One woman’s story of resistance and rescue in the Soviet Union - book review
Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of Resistance and Rescue in The Soviet Union by Pamela Braun Cohen is the story of extraordinary people in America and USSR who refused to be seperated.
Pamela Braun Cohen at her book launch in Jerusalem(photo credit: SHARON MARKS ALTSHUL)BySTEVE LINDEJerusalem Report logo small (credit: JPOST STAFF)
The highlight of Pamela Braun Cohen’s launch of her book, Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of Resistance and Rescue in The Soviet Union (Gefen Publishing House), outside the family home of former Soviet Jewry student activist Yosef Abramowitz in Jerusalem on August 31 was unscripted.
After Cohen, who led two key organizations – the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews and Chicago Action for Soviet Jews – read excerpts from her book, which tells the remarkable story of the Soviet Jewish exodus, a haredi man named Chaim Burshtein stepped forward to thank her for the work she and others had done for refuseniks and Prisoners of Zion such as himself.
“During the period of 1980-1987, I was among the ‘old deniers,’ repeatedly prosecuted and detained by security agencies,” Burshtein later posted on Facebook. “For several years, I was a representative of these two American organizations in Leningrad, almost daily transmitting detailed information about our struggle that they effectively supported. Pamela Cohen and many American Jews who were with her changed Jewish history.”
Cohen, who at first didn’t recognize Burshtein, was overwhelmed, recalling their regular phone calls during the struggle to free Soviet Jewry. In an interview in her Jerusalem home, she tells me: “When Chaim said, ‘Hello Pam. You don’t recognize me?’ it’s true, I didn’t. But I did remember his voice, because we spoke often and I transcribed every phone call I had with every refusenik for a press release or a report. Those voices are engraved in my heart.”
Cohen adds,“We were involved in the mass rescue of almost two million Jews, and we were just volunteers, not professionals, on our side, and maybe a hundred on the front lines in each one of the various cities in the Soviet Union.”
Hidden Heroes book launch in Jerusalem (credit: SHARON MARKS ALTSHUL)
The book launch was attended by former Prisoners of Zion, including Natan Sharansky, and Americans who had been active in the Soviet Jewry movement. Addressing them, Cohen said, “This may be my book, but it’s our story – the story we together engraved on the pages of history.... In the end we forged a partnership that changed history.”
In the preface to the book, she writes, “This is the story... of extraordinary people in America and in the USSR, on two sides of the ocean, who saw themselves as one people, refusing to be separated by an Iron Curtain. This is the story of hidden heroes who might have otherwise been lost to history.”
Sharansky praised Cohen’s book and paid tribute to “the students and housewives” in the US who waged the grassroots battle to free Soviet Jewry. Cohen and her husband Lenny traveled in 1978 from Chicago to Moscow, where they had their first Friday night dinner at the home of Mila and Ari Volvovsky, who was exiled two years later to Gorky before finally making aliyah in 1988.
Cohen later met many other refuseniks but insists she has no favorites. “They were all my heroes,” she says.
Asked what motivated her to write the book, Cohen says, “At first, I felt like I was standing on the shoulders of giants and I couldn’t write about myself. So I stopped writing. But about five years ago, I realized that those people are no longer here, and I was the last man standing. If I didn’t tell the story, there wasn’t anyone else in America who could.”
The result is a riveting account of a modern-day miracle. As Ilan Greenfield, the owner of Gefen Publishing House said, “I think what’s important when people read the book is that they try and envision how one person with no connections but very strong determination can make a real difference to this world.”
