A few weeks before the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations held
in Denver in 1994, Jonathan Pollard wrote to Council of Federations president
Maynard Wishner and executive vice president Martin Kraar: “I was shocked to
learn that on the eve of the 10th anniversary of my incarceration, my case is
not on the agenda of the General Assembly. Given the importance of the General
Assembly, such an omission will be interpreted by the government as a signal
that the Jewish community is unconcerned with my fate. I cannot overstate the
effect this will have on my chances for commutation. I therefore formally ask
the General Assembly to raise my case in a plenum with an eye toward asking that
my sentence be commuted.”
The request was turned down by the Federation
leaders.
A few days from now, the General Assembly of the Jewish
Federations of North America will convene again in Denver, and once again, the
issue of a Jew serving a life sentence for passing classified information to
America’s closest ally will not be raised in any formal session. As the GA gets
under way this week, Pollard, in deteriorating health, is about to enter his
27th year in prison, and the American Jewish community still hasn’t figured out
how to use its much-vaunted political prowess to end his suffering and speak out
against the inequitable sentence.
Back in 1994, I was national director
of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns-Amcha, a grassroots group headed by Rabbi
Avi Weiss (Pollard’s rabbi at the time) that was made up of bands of dedicated
activists scattered in communities all over North America.
The previous
year, we had put an enormous amount of energy into gathering signatures from
1,000 rabbis of every denomination as well as dozens of rabbinic organizations,
national and international Jewish groups, seven city councils, dozens of Jewish
Community Relations Councils and more than 50 local Jewish Federations. The
signatures were appended to a letter to president Bill Clinton that was
published as a full-page ad in The New York Times on November 19, 1993, urging
commutation of Pollard’s sentence to time served.
Pollard had then served
eight years of a life sentence.
Following this powerful and public
expression of communal sentiment, we concurred with Pollard’s belief that a
strong statement of concern raised by the organized Jewish community at the
upcoming General Assembly would put the administration on notice that the
Pollard issue was a major concern.
Stung by the decision that such an
event would not occur, we held a vocal but peaceful demonstration together with
a group of concerned Denver Jews, carrying signs and handing out information
about Pollard outside the Convention Center an hour before then-prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin was scheduled to address the GA plenum.
Rabbi Weiss took a
seat in the auditorium to hear whether the prime minister would mention Pollard
in his widely publicized address. But before the session got under way, burly
security guards alerted by GA organizers barged in, forcefully removing Rabbi
Weiss from his seat and escorting him out of the hall, as if this leader of a
large New York Orthodox congregation was an unwanted interloper.
A
similar incident took place less than two years later when a few CJC-Amcha
people passed out literature inviting delegates of the 1996 AIPAC Washington
Policy Conference to a vigil for Pollard. I was threatened with arrest by
Washington, DC, police officers, who told me “AIPAC doesn’t want you
here.”
Police prevented Rabbi Weiss from entering the hotel, saying they
had orders from AIPAC not to let him in.
It’s hard to fathom the paranoia
of some Jewish organizations and the patronizing attitude that deems that their
members won’t know how to deal with divergent views and therefore should not be
exposed to them.
No doubt Jewish leaders will claim with regard to
Pollard, as they did during the Soviet Jewry movement era, that they are
negotiating at the highest levels behind the scenes and that public outcry only
endangers those efforts. They have still to learn that the synergy of quiet
diplomacy with impassioned protest is a combination has always achieved
results.
The list of prominent figures that have now publicly expressed
their support for commuting Pollard’s sentence continues to grow – former
secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former CIA director James Woolsey, 39
members of Congress, and several ex-attorneys-general. Despite that, and after
all these years some in the mainstream Jewish establishment continue to be
reluctant to mount the kind of full-court press that would send the right message
to the administration.
Pollard’s poignant words to the Jewish
establishment in 1994 are tragically just as relevant today, and should send a
shudder of conscience to those meeting once again in Denver.
The writer
is an award-winning Jerusalem writer. She blogs at
jerusalemdiaries.blogspot.com.
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