That was an evident signal for an attack, and repressions were quick to follow: Already a month and a half later, one of the leading Jewish activists, Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, was arrested and accused of high treason, one of the most serious crimes according to the Criminal Code.
I had been arrested two weeks before, accused of a “parasitic lifestyle.” The court did not deem my private lessons of Hebrew to be “work of public significance,” and sentenced me to two years of exile.
In June 1967, the victory of Israel over the coalition of the Arab countries, which did not conceal their intent “to throw the Jews into the sea,” rescued from elimination not only the Jewish state but also the Jewish nation itself. To rephrase John Reed, one could say that those “six days that changed the world” also overturned the fate of the Soviet Jews. In fact, few of them saw themselves as proud Jews. We must bear in mind that for many decades, the Jews of the USSR were not happy, to put it mildly, about belonging to the Jewish people. Many people were embarrassed about their being Jewish, and the very word “Jew” was hard to pronounce in the vernacular of those days. But now we had something to be proud of!
It started in my childhood when, as a six-year-old boy, I heard from my playmates that I was a Jew. That word was definitely meant as an insult. “Why am I a Jew?” I asked my mother, filled with grief. As the years went by, I understood that I belonged to those strange people, the strangers without kin. I grew up during the black years of Stalinism: Jews were called “cosmopolitans” and “spies.” Jewish authors were accused of being the agents of the Americans, the manifestation of evil. Jewish doctors allegedly “killed” the Soviet leaders, so beloved by the people. And the neighbors with whom we shared our communal apartment whispered that Jews would soon be deported from Moscow.
Nikita Khrushchev, who was Stalin’s successor, had to pursue a more liberal policy. The World Youth Festival held in Moscow in 1957 became a big event. Muscovites could socialize with the young people from other countries.
There was a delegation from Israel at the festival, too, always surrounded by many people, but I tried to stay away from it. I was graduating from university and was planning to get a job…. How could I reveal my interest in a “Zionist country”? I was despising myself for my lack of courage, realizing all too well that I was living in a country where I had to fear being Jewish.
After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, which launched the liberalization of the society, the government had to declare “restoration of the Jewish culture.” Of course, it was another propagandist campaign. Yet, the campaign brought some cultural events to the Jewish community, such as concerts of Jewish songs or the literary journal Sovietish Geimland (“Soviet Motherland”). However, it was published in Yiddish, a language the young people did not know. So I decided I had to learn Yiddish.
Those who seek will find! As the result of a casual conversation with an elderly Jew, he offered to teach me “the ancient Jewish language” of Hebrew. But I asked myself, “Why would I need it? To read the Bible, that religious book full of prejudices?” Neither I nor any of the people I knew thought or dreamt about Israel. However, another thought haunted me. Perhaps this was my chance. If I learned this ancient Jewish language, it would be easier for me to understand what Jews are.
That encounter became the turning point of my life. It was the first step toward the long way to Israel. My first teacher of Hebrew, Lev Grigoryevich Gurvich, was a parishioner of the Moscow synagogue. He was not a professional teacher, but he had received traditional Jewish education in pre-revolutionary Russia. He was now dedicated to helping Jews return to their own sources. He introduced me to the world where, under normal conditions, a Jewish father would bring his young son: the world of the Torah, the history of the Jews and of Israel. This elderly man lived in a tiny room of a communal apartment, furnished only with a bed, a table, and a chair.
When we started a lesson, he would lock the door of his room and turn on the radio to full volume, saying, “There are some neighbors in the apartment who aren’t good.” So, accompanied by the sound of stalwart Soviet songs, the 30-year-old graduate student of the Military Electronics Institute learned the first words of his native language.
I will mention one of the episodes of the Six Day War time in Moscow of 1967. A short time before the war, an international exhibition was opened in Moscow, and there was an Israeli pavilion. Lev Gurvich attended the exhibition and told me: “There were many Jews there, and they asked the Israeli prime minister Yigal Allon worriedly, “What is going to happen? There are so many enemies around.” And Allon replied in Yiddish, “Vett bekumen zain shtock (a dog will get its stick).” I sighed with relief. A few days later, we received confirmation of the prime minister’s words.
By that time, I had completed the first steps of my Jewish education with my Hebrew teacher, but realized that within my circle I was alone with my Hebrew and my thoughts about Israel. I needed to find kindred spirits, my own Jewish company. But where could I find them? There was not a single place in Moscow where a Jew could meet other Jews and talk about Jewish topics. An episode that happened to me soon after the Six Day War demonstrates the degree of alienation of the Jews in the USSR.
One of the men I worked with was Jewish. We became friendly and talked a lot together – but never about Jewish subjects. My colleague was interested in Esperanto and insisted that I join his group of Esperanto students. I didn’t accept the invitation. But one day while taking the bus together, probably wanting to impress my colleague, I showed him my secret Hebrew textbook and said, “Look at my language. Your Esperanto could not be compared with it!” At then I suddenly got scared. We all knew that we had to keep our mouths shut. But we ended the trip speaking Hebrew! It turned out that my colleague was a secret Hebrew student as well. It would have been very funny if it hadn’t been so sad. Two friends, Jews, were studying Hebrew secretly from each other! So I joined his group of “Esperanto amateurs.” There were different types of people there, but they were all enamored of the idea of Israel. They celebrated Jewish holidays and read Jewish books... Some of them had already been imprisoned for Zionism. They were the “soldiers of Zion” in the country in which Zionism was against the law. I was very happy to be among them.
The Soviet power did not like the Jewish nation. Jews – yes, as useful citizens, but not the whole people. The classics of Marxism-Leninism “substantiated” the idea that Jews were not a nation and that assimilation was “a progressive way” for the Jews to take. So equal to others in civil rights and often occupying leading positions in science and culture, the Jews in the USSR were deprived of all the conditions of national minority development. This policy acquired the features of cultural genocide – the annihilation of the people by way of forced assimilation of the Soviet version of the “final solution to the Jewish question.”
After June 1967, Jewish resistance toward the regime of assimilation increased greatly. The time of the battalions of the “soldiers of Zion” had come. The best students of Hebrew began to educate the newcomers. Books and articles about Jewish history, culture, Israel were passed around from hand to hand. Jews began to stage demonstrations and declare hunger strikes, demanding the right to immigrate to Israel. The Soviet power took measures. A massive campaign against “the Israeli aggression” and the “agents of Zionism” started in the mass media. And, like in any war, there were captured soldiers. Dozens of Jewish activists were arrested in various cities of the USSR.
I was in such captivity three times. The first time for teaching the Jewish language, I received a rather light punishment.
The third arrest in November 1982 was much more serious. I was accused of “anti-Soviet propaganda with the intention of undermining the authority of Soviet power” and did this “under the guise of the Hebrew language and familiarizing Jews with the Jewish culture.” The court did not bother to rubber-stamp the maximum sentence under the “anti-Soviet propaganda” article (seven years of strict regime camp, followed by five years of exile). Jewish culture was directly blamed at that trial, which became a showcase in the policy of the Soviet project aimed at the total assimilation of Jews.
“What helped you to stand your ground in the hard conditions of constant KGB persecutions?” Such questions are often asked to the participants of the Jewish movement in the USSR. I would like to emphasize two key factors: an internal one and an external one. A Jewish movement activist realized that he was gaining something that belonged to him genetically: his own people and country that had seemed to be irrevocably lost to Soviet Jews. As an activist, you realized your main mission: to help others to discover this closed world of being Jewish. Аnd the belief in these ideals and the motivation of the “soldiers of Zion” only became stronger during confrontation with KGB.
Another important factor in the confrontation with the KGB was that we were not alone. The global Jewish community had a wide-ranging solidarity movement with the Jews in the USSR. I would like to give a particular example. In May 1988 at a reception at the White House after my release from the USSR, president Ronald Reagan handed me a metal bracelet, saying that he had kept it on his desk to remind him of the suffering of the Soviet Jews. Тhose bracelets with the names of prisoners of Zion in the USSR were widespread in the US. Support from abroad became the second front of the soldiers of Zion’s battles.
1987 became notable in the history of Russian Jews. Prisoners of Zion were released from Gulag prisons and camps. Soon Jews were allowed to leave for Israel. Jewish schools were opened, Jewish culture was permitted. Jewish activists won! The first year of my aliya, 1988, was eventful. It included a number of meetings with leaders of states and prominent public figures in Israel, the US and other countries. But here I would like to talk about another seemingly ordinary meeting.
In essence, this Israeli soldier of Zion saved all the Jews of the world, the entire people of Israel. In our epoch, global assimilation can destroy all the Diaspora Jews wherever they live. The existence of an independent Jewish state is a guarantee that such a thing will not happen. As for me, I had no way of knowing that we two soldiers would have a real meeting, not a virtual one.
It happened by chance in Jerusalem. The inauguration of a sefer Torah was being conducted in a synagogue in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood. We, the two former soldiers of Zion, were in the ritual procession. That is how we met. It seems like a simple story: two war veterans met. So what? Israel is a fighting country, where most people are soldiers of Zion. But I saw a great symbolic meaning in this encounter.
Two soldiers of Zion were fighting in different armies and countries, but they had one common enemy who wanted to make the whole world Judenfrei, to complete the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Soviet Marxists-Leninists regime was in agreement with Arabic dictators on this issue. But the Jews changed! Unprotected and homeless, Jews became a people and gained newfound strength. Jews managed to prove to the entire world that they knew how to fight and win and how to build their own state. And they were capable of helping their fellow Jews who were in trouble. As we, the Jews of USSR were. The help of the world Jewish community led by Israel made possible one more miracle of Jewish history – the great exodus of Russian Jews at the end of the 20th century. Proclaiming the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 aroused national feelings among Soviet Jews. Millions of of them were locked in a spiritual “Jewish gulag” with no exit. But again, the times had changed. The Jewish state existed. The unprecedented international campaign to rescue the Soviet Jews was totally successful. Zionism triumphed over communism: The USSR collapsed, and Russian Jews were liberated.
“The Russians,” as we are called in Israel, have not broken with the national tradition.