Ziva Galili gazes at the computer screen intently, the transcript of the interrogation by now familiar: The interrogator stating the case, the defendant refusing to answer the charges, the recommendation for imprisonment.
Then she clicks on another one, more involved, recommending that the male suspect be sent to the equivalent of concentration camp for three years for his actions.
Their crimes? Zionism, specifically organizing and directing activities of the Soviet branch of Hashomer Hatza'ir in the early 1920s. Their names? Elazar Iskoz and Clara Lipman - Galili's parents.
In a conversation in her apartment in Jerusalem's Nahlaot neighborhood, where she is taking a break from her regular duties as a professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the Israeli-born Galili tells their story, part of her research into a part of Zionist history heretofore shrouded mostly in mystery: the post-revolution activities of at least 10 Zionist organizations, among them the Hashomer Hatza'ir Russian group that created Kibbutz Afikim, where she grew up.
But for Galili, tracing her parents' Zionist activities in what was the Soviet Union has taken her from Israel to New York to New Jersey to Russia and back again, and still not all the questions are answered.
Woven into the tale is intrigue, a love story and a mixture of courage and guilt on the part of her parents, who she believes never felt they did enough for others also arrested for Zionist activity but who didn't make it to Israel.
"They didn't talk about it much," says Galili of her parents' halcyon days as activists in the movement that grew after the Russian Revolution, which drew on the existing Scouts and Maccabi movements.
"I always had a great love for everything Russian," she says of a career that took her from Hebrew University to Columbia, where she got her doctorate, to Rutgers. "My mother told me about works of Russian literature that had an impact on her, books of Russian poetry - maybe there was more connection around that."
Later in life, she discussed it all more at length with her mother, but for the most part, it was Galili herself who had to unearth the story, relying on contacts she built up with archivists in Russia during the 1990s with whom she worked on a major work on the Menshevik party, which opposed the victorious Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.
And while some like to believe the large Zionist movement that spurred the first and second aliyot died with the revolution of 1917, "my research has uncovered that there was a very active Zionist life in the early Soviet period."
At the time, the Soviet government actually tolerated the Zionists and some leaders saw reason to accept them. "There was a kind of assumption that the Soviet government was entirely and unremittingly anti-Zionist," says Galili, who says her research into the period is "partly about my family and partly about Zionism in the Soviet Union" in the 15 years that followed the revolution.
Concerns about the Jews' terrible poverty and their "total lack of preparation for becoming members of society, of the workforce," was behind this acceptance, she says, adding: "They were far from the image we have today of anti-Semitism. The Soviet Union was the only country where anti-Semitism was a punishable crime. So they saw what the Zionists proposed to do as positive, even the goal of emigration to Palestine. So even senior security services leaders backed the idea."
There were lots of Zionist gatherings, both local and national, one of the latter was held by Hashomer Hatza'ir in Kiev, and someone had to host a visiting group leader - Galili's father, whom her mom already knew. "My mother asked her mother, and she said yes, so he stayed with my mother's family for a week or so in the summer of 1923," she recalls with a smile. He visited again the next year. "They didn't only know each other, they knew they wanted to be reunited," she says of the young lovers.
BUT MEANWHILE there was work to do, and trouble. The Jewish Section of the Communist Party feared the Zionist groups were "competing for the soul of the Jewish youth," explains Galili, and urged the secret police to arrest them. Firing back, in August 1924, 10,000 leaflets attacking the Jewish Section of the Communist Party "for its failure to help the Jewish masses" were distributed in Ukraine by Zionist socialist activists. That apparently was too much even for the security services, who arrested 3,000 Zionists in Ukraine on the night of September 2, among them Clara.
When Galili discovered that Russian law made her parents' arrest records accessible to her, she hurriedly obtained them in 1997.
Leafing through them, she was proud of her mother. Sticking to movement credo, Clara refused to answer her interrogators' questions, but then got an unusual offer that became known as "substitution." "The standard charge was anti-Soviet activity and the standard punishment was being sent to a very far-off place," notes Galili. But through the intervention of top Soviet leaders, starting in July 1924, "many, many Zionists were given the option of instead leaving for Palestine for good." Young Clara took the offer.
"Of course it's very moving to see these materials that had to do with my parents 70 years earlier," says Galili. "I ordered copies of the files and I brought them to Israel, and my mother was still alive, so it was very moving to see it with her."
She doesn't blame her mother for not talking about the subject much. "They got involved in their lives and the new society they were building and didn't dwell on what happened there," says Galili, flashing a picture on the computer of her mom on kibbutz, playing with her sister. "I think there was some sort of satisfaction... a certain connection in the fact that I was interested in it, that I went back, and I think it was something that touched her."
Her mom had doubts about coming to Palestine, not realizing she would never see her family again. "She had this very stark choice to make and she made that choice to leave," says Galili. Once here, she found her way to the Hashomer Hatza'ir Russian group.
