When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (84 page)

All through the spring, anger grew, compounded by the general anxiety of the moment. Would Soviet Jews really be allowed out? And if so, which ones? And when? The JDL struck again after years of lying dormant. A tear-gas bomb was set off during a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at Carnegie Hall. That year's Solidarity Sunday rally did not match the previous year's numbers, when Shcharansky's first visit to America drew three hundred thousand people, but it still drew tens of thousands. Sitting on the stage was Yosef Mendelevich, seething with resentment at the American Jewish leaders around him. When Shcharansky, who was again attending the rally, finished his speech, Mendelevich unexpectedly jumped up and grabbed the microphone. He began a long rant—most of which was unintelligible in his thick accent—while stabbing his finger in the air and staring at Morris Abram, who was a few feet away. "I know you have your leaders," Mendelevich shouted. "You elected them. You like them? Have them. But don't send them anymore to Moscow. They don't know how to deal with the Russians." The interruption caused an embarrassing commotion, shattering the appearance of "solidarity" as Mendelevich, a hero of the movement, stormed off the stage.

It seems that Abram himself came to regret the March trip. In July, worried that Gorbachev might resolve only the long-term refusenik cases and then shut the door again, he made a damning assessment of Soviet Jews' prospects that put him more in line with the activists' view. "I must conclude that glasnost, as far as the Jewish population is concerned, at best doesn't exist and at worst is a fraud," he said after a meeting with George Shultz. Gorbachev was deceiving the American people and Jews with "blandishments and soft soap."

Even so, by the time Abram uttered these comments, many of the promises that had been made to him had been realized. Six Jews were given permission to travel to the United States to study for the rabbinate and then return, presumably to open more synagogues. A few months later, for the first time since 1929, kosher food was available in Moscow, imported from Hungary and served at a modest canteen near the Arkhipova Street synagogue. The synagogue was allowed to receive a shipment from abroad of five thousand works of scripture in Hebrew and Russian. A retired Red Army officer, Yuri Sokol, opened up a small Jewish library in a room of his home. He invited local Communist Party officials to a tour, showed them the books on the shelves and the posters with the Hebrew alphabet on the wall. All they did was give him their blessing. In July, a Soviet consular delegation visited Israel for the first time in twenty years to continue discussing the normalization of relations. On the same plane arriving in Tel Aviv was Yuli Edelstein, the young Hebrew teacher who had been arrested on trumped-up charges of illegal drug possession. His release meant there was only one more Prisoner of Zion left in a labor camp, Alexei Magarik, also imprisoned on drug charges. The pale, thin cellist and Hebrew teacher finally returned to Moscow from his Siberian prison in early September, and after that there were no longer any Jews serving prison sentences for being Jews.

As the situation of Soviet Jews improved, the other spheres of conflict between the superpowers also began easing. Once Gorbachev agreed to remove Star Wars from the arms reduction talks—effectively conceding that the program would continue—the path was open to negotiating a pact that would eliminate all the intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. In September, on another trip to Moscow, George Shultz finalized the details of what would be a major de-escalation of the arms race. Reagan and Gorbachev could finally have their first official summit. The Soviet Jewry movement in all its varied manifestations had been waiting for this moment. Shcharansky had continued to call for four hundred thousand American Jews to greet Gorbachev in Washington, which unnerved Jewish leaders. Though there was no clear date yet, a coordinator was chosen. David Harris was emotionally formed by the Soviet Jewry movement and seemed to embody its myriad strains, fusing them together in a single whole. He was one of the few people who could hope to come close to Shcharansky's grand vision.

Harris was tall and gangly, a bespectacled Jimmy Stewart; a Jewish professional in his thirties, he had already acquired a reputation for extreme competence. But it was his recent past that made him interesting and in many ways more in touch with the Jewish grass roots than his colleagues. When he was chosen to coordinate the rally, he was running the American Jewish Committee's Washington office. Harris had grown up in the liberal, cosmopolitan enclave of the Upper West Side, surrounded by a very self-assured Jewish community. This allowed him to take his Jewishness for granted—identity was a combination of bagels, synagogue twice a year, and, especially, the foreign languages that his parents spoke. He was the first of his family to be born in America, and as a child he learned Russian and French—his grandparents had fled the Soviet Union for Paris after the revolution. This superficial Jewish identity changed, however, on a trip to Israel, where he gazed jealously at the soldiers, boys the same age as he was who could serve in an army and, it seemed, actively engage in making history. He had the quintessential conversion moment—one shared by a group of NASA scientists in Cleveland—when as a graduate student at the London School of Economics, he discovered Arthur Morse's sensational
While Six Million Died.
He was shocked at the passivity of American Jews and began learning as much as he could about the wartime period and what he came to see as the community's shameful behavior.

This new sense of responsibility to his people was galvanized when he got a rare chance to live in the Soviet Union in 1974 on an exchange program for teachers. He never intended for it to happen, but the time spent with refUseniks ended up being the most meaningful part of this experience. In Moscow, he spent his Saturdays at the synagogue on Arkhipova. He spoke Russian, and this allowed him a rare entrée into the lives of Soviet Jews, who seemed to pull him in. One day he was walking down the hall of a school in Leningrad where he taught when a young girl passed by and slipped a note into his hand. He went to the bathroom, locked himself in an empty stall, and read: "David Harris, I think you are a Jew. I feel it. If I'm right, please know that my parents are refuseniks. Would you come to our house one day after school?" After three months in the Soviet Union fraternizing with refuseniks, Harris was detained near the Moscow synagogue and then kicked out of the country.

He could not abandon what now felt like a mission. From Moscow he made his way to Rome, where Soviet Jews waited to receive visas to the United States. There he began working for HIAS, processing new arrivals and quickly seeing the flaws in the system. He worried that these refugees were not getting any kind of introduction to the world that was about to engulf them. So Harris composed a manual in Russian,
Entering a New Culture,
that gave information about America, and then he worked on a second book,
The Jewish World,
which tried to expose them to all the elements of Jewish civilization that had been closed to them for so long. In the process of researching and putting the book together, he realized that he needed to learn more himself. He was not the first American Jew to be struck with this epiphany: how could he ask these new immigrants to embrace a Jewish identity if his own knowledge was so cursory?

After several years in Rome and then a stint at the main reception center in Vienna—meeting thousands of Soviet Jews—Harris came back to America and took a job with the American Jewish Committee. Although he loved working on the ground, directly with people, the Jewish organizational world offered the chance to make an even greater impact. He was the perfect choice to lead the rally. Soviet Jewry had played a big role in his intellectual evolution—in the mid-1980s he had even compiled a book of Soviet Jewish humor,
The Jokes of Op
pression
—he had legitimacy with the grassroots activists of the Union of Councils, and he was recognized by the Park Avenue Jewish leaders as one of their own.

On October 30, Shevardnadze arrived in Washington for talks with Reagan. At the end of the day, the president, flanked by Shultz and Shevardnadze, announced that the summit would take place on December 7 in Washington and would last for three days. To Reagan's disappointment, the Soviets wouldn't go for his original plan of taking Gorbachev on a countrywide tour that ended at his California ranch. But he could take pleasure in finally signing the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, which would diffuse the tense nuclear standoff in Europe. A few hours later, Harris announced that American Jews would hold a giant rally on Sunday, December 6, the day before the start of the summit. This gave him thirty-seven days to make concrete what until then had only been an abstract vision. He had to quickly find an answer to the question of what exactly the rally would be about. What point were American Jews trying to make at this moment when progress was clearly visible?

Everyone was leaving. At least that's how it felt to the tight community of refuseniks. Every day seemed to bring another phone call from OVIR. It started in early September when Yosef Begun was given an exit visa, along with other long-term refuseniks like Victor Brailovsky. And then it did not stop. Some refuseniks were so anxious and excited that they literally sat by the phone all day. Naum Meiman, seventy-six and now a widower (his wife had succumbed to cancer three weeks after she'd finally arrived in the United States for special medical treatment), stared at the receiver with anticipation. His only child and most of his friends had recently left. Now he had nothing to do but wait. All through the fall, exit visas cascaded out of OVIR. And soon it wasn't only long-term refuseniks who were part of the nearly nine hundred people a month leaving. Richard Schifter had received reports from Vienna that some of the newer applicants had lied to OVIR about having close relatives in Israel, but no one had tried to verify their claims. Accompanying George Shultz on a trip to Moscow that October, Schifter asked his counterpart if this meant that the Soviets had altered their new emigration policy, which contained strict guidelines about who could be counted as family. "We are now being flexible," the Russian said with a smile. Schifter left Moscow feeling for the first time that the Soviets—at least those in the foreign ministry—had turned from adversaries to allies. They were now working together to help convince the other government agencies that more people should be let out more quickly.

In early October, Ida Nudel went to Moscow to see if she could get a residence permit to move back there. As soon as she arrived, she received a call from her village back in Moldavia. The police there were looking for her. They had a summons from OVIR: her exit visa was waiting. Nudel didn't believe it. She couldn't believe it. Surely, they were trying to fool her. She called the central OVIR and to her astonishment was patched through to Rudolf Kuznetsov, the head of the whole agency. He told her it was true, she was really leaving. In Nudel's excitement, she began thanking him profusely. Only afterward did she curse herself for the kind words. How could she have forgotten that they had made her wait for sixteen years for this moment? She was in a frenzy, overwhelmed and excited. The next few days whirled by. The agents of OVIR seemed intent on getting her out of the country within two weeks, helping her gather all the necessary documents. As her departure got closer, she was presented with a strange request. Would she be willing to fly to Israel aboard the private plane of Armand Hammer, the eighty-nine-year-old billionaire head of Occidental Petroleum who had close ties to the Communists (going back to Lenin)? He had asked the Soviet leaders for this favor. Nudel agreed, and she and her collie, Pizer, began preparing for the trip.

The Slepaks' phone rang on the afternoon of October 13. Masha picked up and a representative of OVIR asked to speak to Volodya. When she said he wasn't home, the man on the line asked if she was Maria Isakovna. "Yes," she told him. He introduced himself and then said the words she had been waiting since 1971 to hear: "You are granted permission to leave the USSR." She was to go tomorrow to the OVIR office to get the card listing the documents she needed in order to obtain her visa. She too was in disbelief. How could something they had all struggled for, anguished over, dreamed about for so long be resolved in a phone call? It was the same feeling the next day when Volodya held in his hands the small slip of paper—just a piece of paper—that promised him an exit visa. How could this be? They had endured exile, seen their children leave, missed the births of their grandchildren—all for this slip of paper? After they left OVIR, jubilant and a little disoriented, they went to a goodbye party for Ida Nudel at a restaurant called the Vilnius. Volodya walked in waving the paper from OVIR. Everyone knew what it meant. The room filled with cheering and crying. A close friend rushed to embrace him, and Volodya could feel the man's tears against his cheek.

The arrival in Israel of Ida Nudel and then the Slepaks sparked emotional media events. The very names of these activists had become touchstones for Jews all over the world. Like Shcharansky, they were symbols, living embodiments of the struggle. And now they were free. There was no more visceral proof than this that some deep change was taking place—despite the hard-liners' continued claims that the wool was being pulled over everyone's eyes. American Jews and Israelis watched on television as Nudel, her gray hair held back, her dog in her arms, walked down the stairs of Armand Hammer's Boeing 707 and was embraced by the sister she hadn't seen in fifteen years. Even Jane Fonda was standing there to receive her. "For me it is the moment," Nudel told the cameras, big tears streaming down her cheeks. "It is the moment of my life. I am at home. I am on the soil of my people. Now I am an absolutely free person among my own people." Soon after landing she was connected by phone to George Shultz, who had recently met her at the Seder in Moscow. "This is Ida Nudel. I'm in Jerusalem," she told him, then paused. "I'm home." Shultz couldn't explain the rush of emotion he suddenly felt. Later he described this as one of the most meaningful moments of his tenure.