CRISIS IN THE SOVIET JEWRY MOVEMENT

...The campaign I urge must be placed on this basis: The Soviet regime aims at the death of our people...

...We dare not allow the Russians to complete the process in Eastern Europe which was begun by the Nazis, using different and more ghastly means...

...Months of hard and complex preparatory work preceded the conference, whose cost has been estimated at nearly one quarter of a million dollars...

...But when we finally decided that we simply could not not mention Israel, we thought we could take the curse off that act by mentioning the United States first and slipping Israel in, unobtrusively as it were, between the U.S...

...Israel was perhaps a focal point of our concerns for Soviet Jews: for fear that the world would think we were being political, rather than "purely" humanitarian...

...In the face of so many crimes and so much violence in recent years, the world's indignation has been dulled...

...Tn our cause, it is only the crucial moral thrust that can be translated into effective political action...

...Skeptical, yes...

...Even more, who would have believed that we would witness the miracle of the aliyah of some 100,000 Soviet Jews to Israel...

...Our claim is our right to survive and the imperatives of Jewish survival are education, religion, community...

...This is a decisive and momentous, even historic, Jewish question which we must answer...

...2) that of the history of Soviet policy toward the Jewish people...

...When we began, and for years thereafter, we consistently adopted three cardinal principles: (1) We always insisted that we were asking for nothing that was opposed to, or outside, the framework of Soviet ideology, constitution and law...

...2. The restoration of cultural rights and institutions, chiefly in Yiddish, for the officially recognized Jewish nationality...

...A Jewish Teachers College must be established, and growing out of it and alongside it as tipne passes, a network of Jewish schools...

...Soviet policy is nothing less than a horrendous attempt at the most outrageous violation of all - a war of extinction against an entire historic people and its right to live...

...All these things constitute the skein of our existence: we have no right to forego them...

...The Bible, which is the very charter of our national existence, describes our Hebrew ancestors as an am k'shay oref, a stiff-necked, obdurate people...

...From the beginning of the Soviet Jewry movement, it has been our policy not to involve ourselves, as an organized community, with the struggles, however just, of Soviet democrats for basic human rights, or of other oppressed Soviet religious and ethnic groups for their rights...

...Through the endless ebb and flow of our history, the Jews have witnessed and remembered the rise and decline of has organized many major public events focused on Soviet Jewish affairs His books include THE PROFILE OF COMMUNISM H961) and MCCARTHY AND THE COMMUNISTS 0954...

...There was a time when the highest American Jewish leadership consisted of men like Louis Brandeis, Abba Hillel Silver, Maurice Samuel, Stephen Wise, Louis Lipsky, Louis Marshall, Cyrus Adler, Bernard Revel — men of genuine culture and intellectual force, of moral dynamism and of faith and piety...

...I propose that the Jewish people adopt a New Declaration of Rights for Soviet Jewry...

...By the same token, I do not mean to derogate the value of aliyah...

...Those who believe that the JDL should be applauded for what it achieved misread the past, and those who imagine that its trivial tactics might be useful today misunderstand the present...

...A writer, editor, researcher, and political activist, he has been deeply involved in the cause of Soviet Jewry, contributing much of the information and documentation on the subject that has been published in this country...

...And since we begin, as stated, with the realization that we confront a regime which denies the right of the Jewish people to exist, the foundation stone of our cause must be, simply and unalterably, to assert the historic right of the Jewish people to perpetuate its existence with honor and dignity wherever Jews live...

...I propose task forces for (1) the Rabbinical Seminary...

...Task Forces...

...numerous records of Jewish songs and Jewish music, records of performances by Jewish singers and musicians are released...

...Since the Soviet Jews are not equipped through either knowledge or experience to create the kinds of institutions, facilities and programs detailed above, we ourselves must create four task forces to send to them — openly and proudly, since there is nothing illegal or subversive about it — to help them establish the institutions and to proceed with the programs...

...The Jewish people has an obligation, a duty, to extend our hands in comradeship to them, to succor them in their time of need and despair, to honor them — to tell the Soviet government and all the world that we the Jewish people, with the longest historical memory of all peoples, know how to remember not only our foes but especially our friends, and that we will not forget them in their moments of need...

...Many will smile and scoff at this hopelessly romantic, Utopian, visionary insistence on Jewish culture and education for Soviet Jewry, and will describe it as an impossible dream, a hopeless demand, an unrealistic expectation...

...In an age that has witnessed the Holocaust of the Jews, the Christian world also has the profound, historical, moral duty to stand guard with us over the destiny of the Children of Israel wherever their existence is threatened, be it the reborn Jewish Commonwealth or beleaguered Soviet Jewry...

...In every generation," we are instructed, "every person must regard himself as though he himself participated in the Exodus from Egypt . . . For it was not our ancestors alone whom the Holy One, Blessed Be He, redeemed from Egypt...

...the entirety of Jewish history, including Russian Jewish history, the history and evolution of the Jewish communities of Israel, America and Western Europe...

...The truth is that a deep malaise grips the Soviet Jewry movement today...

...A former managing editor of THE NEW LEADER...

...There can be no substitute for aliyah, and no change in its highest priority for us...

...Thereafter, during a series of private sessions, they pondered that testimony and voluminous factual and documentary materials which I had prepared for them...

...Remembering that the Jews have always striven to acquire spiritual values, we appeal to you to share with us these books, records and tape recordings...

...The movement for the redemption of the Jews of Russia is adrift, in limbo, at a spiritual impasse...

...The first is from the Prophet Isaiah, Chapters 57:14-58:14, in the course of which God defines precisely the kind of fasting day Yom Kippur must be: Is not this the fast that I have chosen...

...Finally, I drafted for the Commission a formal Judgment which included the following declaration: "A Great Power such as the Soviet Union, precisely because it presents itself to the world as a revolutionary force that seeks to enhance the dignity of man, must surely accept a basic obligation toward certain fundamental individual and group rights...

...the cessation of anti-Semitic propaganda...

...We can be justly proud of our share in all these idealistic enterprises...

...But the desire for such contacts not only exists but is growing all the time...

...Hundreds of thousands of Soviet people, Jews and non-Jews who never had any contact with Jewish cultural life, will benefit from such rich literature and music...

...b) Both make an equation, each in its own way, of Judaism and Zionism...

...Soviet Jews are completely deprived of the opportunity of any kind of contact with their own culture, customs and traditions...

...The world has no conception of the intolerable and wild nature of that propaganda and how it poisons the world's atmosphere...

...The conference organizers specifically excluded an agenda in which concrete resolutions would be presented, debated and voted on...

...We have all but lost public opinion as a potent ally, and one of the chief reasons is precisely this, that we ourselves have lost the sharp cutting edge of the moral concern and the historic vision which alone can enliven the cause...

...The "Golden" and "Silver" Ages are long since behind us, and we have entered in recent years a "Brass Age," under the leadership of epigones — Israeli functionaries, with good will of course, but of only the most modest capacities and attainments, lacking entirely the nobility of spirit, the largeness of imagination, the breadth of vision, the sophistication of political intelligence, the philosophical approach to historical action, and the precious sense of Jewish continuity which were the hallmarks of the first group of leaders...

...There was even an impressive Soviet-Jewish delegation, for the Israel group included some 40 Soviet Jews recently arrived there...

...Seeking to escape his divinely ordered charge, Jonah boarded a ship thinking thus to hide from the Lord...

...This latter precept must stand at the very center of all our endeavors...

...Education...

...5) for all these reasons, the conference was a morale booster for Soviet Jews...

...Clearly, the fate of any individual Jew who has been imprisoned, or who has lost his job because he applied to leave the country, or who is followed about and threatened by the KGB, is infinitely precious and demands concern, attention, action...

...5. A booklet on the growing discrimination against Jews in higher education and professional and scientific employment...

...The world's level of consciousness about the centrality of human rights has reached a new and higher stage...

...And Abraham extracted from God the promise not to destroy Sodom if there could be found in it fifty, or forty-five, or forty, or thirty, or twenty, or even ten righteous men...

...Jewish philosophies...

...We were even hesitant to mention Israel as one of the places where Soviet Jews might go to rejoin their broken families — for fear that it might be thought, in Moscow and elsewhere, that Israel had something to do with our cause, that Israel was somehow involved in our work, that We refused to go beyond what was permitted to others...

...The restoration of elan to the Soviet Jewry movement can, at bottom, only be accomplished as part of a deliberate, conscientious effort to revitalize and remold the American Jewish community as a whole...

...From the very beginning of the Jewish religion, the inextricable relation between Judaism and Justice, between Jews and Justice, has stood at the very heart of our tradition...

...Their letter is a direct appeal to us, their fellow Jews in the West, and it is important to quote from it at length: "Our aim is to fill the enormous void created by an absence of Jewish cultural material in the Soviet Union...

...This demand can be spelled out practically and concretely under the following rubrics: A rabbinical seminary...

...But we cannot even embark upon such a campaign unless we recognize a bitter truth: the world is jaded and cynical...

...For we have made the cause appear overly preoccupied with tough political concerns and with petty details...

...We are confident that the majority of Soviet Jews would be extremely interested in becoming familiar with all these works...

...It is precisely because we believe such a campaign can be successful that we specifically and explicitly eschew violence...

...But never to the exclusion of others, certainly not of the righteous of the world...

...4. A booklet containing the hundreds of anti-Semitic cartoons that have appeared in the Soviet press in the past decade, to demonstrate the elemental virulence of the anti-Jewish hostility...

...It has lost its elan...

...But it is simply no longer enough to keep bringing to public attention individual cases of Jews refused permission to leave, and harassed, arrested, bullied, imprisoned for it...

...We refused to go beyond what was permitted to others...

...That record, compiled in one place, will be a vivid demonstration of the anti-Semitic viciousness of the regime...

...There must be attractive places in all major cities of Soviet Jewish population where Jews, young and old, can feel free to congregate for both social and cultural purposes, lectures, concerts, and adult education...

...It focuses on only one political approach to the problem of Soviet Jewry — aliyah — to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of major demands and large-scale political action...

...We wanted to be lifnim meshuras hadin — strictly within the bounds of Soviet rules, regulations, practices and precedents...

...Among these is the natural human right of a historic people, such as the Jews, to perpetuate its group life and culture...

...and all other relevant course subjects...

...Our history teaches us that the key instrument for that preservation is Jewish education...

...This owes in no small measure to the eagerness of Jewish organizational leadership to follow the lead of Israel on every major question of international Jewish concern...

...To exercise these rights, four things are required: the establishment of authentic Jewish cultural, religious, educational and communal institutions...

...and that we were prepared at last to speak openly of aliyah...

...In that spirit, I propose a dual shift in our policy vis-a-vis the Soviet democrats and the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union: 1. The time has come for the Jewish community to recognize those heroic individuals who, at great risk to themselves and at enormous sacrifice too, staunchly supported and aided Soviet Jews in their struggle to leave the USSR for Israel...

...That is the real heart of our case, and that must be the foundation stone of our demand for aliyah...

...Lenin, though no anti-Semite, shared the common Marxist ignorance and misunderstanding of the Jews, and added to that his own combination of traditional Russian intransigence and intolerance and his personal brand of vicious polemics...

...Jewish literature in all the major languages in which it has been and is being created...

...They wanted, and got, something else, and if one approaches the Brussels Conference with the proper understanding of its objectives and expectations, it can only be seen as a significant success...

...Three analytic lines come to mind at once: (a) Both harp upon the rootless-ness, the homelessness, the essential alienness of the Jew...

...But this has led to a narrow, heads-down concentration on the petty details of fluctuating emigration figures, of individual case histories, of the harassment of Zionist activists and applicants for exit permits...

...the main exporter and manipulator of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic propaganda abroad...

...There are striking parallels, as well as dissimilarities, between the story of Abraham and Sodom, and the story of Jonah — but both have the selfsame point...

...But it is not enough to revive and reinvigorate our old case against anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Jewish discrimination...

...Twelve hundred delegates came from every Western country with an active Jewish community and Soviet Jewry movement, from North and South America, Western Europe, Israel and the Antipodes...

...The kind of demagogic hooliganism in which the Jewish Defense League has engaged on this issue, and which some people mistakenly suppose to have been helpful to the cause of Soviet Jewry, has no place in our work...

...There is no institution inside the USSR which can provide religious thinkers and figures, thoroughly grounded in the Jewish religion, to cope with the groping and the yearning of these Soviet Jews...

...This is how we must seek to revive the world's sense of outrage, to arouse and mobilize world opinion...

...For this is the true meaning of Soviet anti-Semitism: the regime's denial of our historic and natural right to exist as a people...

...When we first began our work in this cause, back in 1958, our efforts were fragmentary, sporadic and unorganized — and resisted on all sides...

...When heads are down, the eyes cannot envision high peaks and broad horizons...

...Its sense of outrage has been blunted...

...2. A study of the Soviet parallels with the ideology and the propaganda of the Nazis...

...For that matter, Jews have played a most decisive role in the democratic human rights movement inside the USSR in the past decade, whether as leaders like Pavel Litvinov or Piotr Yakir or Julius Telesin or Boris Zuckerman or Aleksander Yesenin-Volpin, or as the largest single grouping among the many hundreds of brave Soviet citizens who signed appeals, petitions and protests concerning human rights violations...

...The world has grown weary and bored with the way we have presented our case, and so the entire enterprise of the Soviet Jewry movement has come to appear ordinary...

...Our clear duty is to persist, imaginatively, audaciously, obdurately — and with faith, as befits an am k'shay oref...

...the farthest we would go would be to describe certain facets as "anti-Jewish," a term that clearly does not carry all the negative charges of anti-Semitism...

...To loose the fetters of wickedness, To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free, And that ye break every yoke...

...Father George C. Ford, for decades a pioneering advocate of civil rights and civil liberties in the Catholic Church...

...Nor dare the Christian world, which was silent and inactive once before, stand by again in the face of another kind of Holocaust...

...The time has come for us to break away from the old cardinal principles of our work, to go beyond the self-imposed limitations which they prescribed, and to adopt a new cardinal principle, namely: What we must do and what we must demand must no longer be determined by what is officially recognized and acceptable within the context of Soviet ideology, law and practice — but rather by the necessities of Jewish survival...

...In these institutions the language of instruction would be Russian, which is the main language of Soviet Jewry (as English is of American and British Jewry) — but the two chief Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, would be taught...

...the elimination of discrimination and exclusion of Jews in ever broader areas of higher education and professional employment...

...For that matter, even some of the most seminal Jewish minds were essentially excluded...

...Accordingly, we must press the attack on to the enemy's own territory — by exposing Moscow as the fountainhead of world anti-Semitism, as the chief practitioner at home and On Precedent The ancient rabbis who fixed the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the most solemn and morally demanding day of the Jewish religious calendar, insisted upon the inextricable connection between the Jewish fate and the human fate when they chose the Haftarot, the readings from the Biblical Prophets that were to follow traditionally the two separate readings from the Pentateuch on that holiest of days...

...Both sides — the independent intellectuals as well as our lay and professional leadership along with our Israeli cohorts — will benefit enormously, and for the good of the cause...

...3. A booklet detailing the entire record of every form of massive harassment of the Jews who have applied to leave for Israel since 1969...

...But with the accent always on faith . .. and obdurate persistence...

...These are the materials of our living culture...

...The point of the two stories is identical...

...This is an intellectual-moral-emotional approach, rooted in our history, which responds to the fundamental mood and concern of the entire Jewish people today — the overall concern for the survival of the Jewish people...

...Ironical, certainly...

...Let me not be misunderstood...

...It wasn't only that we feared to offend the sensibilities of an absolutist tyranny which held the power of life and death over our Jews...

...Our duty is the preservation of the Soviet Jewish community...

...Tied to this also is our awareness of the depressing impact of this development upon Jews still in Russia...

...There were many sound reasons for this policy, and it was a line basically also pursued by the leaders of the Soviet Zionist movement...

...What we must do to heighten the dramatic impact of a stepped-up campaign for aliyah is to place it consistently, insistently, explicitly, within the context of Jewish survival...

...This withdrawal poses a grave threat to the spiritual and cultural health of the Jewish people, here and in Israel...

...Many will in time doubtless succeed in disappearing as Jews...

...The late Abraham Joshua Heschel, a premature prophet on Soviet Jewry, always felt isolated from the highest councils of the movement and of the community in general...

...and unnamed other countries...

...When it is Jewish survival that is at stake, our task must be seen clearly and cleanly, all afresh, as though new...

...Five major values emerged from it: (1) it was a massive demonstration of world Jewish and non-Jewish solidarity with Soviet Jewry...

...Nowhere is this central concept of Jewish historical consciousness more strikingly, beautifully and succinctly stated than in two passages in the Haggadah which we chant at the Passover Seder, marking our very constitution as a historic people...

...First, we are experiencing a sort of postpartum psychosis following the abortion of the Jackson Amendment...

...We must restore this educational offensive to the center of our work, expose and shame the Soviets as anti-Semites intent upon the evisceration of the Jewish identity inside the USSR in the first place, and in its war against Israel as well...

...In the words of Isaiah: Hide not thyself from thy fellow man...

...Moreover, the Soviet Jewry movement has been deeply infected with the diseases of routinization and bureaucratization, perhaps an inevitable evolution in all idealistic enterprises...

...The largest single delegation was from the United States, some 370 — including a group of distinguished non-Jews such as Telford Taylor, Bayard Rustin, Nobel Chemistry Laureate Polykarp Kusch and Senator Frank Church...

...Jewish history and the preservation of Soviet Jewry impose this obligation upon us...

...We watched our language carefully...

...but in this case, it is left virtually rudderless and without the kind of spiritual inspiration and inOn Leadership Aliyah and its attendant problems have long since been reduced to the status of an exclusionary shibboleth, with no intellectual energy directed toward other needs of the Soviet Jewry movement...

...in this cause have a profound obligation to Jewish history and continuity, to the Jewish past and the Jewish future, not to write off that great community...

...the Jewish people is enjoined on Yom Kippur not to think only of itself...

...These people put their honor, their freedom, their lives, on the line for Jews...

...There is a fearful, fateful struggle going on for the soul of Russian Jewry, fully one-fourth of the Jewish people dispersed over the face of the earth...

...they've had apt disciples and have succeeded now...

...The workshops, commissions and speeches at the plenary sessions were universally felt to be tedious, boring and repetitious...

...Placed in that context, all our detailed, lesser demands assume larger significance and greater weight...

...Our struggle must not be seen as merely a conflict of national and political interests in which the primary action is political negotiation and the primary process is the striking of hard political bargains...

...It will also appeal to the noblest instincts of On Brussels From February 17 to 19, the largest international conference ever to be held on Soviet Jewry convened in Brussels...

...it was us also whom He redeemed along with them...

...It is at the very center of the Jewish tradition to unite the universal and the particular...

...The two central demands, for Jewish education and for aliyah, are not mutually exclusive...

...I discern three such principles...

...When we mount massive educational campaigns systematically exposing Soviet anti-Semitism, we must place that effort within the context of Jewish historical-moral imperatives...

...What emerged from it...

...2. In the name of the unity of human rights, the Jewish people ought to extend its friendship to all genuine democrats in the USSR who are struggling for a wide range of religious, nationality, cultural rights...

...For if we neglect to bind that cause powerfully to that sense of Jewish history and its moral and cultural imperatives, the movement for Soviet Jewry will fail to take wing, to rise from boring mundaneness to inspired nobility, where it belongs...

...It never occurred to anyone to bring them inside, to consult them on our problems...

...At the same time, twenty-five Israeli intellectuals — including some very thoughtful recently-arrived Russian Jews — would come here for a year or two, not for political or public relations purposes, but to teach, lecture, meet, worry with us about the present and future of the Jewish people...

...For a people whose historic self-definition has always been that of a religious people, it is imperative that a rabbinical seminary be established which will not only teach every aspect of past Jewish religious text and thought and practice, but which will no less be open to every modern current of religious thought and philosophy available throughout the world today, whether in Tsrael or in the West...

...1. We must continue to press for maximum aliyah, using all available means of protest and pressure...

...3) it resulted in large-scale publicity in the world press and mass media not only for the conference but for the cause...

...This would tie in intimately with one of the most profound aspects of Jewish religious and ethical thought...

...3) the Jewish Social-Cultural Centers...

...Jewish rights are indeed to be defended, but we must understand that they are by definition a segment of human rights...

...It was all this, too, which finally drove audacious, courageous Soviet Jews, in resentment and frustration, to "take up arms against a sea of troubles...

...Within this ideological framework, we must pursue several different courses of action concurrently...

...individual Soviet Jews have the basic human right to live as Jews inside the USSR, and to leave the country for Israel or anywhere else...

...of the whole body of world opinion, irrespective of politics...

...It was also because we needed allies in all political camps, including the various communist parties and leftist movements and liberal intellectual circles of the entire Western world whom we sought to enlist — and did, successfully, I might add — in staunch support of our cause...

...And if the Jews have immemo-rially been the People of the Book, we are no less preeminently the People of History, with an ancient, continuously vital historical consciousness and a sure, encompassing historical memory...

...And then we tacked on a free-floating item — I won't call it a demand but a plea — for the reunion of broken Jewish families, with members of such families surviving in the USSR being permitted to rejoin their kin "in the United States, Israel or elsewhere," (listed in that order...

...It wasn't only that we wanted to be absolutely honest and accurate with the facts, and balanced and sober in our use of terms...

...We cannot escape it or avoid it...

...Abundant evidence exists that Soviet Jewry, deprived all these decades of Jewish culture and the means of acquiring it, is desperately, pathetically ignorant — but knows it and "wants to rectify that situation...

...The survival of the Jewish people, including that precious segment of our people in Russia, depends upon the centrality of Jewish education and Jewish consciousness...

...Closely linked with that is another basic human right — the right of individuals to find self-realization through their natural kinship with such a group...

...the world's intelligentsia and of world opinion...

...The object of such a review is simply to enable us to place our work within an appropriate philosophical and historical framework, something that has been lacking for a very long time...

...and, in treating of the Jewish people as a self-aware entity intent upon its own survival, characterize it as pernicious, nefarious, destructive and subversive, (c) Most dreadful of all, and most relevant today, both focus upon an international Jewish conspiracy to dominate, control and take over the world...

...Specifically, the international leadership of the worldwide Soviet Jewry movement, which from its inception has been in the hands of a small group of Israelis, is no longer of the same caliber it once was...

...He considered Judaism, like all religions, to be a reactionary excrescence, doomed by history to be eliminated with the aid of the forces of progress led by the Communist movement...

...In brief: seeing the wickedness of the great Assyrian city of Nineveh, God determined to destroy it — not, however, without giving it a chance to repent and return to righteousness...

...2) We always claimed that we were asking for nothing more than was already accorded to all other comparable national and religious groups in the USSR...

...And it is time for our struggle to be framed in precisely the terms that will link it to those who stand for right...

...From there, God rescued him and sent him once more on his mission of deliverance...

...We here can do no less than to move speedily, with imagination and determination to match their audacity, to supply them with what they need and request...

...and we simply cannot accept that this second largest Jewish community in the world should be deprived of them, and thus be doomed to wither away...

...But the truth is that they were also ignored and excluded...

...The second Prophetic reading for Yom Kippur is the entire small book of Jonah...

...We must emphasize the fundamental, ineradicable and historic right of the Jewish people, in all its branches, to perpetuate its culture, its history, its very life — not least in the ancient Jewish homeland...

...We Jews can do no other than to engage ourselves full force in this battle...

...That original charMoshe Decter is Director of Jewish Minorities Research...

...But while these great non-Jewish champions of human rights were ready to adopt that revolutionary and unprecedented posture, it was still premature for the Jewish community...

...This proposal is not intended in any way to denigrate, minimize or weaken our primary and central demand for aliyah...

...It was not until the Six Day War of 1967, when Jews everywhere, in Russia as well as here, suddenly found new pride, new courage and independence, that we were ready to call a spade a spade, to describe Soviet anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Judaism propaganda for what it was — sheer, outright anti-Semitism...

...Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, And that thou bring the homeless to thy house...

...There are many understandable reasons for this state of affairs...

...and the cessation of official propaganda against Jews and Judaism...

...But, in the midst of a storm that threatened to sink the ship, the sailors realized it was Jonah's presence that was responsible for their danger and they threw him overboard, and into the belly of the whale...

...Included in the curricula, for training teachers and subsequently for teaching children and adults alike, would be every facet of the Jewish heritage: the Bible and the Talmud with their medieval as well as modern commentaries...

...In March, 1966, for example, I organized an Ad Hoc Commission on the Rights of Soviet Jews...

...The Jewish cause, in short, has always been hopeless — yet ever freshly full of hope...

...This is a great crime — and great crimes can arouse great emotions...

...This Commission held public hearings, during which it heard evidence presented by a dozen imposing personalities — scholars, journalists, eyewitnesses...

...Everybody remembers the story of Jonah and the Whale...

...These things may appear obvious, but the sad truth is that our interest and the world's concern have flagged, and it is our task to renew a passionate commitment to the redress of one of the world's great injustices, perpetrated against the last remnant of the East European Jewry slaughtered by the Germans...

...In the process, we evolved a unique sense of historical immediacy, through which time and space are telescoped and recollection of the past involves present experience of it...

...It consisted of the following prominent humanitarians: Bayard Rustin, the Negro leader...

...It is as simple as that...

...The Soviet Jewish community has a basic human right to perpetuate its existence as a group, a segment of world Jewry...

...Ours is the oldest continuous historical-cultural-religious tradition in Western civilization...

...Do we ignore their existence...

...We must press our cause because it is just, because it bodes no ill for anyone but only good, because we have the right to do so, because we must teach the world the lesson that our cause — the cause of the small, the weak, the powerless, the vulnerable — must be ever espoused, for the good of mankind...

...There is ever greater awareness of the indispensa-bility of the struggle for human rights worldwide, of the single standard of decency that must prevail in that struggle, and of the indissoluble link between the demands for human rights everywhere...

...There were only two real high points: a rousing campaign speech by Senator Church and the address by Golda Meir, who cannot fail in such a setting...

...Jewish Social-Cultural Centers...

...With such leadership in the face of enormous difficulties, the Soviet Jewry movement has been sapped of its vitality and has been gradually overcome by what can only be called a crise de conscience...

...and, the greatest of them all, the grand old man of peace, civil rights, civil liberties and socialism, the indestructible champion of social justice — Norman Thomas, who in his seventies and eighties became one of our most effective collaborators...

...For those Soviet Jews who can find realization only in a Jewish State, this would mean the right to leave the USSR in order to create a new Jewish life for themselves in Israel...

...What a contrast...

...Where are such leaders today...

...We confront a self-declared enemy of the Jewish people...

...2. We must boldly face the fact that a very large number of Jews will remain in the USSR...

...Our watchword, our rallying cry, must be survival...

...The effectiveness of our cause in the past resulted precisely from our successfully coordinated work in these three areas, all aimed at a dual objective: to arouse the world's conscience on this issue of vital concern to the Jewish people, and to put the Soviet regime on the moral defensive...

...For without such a context, we shall only continue to flounder, and will not escape from the impasse in which the movement now finds itself...

...A second factor has been that since the Yom Kippur War, the Jewish community's emotional and intellectual faculties have been primarily engaged in the overwhelming concern for the fate and security and welfare of the State of Israel...

...We must, in practical terms, undertake a massive educational offensive to expose the USSR's every expression of anti-Semitism, whether in its propaganda, in its discrimination against Jews in higher education and employment, in its persistent refusal to have civilized diplomatic, cultural and economic relations with the Jewish State of Israel only because it is the Jewish State...

...Perhaps this, too, is an ineluctable historical development, but, inevitable or not, it has taken its toll...

...World Jewish leadership has long since abdicated its intellectual and moral independence and subordinated itself to the Israeli leash, thus finding it virtually impossible to assert a spiritual autonomy in our common causes and mutual interests...

...Thus He dispatched Jonah there, to preach contrition, the pre-condition to redemption and salvation...

...True, many of those people drifted away by themselves...

...As we cast about for new directions, as we seek ways to cope with seemingly insoluble problems, as we plumb our history and national character for philosophical, psychological, moral and practical guidelines, we must realize that we must ground our work on the most fundamental principles...

...And so I propose that we raise to the highest level of our Declaration of Rights for Soviet Jewry the demand for the broadest possible institutionalization of Jewish culture and education in the USSR — led by Jews who are knowledgeable in and proud of their history and their heritage...

...I believe the time has come to change that policy significantly, though not totally...

...We will not acquiesce in the demise of our people in Russia...

...2) the Teachers College...

...So there is both a moral and a pragmatic reason for a change in our policy, and it ought to be our surest instinct to follow the course dictated by the unity of morality and practicality...

...Who among us then believed that we would, within a comparatively few years, succeed in emblazoning our cause on the moral banners of all those for whom human rights are precious...

...We watched our language carefully...

...It took an enormous amount of courage and truth-saying for these Soviet Jewish leaders to send out that appeal...

...There must be established a Jewish publishing house, which will take responsibility for publishing in all the original languages — as well as in Russian translation — all the classics of the Jewish cultural, religious and literary heritage...

...empires, the glory and fall of powerful leaders — and our own historical duality of grandeur and misery, damnation and redemption...

...Toward this end, a triple historical perspective is required: (1) that of the history of the Soviet Jewry movement as we ourselves experienced and shaped it...

...Its initial foot-dragging on Soviet Jewry once overcome, American communal leadership succumbed to the temptation to kowtow, to accept unquestion-ingly the tactics dictated from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv...

...The Jewish cause and the Jewish interest are intimately, sym-biotically, bound to the struggle for morality in public life, the struggle for human rights here and internationally, identical with the cause of justice and freedom and decency...

...Publications...

...Both stories have the same three dramatis personae — the Lord God, the human protagonist (Abraham, Jonah), and a wicked city (Sodom, Nineveh...

...When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, And that thou hide not thyself from thy fellow man...

...Students there should not only learn Bible, Talmud, Rambam, and all other normative texts of traditional Judaism — but also be open to the ideas of Martin Buber, Rav Kook, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Lubavicher Rebbe, Richard Rubinstein...

...Such an approach calls for a new action policy — the adoption of a wide range of energetic new initiatives of public education, political pressure and moral suasion...

...Do we pretend they are not there...

...We were certainly not prepared for a long time to speak of emigration, of aliyah as such...

...In that connection, I propose a publication and information program, whose first — but by no means only — products might be: 1. A booklet of documentation and analysis, explaining in detail the character of Soviet propaganda against Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel...

...Or to harp constantly on the total numbers who wish to leave, or whom we would wish to see leave...

...It is upon the profound lessons to be learned from that complex perspective and, above all, from the fundamental principles which have informed Jewish history through the ages, that a revitalized Soviet Jewry movement can be built...

...They focused on our platform, the demands we were to make of the Soviet authorities — and they were nicely divided into three main areas: 1. The rehabilitation of religious rights and institutions for those who wished to practice Judaism, one of the officially authorized religions of the USSR...

...Our battle must not be presented as a mere matter of the arrest of a few score activists, or of the harassment of applicants for emigration, or of a numbers game conjuring up questions of how many Jews actually want to leave the country...

...And so for a while there was some strong sentiment not to mention any country by name...

...Where do we go from here...

...the free opportunity to leave the USSR...

...But when Trilling and Arendt, glorious son and radiant daughter of Israel, died within a few months of each other in the past half-year, not one Jewish agency found it necessary or fitting to mourn our tragic losses...

...Telford Taylor, professor of law at Columbia University and the U.S...

...Both wicked cities are threatened with doom for their evil-doing...

...And if our cause is indeed a matter of right and not of sufferance, we must henceforth conduct it as a strenuous political struggle which requires that we demand, openly, proudly, even defiantly, what no man and no regime has the right to deprive us of...

...Twenty-five serious American Jewish thinkers would spend one to two years in Israel, conducting seminars, courses, and lectures, meeting with Jews in kibbutzim, universities, and synagogues, living among poets, artists and scientists...

...Ten years ago and more, the Soviets attempted, and failed, to ram through a declaration at a United Nations committee equating Zionism with racism, Nazism and apartheid...

...6. A booklet detailing anti-Jewish discrimination in cultural, religious and communal rights, institutions and facilities...

...4) the Jewish Publishing House...

...It is of the utmost importance at this juncture, therefore, to reassess long-range policy for this great cause...

...Nor dare we restrict our effort exclusively to the campaign for aliyah, for standing by itself such a demand inevitably blurs the outlines and the thrust of the moral case which alone justifies our own concern and our demand that the world listen and act with us...

...Emil Mazey, one of the founders of the United Auto Workers and then its secretary-treasurer...

...This single-minded attention to aliyah is obviously understandable from the vantage point of the Israeli functionaries who fix policy manipulatively and who, prisoners, of their own mindless shibboleths, have no historical sense of a world Jewish people...

...This approach laid the ideological and spiritual groundwork for what ultimately became a full-fledged, open war against the Jewish people and its right to exist...

...Among many of the most self-aware Soviet Jews, among those who are just beginning to arrive at some sort of Jewish consciousness, there is a growing interest in religion...

...Our primary responsibility, to be sure, is to secure our own destiny, and we have learned the bitter lesson that if we do not defend our own interests no one else will...

...I need cite no more than the Jewish contribution to every conceivable idealistic cause in the United States in this century, and the role of the Jews in radical, reform and revolutionary movements seeking the liberation of Russia from Tsarist tyranny...

...Hide not thyself from thy fellow man...

...And that makes it our historic right to demand Jewish education on the vast scale here proposed — and to mount an enormous, concerted, massive worldwide campaign to enlist the support It is our historic right to demand Jewish education on a vast scale - and to mount an enormous, concerted, massive worldwide campaign to enlist the support of the whole body of world opinion, irrespective of politics...

...Any book, religious or historical, or in any way dealing with Jewish subjects, is eagerly snapped up and passed from hand to hand...

...Indeed, we Jews have always acted on that understanding...

...As a consequence, the movement has settled into a kind of dead center...

...But the heart of our claim is that Soviet policy is nothing less than a horrendous attempt at the most outrageous violation of all — a war of extinction against an entire historic people and its right to live...

...And even so, it was not until 1970 —after we learned of the aliyah appeals written by Soviet Jews themselves beginning in late 1969, and after the arrests and trials of Jews who had sought by desperate means (the abortive hijacking of a small, passenger-less airplane) to leave for Israel in early 1970 — it was only then that the organized Jewish community was ready to hark back to our ancient history and to adopt as its slogan the words that first threw down the gauntlet of our national constitution under Moses: Let My People Go...

...And the key to the entire enterprise would be the realization on both sides that what is needed is a true mutuality between our two Jewish communities of America and Israel, an authentic partnership of equality, honesty, and candor...

...3) We always maintained that we were not engaged in a Cold War anti-Soviet campaign, and that our purpose was not political at all, but simply restricted to championing the basic human rights of Soviet Jews...

...Even if as many as 100,000 emigrated each year for the next 10 years, that would still leave perhaps 2,000,000 there...

...But in the light of Jewish history — to go back to the first principle enunciated here — what is impossible, what is hopeless, what is unrealistic...

...We must begin with an understanding of whom and what we confront...

...Do we abandon and forsake them...

...For at the heart of our cause is a moral concern...

...When a big "giver" dies, the obituary columns of the New York Times are filled with dutiful expressions of sorrow paid for by an array of Jewish philanthropic organizations...

...When I use the word "petty," I mean it only in the political action sense, in the context of the larger philosophical conception of the movement's ultimate significance...

...The Soviet regime has been at war with the Jewish people since the Bolshevik Revolution, a war of attrition, intent upon the spiritual demise of the Jewish people...

...The world has become inured to "commonplace" violations of human rights...

...to all those who are suffering for their dedication to democratic principles, genuine religious freedom and toleration, and national aspirations based upon justice and equality...

...Still another important psychological element is the helpless frustration which everyone feels in the face of the seemingly inexorable Soviet slowdown of Jewish emigration and the increasing harassment of the Zionist activists and, in general, of all applicants for emigration...

...On the contrary, they go hand in hand and complement each other...

...If that level of consciousness and that stage of awareness has not yet reached massive proportions, there is no doubt that that is the mood and the basic frame of reference of the most humane and noblest elements of the world community — the very people whom we count upon most decisively to be our allies in our own righteous struggle...

...He did not regard the Jews as a legitimate nation with its own character, history, and destiny, and with an inner cultural, intellectual, religious and political validity and viability...

...The lesson kept enshrined in our consciousness, the world can be saved...

...The mask of anti-Zionism has disguised Soviet anti-Semitism for decades, and from Moscow this poison has spread out to every other center — to the Arab world, Latin America and Africa — from which anti-Semitic propaganda is spewed forth...

...A third element, a corollary of the second, has been the feeling that at this particular juncture it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to hammer incessantly at world public opinion on behalf of both of our two great Jewish international concerns, Israel and Soviet Jewry, with equal intensity and insistence...

...Linked to this, finally, is the phenomenon of a world Jewish leadership, itself bereft of spirit and originality, which has long since abdicated its intellectual and moral independence and subordinated itself to the Israeli leash, thus finding it virtually impossible to assert a spiritual autonomy in our common causes and mutual interests...

...The world has become case-hardened and numbers-weary...

...Confronting that monumental question, we cannot permit ourselves to be limited by the norms of what a repressive regime will condone...

...That is precisely the significance of the powerful and moving parable of Abraham contending with the Lord about the destruction of the city of Sodom — demanding, wheedling, bargaining with the Lord not to destroy a city with its righteous as well as its wicked, and throwing it in His face that He who judges the whole world must do Justice...

...prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials...

...Those who work We must press the attack on to the enemy's own territory - by exposing Moscow as the fountainhead of world anti-Semitism, as the chief practitioner at home and the main exporter and manipulator of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic propaganda abroad...

...2) it helped to recharge the batteries of the delegates, most of whom were activists of a movement in the doldrums...

...It is crucially important for us to recognize now that the severe limitation adopted for so many years by the movement — of a strictly non-political stance — placed us in a psychologically weak posture, forced the movement into the timid defensive position of the suppliant, pleading, appealing, well-nigh begging...

...The recurrent pattern of Jewish history has been confrontation with disaster and triumph over it...

...But Jonah, in his narrow chauvinism, tried by every means of guile, deviousness and evasion to avoid that mission...

...But what do we do about those who will not disappear...

...There is no conflict or contradiction between them...

...The Commission Judgment went beyond individual human rights and on to group rights, to assert the natural human right of a people to perpetuate itself, and the individual Jew's right to leave the USSR not only for family reunification but for self-fulfillment as a Jew in the Jewish State of Israel...

...Above all, we were somehow utterly inhibited psychologically from acting on the basis of the fundamental fact of life that the struggle for human rights, group and individual, is inescapably political, especially when dealing with the Soviet regime, which does not recognize anything as non-political...

...Certain fundamental and natural human rights are self-evident, and among them are the right of the Jewish people to exist and the right of individual Jews to live as Jews...

...And we must devise the most daring and imaginative ways of getting all these cultural resources to the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who need and want them...

...This polarity, and awareness of it, have decisively and permanently molded the character of the Jewish People as an actor on the stage of history...

...We can not accept that the second largest Jewish community in the world should be doomed to wither away and just disappear...

...I can remember the countless meetings and discussions that led to the formation of the first American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry in 1964, in Washington...

...The second fundamental, cardinal principle is that Jewish survival must be the gravamen of our entire case, and we must insist that the Jewish people can survive only on the basis of authentic and viable institutions of learning, education, culture and religion, and upon a free association of all Jews and Jewish communities with each other and with Israel...

...There can be no more striking and demanding testimony to this than a very recent letter from a group of prominent activists in Moscow and Leningrad — including such stalwarts and distinguished scholars as Alek-sander Lerner, Vitaly Rubin, Vladimir Slepak, Vladimir Prestin, Ida Nudel...

...This publication house would also be responsible for the production and dissemination of Jewish cultural journals, chiefly in Russian but also in Hebrew, which would air Jewish ideas circulating among Soviet Jews and would also be open to contemporary intellectual and cultural currents among Jews outside the USSR...

...The lesson forgotten or ignored, the world goes on its way down to doom and evil...

...Our mandate, then, stems from the inner logic of Jewish history, and our license for action is dictated by what is necessary for the survival of the Jewish community of the Soviet Union...

...These self-evident truths must be constantly put forward and must serve as the ever-present, explicit context of our actions...

...It is of the utmost importance to make the world realize that the USSR's equation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, of which people in the West have become aware only in the last few years or even months, is no recent innovation...

...A Major Translation Program...

...We on the outside must vastly expand and improve the tiny program which has been under way for several years, and place upon a sound and regular footing a project for the massive translation into Russian of every facet — religious, cultural, educational, literary, philosophical, histo-riographic — of the Jewish heritage...

...Here the parallels end...

...Our work is the work of human dignity, not of penny ante vandalism...

...Indeed, it can be fairly stated that its declaration of war was actually issued in the early years of the century, a decade and more before the Revolution, in the course of Lenin's great battles with the Bund, through his exposition of the Bolshevik approach to the Jewish people...

...The major dissimilarity is, of course, that in the earlier story it is the man who urges compassion and justice upon God, and in the later story it is God who forces the man to understand compassion...

...Our case for Soviet Jewry is simple...

...Jonah is enjoined not to think only of himself...

...But after the high comes the letdown, and the delegations returned home with no greater sense of direction, no deeper or more stirring inspiration, and no clearer notion of how to lift the movement out of the doldrums than they had before Brussels...

...Nor, despite the pain of it and the keen embarrassment, dare we overlook the sharp impact on our consciousness of a fifth factor: the enormous difficulties, practical and spiritual, faced by Soviet Jews in the absorption process in Israel, linked no doubt to considerable generalized hostility as well as the notorious ineptness and inconsiderateness of the Israeli bureaucracy — and resulting in the shockingly large numbers and percentages of Soviet Jewish "desertions" from the country...

...3. Respect for the "civil rights" of Soviet Jews, which meant, effectively, the elimination of wholesale discrimination against Jews in higher education and in employment in many segments of public life that could be described as security-sensitive...

...Certainly, even minimal achievements in the program for Jewish education will inevitably tend to strengthen the movement for aliyah...

...Do we leave them to languish in bitter frustration, suffering from increasing discrimination and deprivation, but with no outlet for Jewish expression, let alone for emigration...

...All this may appear obvious, and yet — in its full dimensions, implications and consequences — it has never been made the fully conscious and explicit basis of the work of the Soviet Jewry movement...

...He saw the Jews as a group held together by the shackles of persecution, oppression, impoverishment and superstition...

...They failed then...

...Beyond this, I propose a major cultural exchange program between Israel and American Jewry, in order to engage in earnest, probing thought and dialogue on the fundamental questions of Jewish consciousness and identity, religion and culture, fate and destiny...

...For the strange and fascinating thing is that we are not a sad or mournful people...

...This would be a most important kind of assistance which you could render to Soviet Jewry...

...For nearly two years the movement's best energies were focused on the supreme effort to achieve this unique barter of trade and credits for liberalized Jewish emigration from the USSR — and when the Soviets at the last moment aborted the deal, a shattering tremor passed through the Jewish community, leaving it confused, baffled and bewildered...

...We were afraid to call Soviet policy and propaganda anti-Semitic...

...This is how we'll catch the conscience of the world and renew our claim upon it...

...This little homily on the imponderables of Jewish history is, it appears to me, of profound, essential and immediate relevance to the cause of Soviet Jewry...

...ellectual authority that is absolutely indispensable for sustained vigor, enthusiasm and dedication...

...I am not being critical in retrospect...

...But does everyone remember why Jonah was on the sea, and what was the meaning of the whole allegory...

...We must recognize and identify the enemy of the Jewish people — and defend ourselves against him by all legitimate and responsible means at our disposal...

...The third cardinal principle of a renewed movement should be the open linking of our cause with that of the Soviet Democrats...

...We know that an enormous number of books on Jewish history and Judaism are being published in the West, as well as books of contemporary Jewish writers and the Jewish classical literature...

...The Revolution would break those shackles, enlighten and emancipate the Jews, who would then "naturally" disappear as a recognizable entity on the stage of history...

...We have always lived at the edge of the abyss...

...In the early years of the Soviet Jewry movement, a good deal of this sort of work was done, but it has been essentially neglected for the past six or seven years...

...It is instructive to examine the route we took as we worked out our program...

...From the very outset of the encounter of the Jews with modernity, from the beginning of the Jewish Emancipation in the early 19th century — from the moment, that is, when Jews were for the first time free to leave the ghettos and to become actors on the world stage — there has not been a movement for social reform, social justice and human rights anywhere in the world in which Jews have not played a disproportionately large role, whether as thinkers and theoreticians, as political leaders, or as activists and organizers...

...Indeed, I continue to believe that aliyah remains a top priority, the single most important demand we have to make...

...It was against this propaganda and these policies that world Jewry once protested and effectively mobilized world opinion — people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the French, Italian, British and other Communist parties...

...The fact is that the most creative, the most sensitive Jews in America have long since been alienated from the Jewish community, and have only marginally been associated with any Jewish cause...

...We can do it only if we emphasize and never tire of reiterating that a historic people — with the most ancient, continuously creative heritage in the West — and its culture are being done to death...

...If our cause is indeed a matter of right and not of sufferance, we must henceforth conduct it as a strenuous political struggle which requires that we demand, openly, proudly, even defiantly, what no man and no regime has the right to deprive us of...

...Decter acterization provides a major key to an understanding of our history and our survival...

...A first step in that direction ought to be the immediate co-optation of a wide range of independent intellectuals into the highest policy-making bodies of the Soviet Jewry movement, involving them also in the confrontation and collaboration with our Israeli colleagues in this holy work...

...John C. Bennett, then president of Union Theological Seminary...

...Ours is a war of self-defense, and we must use these fresh demands to place the Soviet regime on the moral defensive before the bar of world opinion...

...and (3) that of the larger course of Jewish history from which the movement and its efforts must take their ultimate meaning...

...The Israeli leadership, in turn, has only been spoiled by such pampering, has only been encouraged in its tendency toward manipulation and exploitation — which, in turn, has only been resented by a frustrated American Jewish leadership that has lost the indispensable capacity to stand up and criticize with love...

...We were apprehensive lest we ask for too much...

...It wasn't only that we genuinely intended to avoid Cold War rhetoric...

...Nevertheless, these concerns cannot remain our only priorities, to the exclusion of a whole array of other approaches and demands...

...Whither now...

...We were apprehensive lest we ask for too much...

...To continue along such lines bespeaks a certain poverty of imagination and an unnecessary self-restriction on action, for our protest and our appeal to the world have simply boiled down to the one thing, aliyah — and that, in dangerous and self-defeating isolation from its historical and spiritual context and connotations...

...Such an enterprise will, more deeply and more lastingly than war crises, anti-Zionist resolutions, and emergency fund drives, help bind us more closely into one people...

...4) it delivered a clear message to the Soviet authorities, which the latter understood and took seriously, judging by the fact that they permitted some 15 activist Jewish families to emigrate to Israel just before the conference, and by the fact that they sought to counter its effects by holding adversary press conferences and sending their own counter-delegation to Brussels...

...We must insistently demonstrate that such policies diminish human rights, exclude human talents, create festering wounds in the Jewish community and even in the Soviet body politic itself, incite to hatred, whip up an atmosphere of fear, coercion, intimidation, malice and hostility — thus inhibiting and crushing the Jewish community's natural right to survival, to perpetuation of its cultural, religious and communal existence...

...At the time, I was frequently critical of what I deemed to be excessive caution on many issues, though I did agree that some circumspection was undoubtedly necessary, and for sound reasons...

...He was a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1974, and was honored last year by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry...

...This transcendent historical sense has also become a crucial key to self-understanding and survival...

...We must face the crucial question of the survival of Soviet Jewry...

...We should devise ways, as a Jewish community, of extending signal honors and with great public attention, to men like Andrei Sakharov, Piotr Grigorienko, Vladimir Bukov-sky, Ivan Dzyuba, and other heroes like them...