When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (86 page)

Yosef Mendelevich was also on the stage, and although he had wanted a greater show of anger at the rally, in the final moments he linked arms with Shcharansky and Ida Nudel, the Slepaks, Yuli Edelstein, and Morris Abram. They sang the "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem, and swayed together. Looking out at those thousands upon thousands of freezing people, Mendelevich must have remembered himself as a boy coming across the forest at Rumbuli and seeing for the first time a group of Jews working together, toiling over the ground, smoothing the earth down to make it respectable for the massacred bodies lying beneath it. Back then, he had never seen so many Jews together in one place. And now here he was, looking at all these faces. That same jolt of unfamiliar power he'd felt as a boy, that was here too. They had come to do something together, and they had done it.

T
HAT FALL DAY
when the Berlin Wall crumbled under the force of thousands of pickax-wielding Germans was a historic moment that occurred at astonishing speed. The known world flipped on its head in a few hours. By nightfall on November 9, 1989, the Cold War was effectively over. The end of the Soviet Jewry movement, however, was not as swift and unambiguous. Victory accreted slowly with every planeload of Soviet Jews. But from 1988 and into the early 1990s—a relatively short period of time compared with the decades of struggle—the mass of people who left the Soviet Union exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. In 1988, 18,919 Jews left, a modest figure but still more than double the previous year. Then the numbers exploded: 71,196 in 1989; 181,802 in 1990; 178,566 in 1991; 108,292 in 1992; 102,134 in 1993. By the end of the 1990s, more than one million Soviet Jews had emigrated to Israel. Another half a million had gone to the United States, and a couple hundred thousand to other countries in the West, such as Germany. During the years of the protest movement, the activists and refuseniks, sustained mostly by faith, had believed that hundreds of thousands would leave if given the chance. Now came a surge of humanity that fulfilled those dreams: an exodus.

The incredible numbers hid a bumpier denouement. The unity and triumph of the rally in Washington was, in retrospect, a rare moment of grace. The actual arrival in the West of the hundreds of thousands was filled with the intrigue and tension that had characterized the years of struggle. All the familiar conflicts—grass roots versus establishment, American Jews versus Israel, freedom of choice versus Zionism—intensified just as success was finally within reach.

Lost sometimes in these heated ideological debates were the emigrants themselves. They had left their lives and everything they had ever known. The vast majority were not the brave fighters cheered on by the Western world, the Shcharanskys and the Slepaks. They were ordinary people who had seen no future for themselves inside the Soviet Union, who had feared what would follow the collapse of the empire. Most were not Zionists. They were engineers and doctors, physicists and musicians, looking for a better life. They had children and elderly parents. They looked at the Soviet Union in its death throes and saw a place of great political and economic instability. Freedom had unleashed certain demons. Anti-Semitic groups like Pamyat blamed the Jews for the disintegration of their society. They were calling for blood. For the vast—and, until then, silent—majority of Soviet Jews, this was enough to convince them to walk through the doors that had been unbolted.

American Jews were disoriented by this victory. They didn't know quite how to accept that they had succeeded. The movement began folding up after the triumphant rally in December 1987. The following year, for the first time since 1971, there was no Solidarity Sunday. No one saw any point. The National Conference on Soviet Jewry (though it still exists today) began scaling back its activities and focused on pushing the American government to reward Gorbachev more quickly for the changes he had made. The Union of Councils and the other grassroots activist groups did not quiet down so easily. Those who saw the movement as a freedom struggle were still waiting for something huge to happen, for the heavens to open up and declare that they had won. Even when presented with the incredible emigration numbers, they refused to believe that they could pack up their signs and banners and go home. For them, the sheer ordinariness of the emigrants—not heroes, just regular Sashas and Borises and Mashas looking to make a living—was depressing and demoralizing. Most of these activists were never able to take the next step and embrace the much more prosaic and perhaps less gratifying work of absorbing these new citizens.

The mass emigration itself—how it was carried out and what happened to the emigrants—is a subject worthy of another book. But our story ends at the moment when the two communities that generated the Soviet Jewry movement finally found the redemption they had been seeking. American Jews, now liberated from the fear of agitating for their own, had discovered a political voice and a sense of common purpose. Soviet Jews were on the verge of getting out and would be free to stay or leave, embrace their Jewishness or assimilate. The choice was theirs to make.

But this feeling of redemption soon dissipated. Nothing since has united American Jewry in quite the same way, drawing together both right and left. In fact, at the very moment that American Jews were finding common cause in Washington, an intifada was beginning in the streets of Gaza. After a series of violent episodes that began a day before the 1987 rally, mass rioting broke out that would engulf Israel and force it to confront its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Lebanon war in the early 1980s had divided American Jews, and the conflict with the Palestinians only widened the chasm. It seems inconceivable today that there was ever a moment in the recent past when liberal Jews professing universal principles of human rights could join, however tenuously, with die-hard Jabotinskyite believers of Jewish power. But there was such a time. And for those who took part in the movement, there is great sadness that a community that gained so much from the struggle seems too fractured to ever rally together again.

For Soviet Jews, of course, the redemption was physical. The act of leaving was a fulfillment of the movement. But what awaited them in their new countries was less than ideal. Both the United States and Israel were ill equipped to handle the mass immigration. As soon as the gates opened wider, the dropout problem escalated. In 1988, an incredible 88.5 percent of Soviet emigrants dropped out in Vienna. In 1989, it was 82.9 percent. Israel, and the agents of the Lishka, watched these percentages with horror. This was supposed to be the culmination of all their efforts—their secret demographic weapon to secure Israel's future as Jewish and democratic—and the Soviet Jews were overwhelmingly choosing to go elsewhere. The situation caused chaos and heartache for American Jews. Some activists tried to hold a firm line, demanding freedom of choice for the emigrants. Others in the community empathized with the Israelis' anguish and pushed for direct flights from Moscow to Tel Aviv—something the Soviets had promised to do but hadn't yet.

The situation finally began to change in the summer of 1988, when the American embassy in Moscow stopped processing visa applications. Overwhelmed, underfinanced, and understaffed, the embassy simply could not handle the thousands of Armenians and Pentecostal Soviet citizens bursting to get out. Soviet Jews were still leaving with Israeli visas that they abandoned in Vienna. But soon they too began to feel the lack of resources. That same summer, the State Department decided to redefine refugee status; now Soviet Jews had to prove a "well-founded fear of persecution" to get immediate American citizenship, a task that became more and more difficult for them in light of Gorbachev's liberalizations. Then, in the early months of 1989, the United States simply stopped giving visas to many of the dropouts in Vienna. The number of those rejected for American visas after they'd already reached Rome rose from 11 percent in January to 36 percent in March. The American option was quickly closing for Soviet emigrants. By July, sixteen thousand Jews were in limbo in the suburbs of the Italian capital, anxiously waiting for news of their applications. Almost fifty thousand waited in Moscow for the American embassy to begin issuing applications again.

The new Bush administration declared a refugee emergency. Not as ideologically attached to the movement as the previous administration, these politicians were less inclined to accept the budgetary strain that would accompany an unending flow of immigrants—and they were skeptical that Soviet Jews should be counted as a threatened people who didn't have a natural home. After long negotiations between Jewish organizations and the administration, a deal was finally worked out. Starting October 1, 1989, Soviet Jews would no longer be processed in Vienna or Rome. The United States set a quota: forty thousand Soviet Jews would be admitted every year, and of those, only thirty-two thousand would be financially supported by the government as refugees; American Jews would have to pick up the tab for the remaining eight thousand. Their visas would be issued in the Soviet capital, and preference would be given to people who had close family members already in the United States. The tens of thousands stuck in the pipeline—either waiting in Rome or backlogged in Moscow—would get out first. Israel, gleeful at this resolution, became the main destination for Soviet Jews who wanted to get out. The dropout problem, which the Israelis had worked so hard to combat, was over. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were flown via Bucharest or Warsaw (countries that would not let them drop out) to Tel Aviv to become new Israelis.

Many Soviet Jews perceived this as a betrayal by the United States. Their plight had served as good ideological ammunition when the Cold War raged, but now that they were no longer needed, America would not make the necessary sacrifices to take them in. The life many Soviet Jews found in Israel also gave them cause to complain. The challenge of absorbing a million people into a state that had only five million to begin with proved huge, and the Israelis did not approach it with either resourcefulness or humility. In truth, the task was enormous. More than 70 percent of the new immigrants had advanced degrees, including a hundred thousand engineers and twenty-three thousand doctors. Today, Israel can look at its transformation into a science and high-tech capital of the world and be thankful for this infusion of intellectual power, but in the early years it was overwhelming to find a professional home for these people—hardly any of whom spoke Hebrew.

Now Soviet Jews make up the largest single immigrant bloc, and their presence has changed the face of Israel. There are a hundred and thirty Israeli Russian periodicals, including four daily newspapers and dozens of weeklies; two hundred Russian bookstores; a Russian television station; and hundreds of Israeli Russian Internet sites. The symphony orchestras of Israel are bursting with Soviet Jewish pianists and violinists. The Russian emigrant community has gained a political voice as a substantial conservative bloc—perhaps a reaction to living in a leftist totalitarian state. In the early 1990s they were happy to give political power to Natan Sharansky—he rose to the position of deputy prime minister—but now they vote for deeply conservative figures, such as Avigdor Lieberman, appointed foreign minister after the 2009 elections and a staunch advocate of forced population exchange to deal with the Palestinian conflict. Absorption still remains a challenge. Along with the Soviet Jews who arrived in Israel came tens of thousands of non-Jewish spouses and relatives, as well as people whose Jewish roots were tenuous at best. They have added another layer of complexity to the Israeli story. As for the old refusenik leaders, they often feel ignored or disrespected, their role in Jewish history forgotten. Volodya Slepak, now in his eighties—stooped, his beard completely white, but his face still bright and open—struggled with economic hardship for years while the Israeli government refused to pay sufficient pensions for those refuseniks who'd given up careers to fight for their right to go to Israel. Other former activists have become destitute in Israel, subsisting on grants from individual donors and foundations, like the one set up by Enid Wurtman, the Soviet Jewry activist from Philadelphia who herself made aliyah.

But for all these difficulties and disappointments, on any given day in any street in Israel, one can still see and hear an Israeli soldier in an olive uniform chatting away on a cell phone in Russian—a boy or girl who would have grown up ignorant of his or her Jewish identity if not for the Soviet Jewry movement. The difficulties of resettlement don't take away from the successes of a campaign that injected itself into the middle of the Cold War and demanded a place next to discussions of nuclear weapons and billion-dollar trade deals. If the first half of the twentieth century gave us the ultimate example of Jews as victims of history, then the second half gave us—in addition to the establishment of Israel—this triumphant story, one in which Jews grabbed history and changed its course.

The Soviet Union's dismal economic conditions certainly precipitated its swift collapse. By the second half of the 1980s, the failures of a centrally planned system were manifest. The line for toilet paper was simply too long. The economies of the Eastern bloc countries, modeled on the Soviet system, were basically large Ponzi schemes; they borrowed money from the West and then borrowed even more money to pay off those debts. It was untenable.

But although the Soviet Union's economic system was doomed, was its totalitarian structure destined to fail as well? China had managed to compete with the capitalists while still crushing dissent and ignoring human rights. The tanks of Tiananmen Square in 1989 could have reassured the Soviet Communist Party and the military establishment that it was possible to open up their economy without relinquishing total power. But that option was not available to them. Soviet Jewry—and the dissident movement—had worked very hard to ensure that their freedom was the price of reengagement with the West, a necessary element of glasnost and perestroika. And once that thread was pulled, it wasn't long before everything unraveled. Just a quick look at the demands placed on Gorbachev and Shevardnadze when the Helsinki conference in Vienna concluded in January 1989 shows how thoroughly the Soviet government had to dismantle the all-seeing, all-powerful apparatus that had controlled the USSR for six decades. The Soviet leaders had made extraordinary promises, exceeding even the commitments of the initial accords. A country's citizens had the right to leave; religious rights; ethnic rights; the right to information. The Soviets were even
rewarded;
they were given the chance to hold a human rights conference in Moscow. Once these changes were made, they could not be reversed easily, and they only fed people's hunger for more freedom.