Whither Soviet Jews: The Debate Goes On
Schroeter, Leon Dulzin and Leonard
WHITHER SOVIET JEWS: THE DEBATE GOES ON LEON DULZIN LEONARD SCHROETER The issue of the so-called "dropouts" (noshrim in Hebrew)—Russian Jews who exit the Soviet Union on Israeli visas, but who...
...But you will help them...
...We're all for peace...
...The second thing is that I've been warning all along that if we don't take measures against this problem, we will find that 60 percent, then 70 and even 80 percent will reject Israel...
...We're all for the best and most secure borders...
...It is certainly relevant, for example, that the Soviet Jews who came to Israel, became Israeli citizens, and then left—i.e., those who became yordim (Jewish emigrants from Israel)—are still much less than 10 percent of those who become olim (Jewish immigrants to Israel...
...They accurately perceive that it is Shcharansky and his supporters who characterize the future direction of the Movement and its tactics...
...Detente for the Soviets meant at least the neutralization of the United States in the Sino-Soviet struggle...
...By 1978, almost two-thirds of all Soviet Jews were emigrating to the United States, most of these people from large heartland cities, the major Jewish population centers...
...One of the arguments the people who disagree with me use is that the emigrant has the moral right to use the Israeli visa even if he knows he's not going to Israel— after all, we've been doing that kind of thing forever...
...So we could double the current rate...
...Isn't it possible that the Russians have opened their doors ever wider precisely because they don't have to defend themselves against the Arabs, since the Jews aren't going to Israel after all...
...We have absorbed 150,000 so far...
...35 percent in 1975...
...The Russians have increased the flow for one reason and one reason only: the Jackson amendment...
...And it's not 70 percent of a small number, of, say, a thousand a month...
...dangerous" prisoners serving long terms (Dymshits and Kuznetsov)—all have been freed...
...So we are facing a new situation, and a very dangerous situation...
...In the perspective of a dozen years, some earlier directions have now been confirmed...
...Further, the number of yordim among Israeli-born Jews has increased...
...This kind of support was vital to the Movement...
...And I said, in a remark which was widely misinterpreted, that if he wants to stay in Kiev, he is responsible for his own fate, not me...
...We had, since that time, only another 2,000 Russians who left Israel...
...It means that we are competing...
...We are here for him...
...It's not so simple to get money for such large numbers, the UJA will lose money, and they know that if they take the UJA money and use it for the Russians, we'll not let them...
...Within the past century, during which freedom of movement has become increasingly technically feasible, Jews have moved from lands of oppression to lands of opportunity, when the country of oppression permitted migrations and the country of opportunity accepted immigrants...
...Our luck was Jackson—after all, Nixon and Ford and Carter were all against the amendment, and much of the Jewish leadership, too...
...Now if you believe that, look at the facts...
...We will be losing 4,000, maybe even 4,500 every month...
...The post-1967 euphoria was replaced by a post-1973 sober reality...
...Dulzin: First, let me try to set the record straight...
...If so, why only Russian Jews...
...50 percent in 1976...
...First of all, the Jews come out on Israeli visas...
...emigrated to Canada and then the United States...
...The publication and use of The Last Exodus constitutes a confirmation of that fact...
...On the other hand, the 80 percent of the Jewish population residing in the largely urban heartland republics produced less than IS percent of the Israel emigration...
...and is well on the way to American citizenship...
...and continuously upward since then...
...And I have to admit—we can't compete with America...
...We pay for him...
...Alright...
...A refugee is someone who runs away from where he lives and has no place to go...
...The Israeli authorities responsible for Soviet Jewry do not tolerate the heresy of diluting Zionism by solidarity with democrats and other dissidents...
...Movement leaders know the names and political attitudes of members of Congress far better than they know details about Soviet elected officials...
...The most intractable refusenik cases have proved not to be "impossible" at all...
...bore a new child...
...But the Russians are our great reservoir...
...But they all insist that it is their moral obligation to help them once they've decided not to...
...Soviet Jews have best learned about themselves from their friends abroad, who by recording their history permit them to see a reflection of their own identity...
...I never made a claim against HIAS...
...He has to do something, to take action here, or he will be responsible for the greatest historical calamity...
...So why not...
...They are followed by excerpts from the epilogue to the second edition of Leonard Schroeter's highly regarded The Last Exodus, a book which first appeared in 1974 and which chronicles the history of the Jewish Jewry movement...
...He's not a refugee...
...These differences have dramatic manifestations, including the definition of the character of the Movement itself...
...You will help people to leave Israel...
...Although in the month of October we had a record number of Russian Jews arriving—4,200—day in, day out, during the war they kept on coming—right after the war, in November and December, almost 2,000 of the Russian Jews left Israel...
...On this issue, we have much support, even from countries that aren't friendly to Israel...
...It has been obvious that the Israeli visa is a comforting fiction to Soviet authorities, and is a pragmatic mechanism for Jewish rescue from the USSR...
...So that we must know that our major task is aliyah, is immigration and absorption, it is also the quality of life, building an Israel that will attract Jews...
...I've said it in public every chance I've had...
...We pay for his passport in Russia, we take care of him, we bring him to Israel...
...Crucial factors in the success it has achieved in recent years were extensions and reconfirmations of tactics and directions that had already emerged by 1972...
...Endemic Russian anti-Semitism, now buttressed by the official anti-Semitism of the regime (often in the guise of anti-Zionism or anti-Israel politics), has substantially increased, and is seemingly institutionalized in its more overt, rabid form...
...great scientists (Levich...
...They have invoked the provisions of the Helsinki Agreement, prepared documentation'for the Belgrade Conference, and endlessly cited international human rights covenants, because they know that the Soviet regime, under American prodding, has great sensitivity and vulnerability in these areas...
...That's what I mean by "indirect...
...The Hungarians were refugees, the Poles...
...Shcharansky, with his courageous confrontation politics, had committed too many cardinal sins for the regime...
...Thus, the ability of Soviet Jews to successfully penetrate the upper reaches of the Soviet power structure has been drastically reduced, with its inevitable concomitant—the near universality of Jewish alienation from the society...
...My claim was that by its attitude, HIAS indirectly encourages the emigrant not to go to Israel...
...And I tell you that if he's on his own, he will come to Israel...
...Levanon's office proved consistently inept...
...A fellow arrives in Vienna...
...American Jews, by and large, have argued that we are obliged to help any Jew who needs help...
...The movement in his support has been wholly out of their control...
...Your honeymoon is over...
...We know that they are far more heterogenous than Jewish populations in any European countries...
...A people or movement must be nourished by knowledge of their own history...
...The President of the United States took the unprecedented step of publicly denying that Shcharansky had ever been any kind of a CIA agent...
...The activists soon learned to call this apparatus, headed since 1970 by Nechemia Levanon, the "office without a name...
...It's a very simple process...
...It became an important source book for Soviet activists preparing their own samizdat journals...
...Similarly the high level of Zionist commitment of the early years would now seem to have been specific to the time, and of short-term duration...
...Next to the support of Israel it occupied the highest political priority for most Jews in Western countries...
...Let's be clear about this...
...Anti-Semitism and discrimination have their profound long-term effect, fueling the already developed emigration pressures...
...It is little wonder then that once the reservoir of Zionist-committed Jews (e.g., in Latvia and Georgia) was substantially drained, the relative percentage of Jews emigrating from the far more populous heartland republics increased drastically as did the percentages of Jews going to Western countries rather than Israel...
...This is the future of Israel...
...But a thousand...
...Thus independent activists within the Soviet Union, in Israel, or in the countries of the West, are suspect to them and subjected to intense criticism...
...The brutal bureaucracy of the regime has eclipsed hope—despite the activists' knowledge that no hope is too extreme, that nothing is impossible, and that even for them the great Soviet prison doors may open...
...Any simplistic generalities concerning Soviet Jews should by now have been dispelled...
...And I say no, that's an unfair competition...
...WHITHER SOVIET JEWS: THE DEBATE GOES ON LEON DULZIN LEONARD SCHROETER The issue of the so-called "dropouts" (noshrim in Hebrew)—Russian Jews who exit the Soviet Union on Israeli visas, but who then opt to go to the United States rather than Israel—has been festering for several years now...
...No reason exists to believe that there is any category of person who will be permanently held by the regime...
...he gives him a tzetl, a form, and passes him over to HIAS...
...So I say, while I can't force him, if he doesn't want to come to us, he's on his own...
...This spells the end of their power and control...
...We have to be a people of four, five, six million Jews, at a minimum...
...Without a press, journals, research centers, and universities, how can a people know themselves...
...Those who are not going to Israel are taken by us— by the Jewish Agency—to some kind of hotel, and the next day, they come to the office of HIAS...
...Telephone links, hot lines, newsletters, press conferences, all have had these purposes: securing popular and governmental support in the West...
...Absent some even more extraordinary events than have occurred, or some unspeakable, genocidal tragedy—both essentially not predictable but not excludable—Jews will still be seeking to leave and will be continuing their exodus from the USSR at the beginning of the twenty-first century...
...Although Zionist rhetoric remains a fundamental feature of Movement literature, emigration conduct is much more significant...
...cover pictures on news magazines all over the world...
...Do you know what you are doing...
...Refusenik scientists, who by virtue of their international status and their indisputably seminal minds were Soviet national assets, and whose emigration was a meaningful technologic increment to the receiving country, have now departed...
...There are now approximately as many yordim as olim each year, and many times more Israeli yordim in America than there are American olim in Israel...
...That is, it's closed— for security reasons...
...Worldwide protest over his arrest was ignored...
...But I say that we cannot allow this to happen when the future of the State of Israel is at stake...
...He also became a founder and one of the spokesmen of the Helsinki Watch Committee, a monitoring group committed to seeing that Soviet regime failures to adhere to its Helsinki Agreement human rights commitments would become known to the world...
...And here I think we face a very serious crisis...
...Unfortunately, we have now already reached the 70 percent mark...
...And after they talk, the Agency representative clears him...
...That would be a godsend...
...This development led to hysterical, insensitive, extreme reactions from Israeli and Jewish Agency officials...
...There are some hardcore refusenik cases, such as Academician Aleksandr Lerner, whose applications for exit visas, made almost a decade ago, have still not been granted despite constant reapplication, political agitation, and support from abroad...
...What is my argument...
...Soviet Jews are the legitimate descendants of the Jewish generations that preceded them...
...Most important, it lost the confidence of activists, both within the USSR and in Western countries...
...Shortly after the first publication of my book, activists in the United States began to smuggle copies of it into the USSR...
...He can simply say that when he got to Vienna, he changed his mind...
...In August 1972, when the Soviet regime imposed the notorious education tax that required, as a precondition of emigration, repayment to the state of the claimed massive costs of secondary education, the response of Movement and Soviet democratic leaders was that the United States should condition any economic benefits to the USSR upon Soviet adherence to the fundamental human right to leave one's country...
...It's the Jewish aspect of the problem...
...But we can absorb them...
...Contrary to the early hopes and illusions, the majority of Soviet , Jews, like the majority of their ancestors and like the majority of other Jews from other lands, are not Zionists, despite the Holocaust and the foundation and continued existence of the State of Israel...
...A stateless person is a refugee...
...Rabin didn't act on this matter and Begin hasn't acted on it either...
...The Israel "office without a name" has, not so strangely, been ambivalent, lukewarm, and sometimes standoffish about the Shcharansky case...
...Senate wouldn't back down, they started to let the Jews go...
...The activists feel that Levanon's office has been consistently manipulative and obstructionist...
...Alright...
...And HIAS took care of them in Rome...
...And if we allow the present process to continue, they will continue to go to America, and our great historic opportunity will be lost...
...Who is the leadership of American Jewry...
...His young wife, Natalya, received permission to leave Moscow the day after their marriage and has been in Israel (where she adopted the Hebrew first name of Avital) ever since...
...We said that if an emigrant comes to Vienna, and he's got parents or children or a brother or sister in America, fine...
...are often third or fourth generation Soviet citizens, far removed in time and understanding from the religio-culture of their people...
...The behavior of contemporary Soviet Jewry can be appropriately contrasted to that of the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of most Western Jews who are descendants of this stock...
...But this is different...
...Shcharansky then endured a predictably rigged trial, distinguished only by the paucity of evidence of anything other than that he was a dissident human rights and Jewish activist...
...I have been saying one thing all along, and I say it today: I cannot force a Jew who doesn't want to come to Israel to come to us...
...During the same period, despite the ideological and political activity of Zionist parties in all Eastern European Jewish communities, less than a tenth of that number emigrated to Palestine, and a large percentage of those emigrants left the rigors of that life, often moving on to America...
...Some documentation indicates that almost 300,000 Jews, constituting approximately 13 percent of the Jewish population, are party members...
...And remember, the Russians let the Jews out even during the '73 war...
...They can go and they can get a visa...
...That depends on conditions inside Israel...
...Emigration motivation thus has little to do with Zionist ideology...
...First, more than any other such case, it has become an international incident of substantial proportions, involving the integrity of the President of the United States, and the stubborn vengeance of the example-setting Soviet authorities...
...These events help verify the perspective that the Soviet Jewry Movement conforms to the main creative forces of Jewish history, rather than being an idealistic Zionist aberration...
...we'll conduct a separate campaign, because people are not giving for the Russians, they are giving for Israel...
...Later there were reports that translations of some of the chapters into Russian had occurred...
...And to be on his own means that he doesn't get assistance...
...The percentage of Soviet Jews going to countries others than Israel rose roughly from 5 percent in 1973 to 20 percent in 1974...
...So we can reach 25,000...
...All contacts were to be with the Israeli government office with self-delegated authority to coordinate the Soviet Jewry struggle throughout the world...
...That would include about 25 percent of all the Russians arriving in Vienna...
...Fifteen, maybe 16,000 a month...
...So how can he be a refugee...
...has returned to her profession as a pharmacist...
...Polina Epelman, the wife of a defector, and thus by conventional wisdom a permanent prisoner of the regime, received an exit visa...
...For eight or nine years now, we've been sending 5 to 6,000 affidavits a month...
...All Jews, whether assimilated party members or not, are being seen in regime terms as unreliable...
...Would you come to Israel...
...The principal advocate of the Israeli position is Leon Dulzin, Chairman of the Jewish Agency...
...Yet, as of this writing, it would appear that 50,000 to 60,000 Jews may be released from the USSR during 1979—by far the largest annual emigration in the history of the USSR...
...In the main they are educated, impressed with Western technological and cultural values, urban, and alienated...
...Soviet Jews from the large population centers (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Minsk, etc...
...I once asked a fellow in Rome, "Tell me, why do you want to go to America...
...They are free people, there is an American Consulate...
...What then distinguished Shcharansky from earlier Soviet Jewish prisoners of conscience...
...It's a very beautiful camp, but it's a camp...
...And, of course, some of them are running away from Judaism altogether...
...The major differences in culture, language, and historical experience between the three broad groups (all of which have multiple subdivisions)—(1) Asian Jews (e.g., Georgian, Bukharan, and Mountain Jews), (2) Soviet heartland Ashke-nazis (RSFSR, Ukraine, Byelorussia), and (3) Jews from the Western borderlands (the Baltic states and pre-World War II Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, and Czechosloyakian territories)—lead to ideologic, political, and emigration goal differences...
...It has a great deal to do with the characteristic patterns of modern Jewish history and the oppressiveness of Soviet life...
...It's a Zionist problem...
...The Soviet government ceased requiring payment of the education tax, and the Movement marshaled its forces in support of the Jackson legislation...
...At that time, I had Golda's full support...
...Shcharansky acted as a tour guide of Soviet dissidents, covering the wide spectrum of human rights protest activities...
...This is where the action is...
...Shcharansky had, as a very young man, become a part of the Jewish movement in Moscow, applied for an exit visa, and been refused...
...And if they don't have a very deep and strong motivation— and, after all, there are a lot of Zionists in this world with deep Jewish and Zionist motivation who also don't come to live in Israel— why should we expect more of these Russian Jews...
...Although assimilation has been officially encouraged and frequently practiced, it is now increasingly being viewed as unachievable...
...And I interviewed a number of the Russians, and I asked them all one question: What would happen if you didn't have the possibility of going to the United States...
...The classic illustrative case of the maturing directions of the Soviet Jewry movement and Soviet and Western responses to it is that of Anatoly Shcharansky...
...This is a historic opportunity...
...I never said that HIAS is conducting a special activity to divert the immigrants to America...
...Freedom of choice, yes...
...Shcharansky, a talented computer scientist, was arrested in early 1977 to the accompaniment of extensive and exceptional Soviet news charges that he was a CIA-sponsored espionage agent...
...All present indications are that the overwhelming majority of Soviet Jews do not leave the USSR because they are Zionists, but because of their perception that their society is anti-Semitic, discriminatory, and that they and their children will be denied upward social mobility...
...In America, you can buy a used color television set for $200...
...The documentation of these attitudes and how they expressed themselves is highly instructive, illustrating some central theses that have become clearer with the passage of time...
...They fear Soviet Jewry political activity that is not under their control...
...And we will simply kill our hope for aliyah from Soviet Russia...
...But if that were to start happening, wouldn't the Arabs bring fierce pressure on the Russians to stop the flow...
...So if a person like this has the option to go to America, why should he go to Israel...
...Now I think it's time to respond, to signal them that we understand what they're doing and what they want...
...Because what does the assistance mean...
...Now all of that is only a part of the issue...
...Of the 35,000 Russian Jews who came out in 1973, 33,700 came to Israel...
...Most observers agree that once the Soviet Jewry Movement surfaced, was identified in the West, and had developed a sense of its own character and existence as a movement, its continued vitality and successes became largely reliant upon American Jewish supporters and the active and potential intervention of the United States government...
...The internal scandals in Israel following the war reminded Jews everywehre that Israel was not a Utopian Zionist paradise, but a hard pressed, small nation with all the usual warts and blemishes of states, plus an extraordinary vulnerability to the likelihood of future war...
...But many believe that the policy of the regime is purposely unpredictable...
...I was in Vienna three times...
...Their targets are American public opinion, Congress, and the President...
...Shcharansky is indeed a fitting modern hero, and his supporers are admirable and skillful proponents of his cause...
...We had one experience which proves my case...
...Of course they would come to Israel...
...Between 1880 and 1925 (when open emigration to the United States was halted), over 2.5 million Jews, about one-third of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, came to America...
...Thirty or 40 people...
...Movement leaders appreciate that apart from their own capacity to make direct appeals, they have available to them a potent pressure group—the Jewish communities of the western world...
...Activist Movement leaders, notably Vladimir Slepak, Grigory Goldstein, Ida Nudel, and Yosef Begin, after years of struggle, have been prosecuted, receiving sentences in labor camps and exile...
...So, now we brought a proposal...
...It seems clear that the Soviet perception of the Jew as the "outsider"—the "rootless cosmopolitan"—has become a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...His remarks appear below...
...So those who are going to Israel are taken to a special camp...
...Furthermore, the increasing dominance of oil in foreign policy changed the Middle East from a secondary focus of international power politics to the primary one, making evident what had long been true—that Israel was a client state of the United States, without power to control events, let alone free Soviet Jews...
...Jews will come from America...
...severe and increasing entry limitations into the heretofore heavily Jewish scientific and art sectors...
...They are sent from heaven...
...They knew that HIAS would take care of them so the outflow continued...
...If not, the Jewish community does not help him...
...This is in marked contrast to olim from Western countries who leave Israel at a ratio five to ten times higher than that of Soviet olim...
...Most of these (perhaps 65-70 percent) are expected to choose the United States as their ultimate haven...
...Israelis have countered that American help is, in fact, a form of enticement...
...It was in 1973, after the war...
...This would clearly appear to be an irreversible trend...
...They are creating exciting new chapters in the long and rich history of the Jewish people—and in the process they are affecting detente and the delicate world power balance...
...Sometimes I think to myself, if we still have 20 or 30 percent coming to Israel, the others were disconnected, they were second and third generation, completely assimilated, people who remained Jews because of the passport regulations...
...And I have never heard anybody, no matter how much he disagrees with the position I've taken, say "No, we would not like them to go to Israel...
...They were frightened by the war, or whatever...
...The first person that they meet is a representative of the Jewish Agency...
...Activist Movement leadership knows that if changes are to occur in Soviet policy toward them, these changes will take place because of pressures, in fact or anticipated, from the United States government...
...The Israelis have felt that Shcharansky was never "their man...
...And then the honeymoon is over...
...This was followed by a brutish insistence that funds be totally denied noshrim...
...All in all, 150,000 came, and 4,200 have left...
...joined her professor husband in Israel...
...As I write, in mid-1979, virtually all of the Leningrad trial defendants have been freed, and most of the Prisoners of Conscience and Movement leaders I discussed in The Last Exodus now live in Israel, their heroic period behind them, pursuing more or less normal lives except for the permanent emotional scars left by long years in the Gulag...
...And that was at a time when there were no dropouts...
...Last month, moment had the opportunity to talk about the problem with Dulzin...
...Until 1973, not more than 2 percent of all Jews, who left the USSR chose to go anywhere other than Israel—thus fully supporting the thesis that the Soviet Jewry Movement was indeed a "repatriation movement...
...This, in turn, required the Soviet regime to be finely tuned to congressional sentiments and not to be too insensitive to American public opinion...
...I told them that we simply couldn't allow them to help Jews who want to leave Israel...
...That's the Jewish aspect of it...
...Years after the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Bill, efforts to eliminate linkage or neutralize its legislative effects still result in vigorous Movement opposition...
...Today, after more than thirty years of Jewish statehood, more than five times as many Israelis are living in the United States and Canada than there are American Jews living in Israel...
...The chronic nature of the issue arises from the awareness of the future long-term presence of the "Jewish problem...
...He wants to use his Israeli visa to escape Soviet Russia...
...The Vietnamese are refugees...
...So this isn't the major problem...
...Since it is commonly said that most Jews have become Zionists, it should be noted that I mean by Zionism a commitment to live in Israel, not simply financial, political, and moral support of that country...
...It is therefore no surprise that close to 50,000 Soviet Jews have recently come to the United States and tens of thousands of others wish to do so, if the human right to leave becomes an institutionalized reality...
...For many reasons, this became obviously erroneous...
...There are hundreds of thousands...
...Why not Moroccan Jews, Yemenite Jews, Argentinian Jews...
...Unquestionably, in its inception and early years, the Movement not only had the rhetoric of political Zionism, but its behavior was the most dramatic affirmation of Zionism in Zionism's eighty-year history...
...The regime even used the repatriation pretext when it issued exit visas to Israel for non-Jews who had publicly indicated their intent to go West...
...If we tell them they're on their own, they'll come to Israel, and they'll stay...
...He doesn't even have to say it...
...Most of the argument has been about tachlis, not about theory...
...These fundamental patterns lead to other basic observations, distil-lable from the perspective of a dozen years...
...the strong protests of government leaders in the United States and other countries...
...He was involved in multiple activist ways, his name, face, and voice becoming well known in the West...
...But we should know one thing: even with a full peace and the best borders possible, if we remain a people of three, or three and a half million, the State of Israel will be in danger...
...But freedom of choice does not oblige me to help, when by helping, I enter into a competition between Israel and the United States...
...Can you summarize your position for us...
...He gives up his Russian citizenship based on his Israeli visa, and Israel receives him...
...Secondly, Shcharansky is not merely a Zionist hero—he is much more complex, embodying Zionist attachment, human rights commitments, intimate and interlocking connections with the democratic movement and other Soviet dissident groups, and a sophisticated political awareness that permitted him to recognize that political leverage could be applied most effectively by means of Western media and politicians (particularly American...
...The raw statistics, however, do not tell more than a small part of the meaningful story, do not provide us with the historical perspective which alone makes the Soviet Jewry Movement comprehensible...
...Thus they move from a country where they are disadvantaged because of restrictions on Jews, lack of economic opportunity, and bureaucratic repression, which results in their political and intellectual alienation...
...I say that in the Jewish world outside Israel today there are at least 200,000 people who think seriously about aliyah...
...And they went to Rome...
...What was my claim...
...They move to countries where they see the opportunity for upward mobility— particularly in terms of the advanced education of their children, economic opportunity, full utilization of their professional skill, freedom for creative growth and from bureaucratic repression, and where extended family exists...
...We have hundreds of thousands of Jews who could come here...
...That's a compromise...
...Meanwhile Shcharansky, who speaks fluent English, was the primary direct contact person for the Movement with the Western press...
...Now I come to the Zionist aspect...
...The original assumption of Movement leaders was that the link to Israel and its government was the critical one for implementing their struggle...
...But if there is no such thing as a Jewish refugee, then the situation is completely different from what it was in the old times, when we were cheating governments and bribing consuls and so forth...
...at times half-hearted and ambiguous...
...After all, HIAS stands for America...
...Even those who are Communist Party members are dramatically affected by the emigration movement...
...This proposed tactic found expression in Senator Jackson's insistence upon linkage between economic aid and free emigration...
...The campaign for his release thus symbolically becomes the most important confrontation in the rapidly expanding Soviet Jewry struggle...
...I've told him that...
...I say you could have an argument with me if you tell me that we in Israel can't absorb them, if you tell me we don't have work for them...
...everybody is free to leave Israel if he wants to...
...With the exception of the Yemenites, that's the smallest number of departees from any group...
...Conscious random irrationality and example-setting remain a potent weapon to discourage the right to leave...
...The trial resulted in a thirteen-year sentence...
...Political Zionism—a land of one's own—has been much less important than a house or business of one's own...
...The issue is not less serious than the creation of the State...
...In such migrations the opportunity for full religious expression has been much less important than the opportunity for a college degree...
...we do absorb them...
...The debate has sharpened as the numbers of Jews leaving the USSR has grown, and as the proportion choosing to come to the United States has grown...
...The Russians are responding to the Jackson amendment, and to intense world pressure...
...This astonishing abdication of century-old Jewish community commitment to aid the poor and oppressed was justified to obsequious sycophants in diaspora countries by asserting that Soviet Jews had perpetrated a fraud by accepting visas to Israel and then going to the West...
...The continued rejection of Israeli and Jewish Agency pressures to deny funds to Soviet Jews who do not go to Israel can only be counted as a triumph for traditional Jewish values...
...But not the Jews...
...Jewish alienation from Soviet society, always present, has become substantially institutionalized on a two-way basis...
...You know how many we're sending now...
...They are heavy consumers and producers of Russian culture...
...Two or three hundred Jews—that's simple...
...Soviet Jewry activists in the West have understood this lesson well...
...Denigrating epithets such as "noshrim" (dropouts), employed with alacrity in recent years to those Soviet Jews who, receiving Israel exit visas, choose Western countries rather than Israel, not only fail to reverse the trend, they show a lack of comprehension of Jewish history and the basic human right of free choice...
...That's just not true...
...If not for that, they would have disappeared as Jews a long time ago...
...By the very fact that HIAS is there, ready to help, ready to make America possible, it diverts the Jews to America...
...and the prisoner of a largely inapplicable post-World War II experience and mentality...
...It has supplied much of the leadership and creative vigor of Israel, a substantial part of the leadership of the Jewish communities of America, and has made enormous contributions to science, aesthetics, and scholarship both in the United States and in the USSR...
...Later travelers learned that the book had been seen in a number of cities and that typed samizdat copies of fifty to sixty pages of the book were being circulated in cities like Kharkov and Kiev...
...When read together with Jon Weiner's update on Soviet resettlement in America (moment, July/August 1979), the complexity of the problem emerges starkly...
...Frustrating and disappointing as these facts are to many Zionists, they constitute a central reality of modern Jewish history...
...And the Americans are beginning to understand that the problem isn't so simple...
...What is a refugee...
...The United States is the principal land of such opportunity, freedom and family connection...
...Like King Canute commanding the waves to retreat, those who would attempt to roll back the Movement to its pristine Zionist days are fated to damp frustration...
...and being a communication system, keeping Soviet Jews informed about themselves, aware of and in contact with their Western supporters...
...I called in the people of HIAS and the Joint, and I warned them...
...and widespread understanding that economic opportunity is being curtailed, and that children will have far less chance for advanced educational opportunities than their parents had...
...But there won't be 50,000 or 100,000...
...As the 1967 Six-Day War is a convenient bench mark for the beginning of the Soviet Jewry Movement, the 1973 Yom Kippur War can be similarly useful as the turning point from its predominantly Zionist character to its more historically traditional Jewish conduct...
...Shcharansky was particularly targeted for regime revenge and example-setting by being charged with espionage on behalf of the CIA...
...To me, Russian Jewry is the savior of the State of Israel...
...To Israeli ideologues this phenomenon was a euphorically staggering vindication...
...Much of the Jewish migration of the past century has been by East European Jews, from lands now within the present territorial boundaries of the USSR...
...He, and virtually all members of the Helsinki Watch committees, were prosecuted, usually on catch-all bases such as "anti-Soviet" activity...
...This is where their samizdat literature, letters, petitions, telephone calls, and pleas are directed...
...Their first-line allies are the Soviet Jewry activists in the West...
...I had only one case that was different, a young boy from Kiev who told me that if he could go only to Israel, he would rather stay in Kiev...
...Viewed in this context, the Zionist steadfastness of the Soviet Jewish Movement remains remarkably high in contrast to overall Jewish constancy toward Israel...
...She said, "This will stop," and it stopped...
...We are expecting 50,000 this year, and 70 percent of 30,000 is a very large number...
...That's the point, and that's my case...
...the substantial size of the Jewish population...
...Russian Jewry and the State of Israel need each other, they belong to each other...
...Dulzin, you've been in the forefront of the effort to change Jewish public policy with respect to the nosh rim, the Russian Jews who exit Russia on Israeli visas, but who then elect to go to the United States rather than to Israel...
...So yes, there is a human problem here, but there is also a historic problem...
...He remained incommunicado in detention for well over a year, without an attorney or any semblance of what could be described as due process...
...The Russians tried to be stubborn for three years or so, and when they finally realized that the U.S...
...Begin tells me that he agrees with me, and I tell him that his agreeing isn't enough...
...primarily concerned with aliyah, not rescue...
...The obsession of Soviet leaders with the perceived menace of Chinese powers led to a major Soviet detente gambit in February 1971, which has continued to this date...
...This sophistry ultimately failed, since it was well known that for the Soviet Union the ideology of "repatriation" to Israel and the concept of family reunification were merely convenient rationalizations for the current emigration policy...
...acting as the voice and reflection of the captive Movement...
...I can't compete...
...The people composing the current Soviet Jewish Movement, in perspective, are often strikingly reminiscent of those portrayed in World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, by Irving Howe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976...
...Everybody—the Joint, HIAS—they all want them to go to Israel...
...But because they are afraid to get into a quarrel with the leadership of American Jewry...
...Characteristic of the Movement's focus was their instigation of what became the Jackson-Vanik Bill, and their continued support of that legislation...
...From the whole free world we now have 10 to 15,000 a year...
...Although in the early years almost 100 percent of Soviet Jews came as olim, casting their lot with the Jewish state and rejecting life in the USSR or any part of the diaspora, after 1973 in increasing numbers those who emigrated voted with their feet to go West...
...You in the United States will be getting 30,000, maybe 35,000...
...In all likelihood the issue of Soviet Jewry will remain a chronic one, with exacerbations and remissions in its fever level and its effect on the world outside the USSR...
...The Jewish people must make a decision on this matter...
...LEON DUUM moment: Mr...
...For some, rights deprivation, harassment, repression and hopelessness have become chronic...
...Under these circumstances the Soviet Jewry issue became significant in the world politics of the 1970s...
...LEONARD SCHROETER Over 200,000 Jews have been permitted to leave the USSR since the contemporary Jewish movement began in 1967...
...Schroeter, a Seattle attorney, takes a very different position from Dulzin...
...Why...
...the awakening and revival of interest in Jewish religion, culture, and history—all the accoutrements of Judaism as a religious civilization...
...combined with the almost total absence of access to Jewish experience...
...famous scholars (Vitaly Rubin...
...And he said, "I know that when I get there, I'll get a furnished flat, I was told that the community is nice, there will be a refrigerator full of food, and I will even get a color television...
...By now, refuseniks such as the most distinguished artistic celebrities (Valery Panov...
...But then, he should be on his own...
...When Academician Venyamin Levich is permitted to leave as he has been, it would appear that there is no logical, comprehensible constraint that exists to prevent any individual Jewish exodus...
...HIAS will keep him for a week or two in Vienna, and then send him over to Rome...
...he comes to Israel...
...That's the procedure...
...More people are daring to ask, more people are actually coming out...
...Anti-Semitism is accompanied by increased discrimination, evidenced by an almost total absence of upward mobility...
...It was not at first noticed or understood that in these early years fully two-thirds of the immigrants to Israel came from the border states and Georgia, although less than 10 percent of all Soviet Jews reside in those areas...
...Instead of 3,000 a year, maybe we'll reach 10,000 a year, maybe even 15,000...
...The first manifestation of this was the effort mounted to compel organized Jewish communities to deny any economic assistance to impoverished Soviet Jews who, having come to Israel, decided to live elsewhere...
...A British television film company produced two documentaries featuring Shcharansky and his commentaries—audaciously filmed in Moscow...
...Few Soviet Jews have remained unaffected by the events of the past decade...
...and the continuing global crisscrossing in his behalf by his beautiful wife, Avital, and her articulate and indefatigable brother, Michael Stiglitz...
...He tries to talk to the fellow, to ask him why, and what, and so forth...
...That war demonstrated that the belief in Israel's military invincibility was an illusion...
...Their primary task has been to report, publish, document, spread, and return information to the activists within the Soviet Union...
...The lack of predictable logic as to why some are victimized tends to inhibit all...
...This is an Israeli visa, it's not a fiction, it's not a forgery...
...What's the situation in the United States today...
...He doesn't have to say anything, and I can't help it...
...Now, people are becoming concerned...
...Consequently, there will be increasing concern by Soviet Jews and the world Jewish community over the right to have Jewish identity and expression within the Soviet Union...
...Before he's even asked, on the railroad to Vienna, he tells you, "I'm not going to Israel, I'm going to HIAS...
...Because there has been no such thing as a Jewish refugee since 1948, since the State of Israel...
...Many commentators have observed that Russian Jewry has been the most prolific, vigorous, and creative people in modern Jewish history...
...Not because they don't know that we need the people...
Vol. 4 • September 1979 • No. 8
