Actually, the whole quote was “I was born a Jew and I want to live out my life as a Jew. I demand to be freed from the humiliation of being considered a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
The quote above was written by Yasha Kazakov, a young university student. He was the first Jew to publicly renounce his Soviet citizenship and state that he wanted to emigrate to Israel.
When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone
In October 1963, a group of Cleveland rabbis signed a telegram urging President John F. Kennedy to link the sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union — a sale Kennedy had announced he would permit — to the lifting of a Soviet ban on baking matzo for Passover. The petition was organized by two Cleveland laymen, NASA engineer Lou Rosenblum and psychologist Herb Caron, who were looking for ways to call attention to the deteriorating plight of Soviet Jews. “American wheat,” the telegram said, “should not become an instrument of the official Soviet policy of persecuting the Jewish minority group.”
The rabbis’ plea was ignored. The view of the Kennedy administration, expressed earlier that year in a memo to Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman, was that “formal US Government representation to the Soviet Government would not be in the best interests of Soviet Jews.” American Jewish leaders, for whom Soviet Jewry was not a pressing issue, tended to agree. “It is wrong to generate too much activity on behalf of Russian Jewry,” the head of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann, told an Israeli publication, “because this could endanger the very existence of three million Jews.”
One generation later, everything had changed.
When President Ronald Reagan headed to Geneva for his first summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985, support for Soviet Jews was vocal, omnipresent — and as much a White House priority as arms control. “Summit Parley Overshadowed by Rights Issue,” a front-page story in The New York Times was headlined. It reported that the issue of Soviet dissidents, and especially the beleaguered Jewish “refuseniks” seeking to emigrate, “is one that President Reagan has said he will raise in the Geneva meeting.”
In fact, Reagan not only raised the issue during the summit, he devoted an entire session to it. After all, he later told Morris Abram, the famed civil-rights lawyer who headed the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, if Moscow couldn’t be trusted to keep its word when it came to Jewish emigration and other human rights, how could it be trusted on arms control?
In less than a quarter-century, the welfare of the Soviet Union’s Jews had gone from being a topic that US presidents could safely ignore to one that the White House forcefully championed — and from a cause few American Jews had ever thought about to one that aroused and united them as no cause ever had. How that came about is, roughly speaking, half the story that Gal Beckerman tells in When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone, his absorbing chronicle of the Soviet Jewry movement. The other half is the extraordinary epic of the Soviet Jews themselves — from the first Zionist stirrings that followed Stalin’s death, through the defiance of the refuseniks in the face of totalitarian cruelty and antisemitism, to the great exodus of the 1990s, when more than a million Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel. It is a sprawling saga of Cold War politics, Jewish self-awakening, and the rise of human rights as an issue in international relations. Beckerman, an experienced journalist, spent five years and interviewed more than two hundred people in the course of researching this book; the result is a riveting work of reporting and a magisterial history of one of the 20th century’s great dramas of liberation.
In both the US and the USSR, the struggle for Soviet Jewry began with memories of the Holocaust. When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone opens in the Rumbuli woods outside the Latvian capital of Riga, where in 1941 the Nazis and their collaborators had systematically murdered 25,000 Jews. In the early 1960s, hundreds of Jews began gathering on weekends to clean and landscape the mass graves, plant flowers, and turn Rumbuli into a proper memorial to the victims. It was at Rumbuli that Yosef Mendelevich and other Jews born after World War II first began to develop a sense of Jewish pride. From a handful of older Jews, some of whom had been active in Zionist youth groups during the prewar years when Latvia was independent, they learned Hebrew songs, picked up something of Jewish history, and were exposed to clandestine writings about Israel. By 1965, Mendelevich had organized a small band of Zionist teens. They had come together “out of an emotional love for our people,” he wrote in the group’s manifesto, and were determined “to work toward the self-awareness of Jewish nationality.”
Five thousand miles away in Cleveland, Rosenblum and Caron were animated by a different kind of Holocaust remembrance. They were filled with a “bitter mix of guilt, shame, and anger” as they learned of the failure of American Jews to rise up or cry out as European Jewry was annihilated. Now it was the Jews of the Soviet Union who were at risk — an eye-opening article in Foreign Affairs described the Kremlin’s restrictions on Jewish life as “spiritual strangulation” — and Rosenblum and Caron felt a powerful urge to act. When the local Jewish federation wouldn’t take the issue seriously, they launched a campaign of their own. The Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism, born in 1963, became the nation’s first Soviet Jewry activist organization.
From these modest beginnings developed a movement that would eventually open the first rip in the Soviet empire and teach American Jews how to flex their political muscle. Beckerman’s narrative alternates between America and the Soviet Union; one thread recounts the deepening of Jewish resistance behind the Iron Curtain, while the other shows how Soviet Jewry activism grew so powerful in the West.
At first, the American protesters knew next to nothing about the besieged Jews they were trying to help. “What was most striking about the fervor of those students who trudged through Central Park,” Beckerman writes about an early protest organized by Yaakov Birnbaum, who founded the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in 1964, is how little they knew about the actual ‘plight of the Soviet Jew,’ as they referred to their cause. Soviet Jews themselves were still unseen and unheard. So the passion and activity of these young American Jews was largely self-motivated and self-directed.
But Soviet Jews didn’t remain an abstraction for long. In 1966, Elie Wiesel published The Jews of Silence, his emotional eyewitness account of the precariousness and fear that characterized Soviet Jewish life. “After reading this book,” Max Hayward wrote in Commentary, “nobody will be able to deny that the state of Russian Jewry remains a legitimate cause for concern in the outside world.”
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I urge you to click here to read “the rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey used to say.
