Those Were the Days, My Friend!
It has been nearly two decades since the exodus of almost 1,250,000 Jews from the Soviet Union.
This wave of immigration, which happened between 1988 and1991, was one of the most miraculous accomplishments in modern Jewish history, second only to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It was the result of a number of historical factors: the Soviet empire, in a downward slide, was in desperate need of financial aid from the West; Americans increasingly supported linking the conduct of American foreign policy and trade with human rights, as demonstrated by the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and Israel was skillfully juggling Cold War and Middle East politics.
In the United States, the campaign to free Soviet Jewry was of paramount importantance. Fueled by the slogan “never again,” American Jewry never was more energized than in its effort to smash the “mighty Pharaoh” and free their brothers and sisters.
The great refusenik Natan Sharansky described the Soviet Jewry movement as “an army of housewives and students,” and 20 years later it is clear that he was right. The story of the Soviet Jewry movement is one of a grassroots effort by rabbis, cantors, educators, and laity, inspired by the heroism and sacrifices of Russia’s Jews, who devoted their financial and spiritual resources to see an impossible dream come true.
Jews everywhere were touched by the movement’s essential message, shelach etami (Let my people go), the heart of our Torah’s fundamental call for freedom. This message was felt particularly at Passover, when the holiday’s story of slavery was expanded to embrace the new narrative of the refuseniks, prisoners of Zion, Russian Jews who hungered for liberation from their bondage behind the Iron Curtain. The dovetailing of the traditional Exodus from Egypt with the call for the human rights of Soviet Jews rang with great urgency.
Rabbis, cantors, and lay leaders from Conservative congregations joined forces with the grassroots Union of Councils for Soviet Jews and the Jewish establishment’s National Conference for Soviet Jews, and Conservative leaders and laity remained at the movement’s vanguard. We led rallies, demonstrations, and media blitzes. We encouraged letter-writing campaigns, bar/bat mitzvah twinning, and visits to refuseniks. We jammed phone lines in Moscow, testified before congressional committees, and signed petitions. We made sure that the Soviet regime, members of Congress, senators, American administrations, and members of the Israeli Knesset saw that world Jewry was not going to rest until Soviet Jews were allowed the most basic of human rights – the right to live where they chose.
In the spirit of the Conservative movement’s longstanding support of Jewish peoplehood and its solidarity with Zionism, a steady stream of resolutions, impassioned sermons, articles, and other writings came from United Synagogue, Women’s League, the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs, the Rabbinical Assembly, and other Conservative organizations.
I was involved in the fight to free Soviet Jews, and I continue to be proud of the colleagues who showed determined leadership and example. Just a few days before Purim in 1986, Rabbi Alexander Shapiro, z”l, then president of the Rabbinical Assembly, led a group of RA members, together with prominent Reform and Orthodox rabbis, to a reading of megillat Esther at the entrance to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. According to the Washington Jewish Week, on that chilly March day, Rabbi Shapiro said, “Our coming together represents the full Jewish community. We have come together to identify with our Soviet brothers and sisters, and to remind ourselves during this week of Purim…that only if we speak loud enough and long enough – showing that we will not give up but will come back again and again – will the Hamans ultimately respond.”
The largest number of rabbis at that rally – about 30 in all – came from the Rabbinical Assembly. The call to assist our brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union grew naturally from our affiliation with Conservative Judaism, which demands that we save Jewish lives, smash oppression, and bring faith and resolve to our congregants.
We were all arrested. A law enacted in the 1930s to protect the German embassy prohibited any public assembly within 50 yards of a foreign embassy. Sent to prison for the day, we chanted Israeli songs in front of the other inmates, davened, discussed our next moves, and dreamed about new lives for our Soviet brothers and sisters in Israel and North America. We were brought before a judge who set us free with words of praise and gratitude. (Only in America!) Leaving the courtroom, we were applauded and cheered by the media, court officials, and other witnesses to the events.
That day – and there were other, similar days – we sent a message to our congregations. We showed them that their rabbis were going to lead by example and do what the American Jewish community largely failed to do in the 1930s. As Abraham Joshua Heschel, the movement’s foremost activistrabbi, had written in 1963, “There is a dreadful moral trauma that haunts many of us: the failure to do our utmost…to save the Jews under Hitler. There is a nightmare that terrifies me today; the unawareness of our being involved in a new failure, in a tragic dereliction of duty. Eastern European Jewry vanished. Russian Jewry is the last remnant of a spiritual glory that is no more... Let the twentieth century not enter the annals of Jewish history as the century of physical and spiritual destruction” (The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays in Human Existence).
Rabbi Heschel delivered these words at a conference at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Looking back, it is clear that Rabbi Heschel’s call for activism became a centerpiece of the movement’s understanding of social action and social justice.
In April 1988, Coretta Scott King addressed the Rabbinical Assembly convention delegates in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where her late husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had delivered some of his most impassioned sermons.
After hearing her stirring words, a few of us, including Rabbi Leonid Feldman, one of the first Soviet immigrants to be ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, joined to send matzot and other symbols of Passover to Jews in the Soviet Union. We were determined to continue to fulfill the divine mandate that Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King had presented to us.
Why did the Soviet Jewry movement strike such a responsive chord? Three powerful motifs run throughout the many appeals and resolutions to be found in the movement’s archives. First, there was the community’s imperative to reverse the embarrassing record of American Jewry’s apathy during the Shoah. Second, there was the grandparent factor. Our Yiddish-speaking grandparents had infused many of our lives with yiddishkeit. They were the fortunate ones, who left tsarist Russia between 1881 and 1921, when the great wave of Jewish immigrants came to these North American shores. For their grandchildren, looking at the plight of Soviet Jews was like looking at a mirror image of our own histories.
Then there was Israel. Especially after the 1967 Six Day War, the early prisoners of Zion, Russian Jews who sought to immigrate to Israel, seemed to reenact our heroic Maccabean heritage as they sought to learn Hebrew and Jewish history and literature and to practice Judaism. Their stories reinforced the stories of our own personal journeys, which led to our commitment to Zionism and the state of Israel.
An ideological debate on the essence of freedom runs throughout Jewish history and is at the heart of the haggadah narrative. Is it physical or spiritual freedom for which the children of Israel yearned when they were in Egypt? Was it their release from physical or spiritual bondage that we celebrate? Was it Soviet Jews’ struggle for the right to emigrate, to be free from debilitating anti-Semitism, KGB searches, and humiliations that inspired us? Or was it the spiritual sacrifices of Natan Sharansky, Yuli Edelstein, Yosef Begun, Lev Elbert, Pavel Astrakhan, and Boris Klotz, among many others? These Jews faced imprisonment not only because they wanted to live free, but because they also wanted to teach and to learn Hebrew, to practice and to study Judaism.
As a movement, we must remember this formative episode, which shaped us, and remember and honor the many people who cared so deeply, risked so much, and gained so much.
The lessons we learned from the thousands of Russian Jews who sacrificed their security, livelihoods, and safety can kindle the flames of hope in the hearts of all of us. Finally, we can appreciate that rabbis and congregants, cantors and educators, professionals and volunteers, undoubtedly can make a difference in the struggle for Israel’s future as they can in all just causes that lead to shalom.
Stuart Altshuler, the rabbi of Congregation Eilat in Mission Viejo, California, is a professor of religious studies and history at Chapman University in Orange, California, and the author of From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement.
