its embassy in Moscow. Instead, the Israelis used their position inside the Soviet Union to offer symbolic support to the few Jews interested in maintaining a connection with Judaism or the Jewish State—slipping miniature Jewish calendars and prayer books into pockets of eager Jews at decrepit synagogues, meeting with the few Zionist activists from places like Riga, and, mostly, collecting information on the condition of the community. These efforts, minor though they were, were directed from Tel Aviv by Shaul Avigur, the eminence grise of Israeli intelligence.

Avigur was typical of the short, stocky, taciturn men who started Israel's secret service. He had immigrated to Palestine from Latvia when he was twelve and made his mark leading Aliyah Bet, the clandestine operation set up with the goal of smuggling as many Jews as possible into Israel during the British mandate period. Once Israeli independence was secure, Avigur shifted his focus to getting Jews out of countries that did not permit emigration. In 1952, this operation was shut down, and he went into brief retirement at his kibbutz, Kinneret, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. But Avigur was soon called back to duty by the foreign ministry, which wanted him to head up a new, highly secretive office known internally by the code word
Nativ
(the Hebrew word for "path") and to the rest of the world as Lishkat Hakesher, "the Liaison Bureau." It was often referred to as the Lishka, which meant, simply and mysteriously, "the Bureau." Everything about the new endeavor was left vague. Avigur's official title was assistant for special matters to the defense minister. His new office was in the Tel Aviv building that housed the foreign ministry. And, strangely, he reported directly to the prime minister (who at the time was his brother-in-law Moshe Sharett). The office's means were unclear, but its mission was laser focused: make contact with the Jews of the Soviet Union and find a way to get them out.

Avigur felt very comfortable with secret operations, but fomenting change from inside the Soviet Union was recklessly suicidal. So halfway through the decade, he decided on a new strategy: he would start an international movement that would apply external pressure on the Soviets. If Avigur could find a way to inspire intellectuals in Europe and the United States to voice concern for the Jewish minority (at a time when concern for minorities was becoming increasingly fashionable), it just might shame the Russians into letting out a few Jews.

By 1955, Avigur had established an informal committee made up of a handful of Jewish professionals in the Diaspora who, together with Israeli government officials, would direct this part of the Lishka's operations. It was given the name Bar.

Avigur recruited Jewish intellectuals in London and Paris to act as his covert agents. Their assignment was to ignite moral outrage over the issue of Soviet Jewry by appealing to public figures. There was to be no talk of emigration. The focus was on demanding cultural and religious rights. For London, Avigur chose Emanuel Litvinoff, a poet and playwright who had grown up in the city's poor East End and had gained some notoriety for blasting T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitism in a 1952 poem called "To T. S. Eliot." On a visit to the Soviet Union, Litvinoff had been struck by the Jewish condition, and it was an article he wrote about this trip that got him the attention of the Israelis. He used the information the Lishka was able to give him to publish a newsletter, first as a supplement to the
Jewish Observer and Middle East Review
and then, from 1959 on, as an independent journal,
Jews in Eastern Europe.
It was the first publication devoted solely to the problem and it reflected Avigur's instructions. Litvinoff was academic in his presentation, even scientific. In Paris, a young Israeli international law student at the Sorbonne, Meir Rosenhaupt, was tapped. He too quickly got to work, approaching thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and François Mauriac for their backing.