When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (10 page)

The new CCSA met twice a month at the City Club with the whole board. They made up a letterhead with Decter's seven points printed on the back. Herb Caron became the executive chairman. His first project was a survey to gauge existing knowledge of the Soviet Jewry question, to get a better idea of what they were working with. He sent out a questionnaire to two thousand rabbis of many different denominations. Over the fall and winter of 1963 and into 1964, they received more than a thousand responses. Caron recorded the answers using IBM punch cards. Most congregations had no awareness of the issue and certainly no response to it. To the question "What role has your congregation taken in informing the community about the deteriorating position of Soviet Jews?" the majority answered "None." To the extent that they had thought about the issue, the rabbis confessed that they were under the impression that the Jewish establishment was taking care of the problem. The response of Murray Stadtmauer, rabbi at the Jewish Center of Bayside Hills in New York, was typical: "It has been my understanding that Jewish organizations have been making representations to Soviet officials at the UN and the Soviet embassy and that only when these fail, will an open, public protest effort be undertaken. Has the time come?"

The group had started to attract outside attention. In November of 1963 Rosenblum put together a pamphlet called "Soviet Terror Against Jews: How Cleveland Initiated an Interfaith Protest" in which he described the problem and asked the reader to sign on to an "Appeal to Conscience of Soviet Leaders." The publication was sent to congregations all over America. The CCSA took out large ads in the Cleveland newspapers and got some immediate notice from the press. People from other cities started writing Rosenblum and Caron, asking to be placed on the group's mailing list. The two were a little shocked by the attention. The CCSA had no office—Herb Caron's house was the mailing address—and no time to answer what were often deeply felt letters, like the one from Lynne Gershman of Springfield, Illinois, who first wrote at the beginning of 1964 in a sloping, elegant cursive on flowery stationery. She offered Caron "a few statistics about us": "my husband, a Sales Representative for the Burroughs Corps., is 31. I am 27, we have three children ages 2.5, 5.5, 7.5, married 9 lovely years, living in Springfield for 7 years, activities include PTA, JWV, Masons, Jr. Chamber of Commerce, etc. How typical can you get?" As to why she was interested in the issue,

the answer is many faceted and probably the same for many people—after reading reports intermittently in the press, a feeling of sadness I could not shake off, deep gratitude for a wonderful country, loving family, happy children whose future waits secure and free, a belief that the fortunate are the only hope of those who are not, behind it all the awareness of the persecution of Jews through the ages and the fact that it could easily have been our children, our family, in despair. If we don't try to help, who will? My husband feels these things as deeply as I do, as I am sure countless others do.

***

As Soviet Jewry began to penetrate the consciousness of the community in 1963, a number of Jewish American politicians began raising their voices. Most notably were the Senate's two Jewish members and a Jewish Supreme Court justice, the three of whom emerged as a troika of sorts, the unofficial leading voices in government on the issue: Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a Democrat from Connecticut (who had taken Prescott Bush's seat in the 1962 election); Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican from New York; and Arthur Goldberg, who had been appointed secretary of labor but had joined the Supreme Court in 1962, replacing an ailing Felix Frankfurter. All three were the children of Jewish immigrants. All three had also grown up poor: Ribicoff had spent his teenage years working in a zipper and buckle factory; Javits was raised on the Lower East Side. And Goldberg was the son of poor Polish immigrants (from the town of Os'wieçim, the original Polish name for Auschwitz); his father worked as a produce peddler in the impoverished West Side of Chicago.

In the fall of 1963, as Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron were setting up their small group in Cleveland, Goldberg started working with the two senators on getting Kennedy or his then secretary of state, Dean Rusk, to take up the issue. Javits had already warned Congress at the end of September that the time for a protest that was "loud and long" had come; what was needed was a "great surge of indignation—the determined protests not only of Jews but of all free peoples who treasure the rights of the individual." Rusk did meet with the three, but he thought it best that for the sake of Cold War diplomacy, any gripe with the Soviet Union should be expressed by Jewish leaders, not the State Department. Behind the scenes, Averell Harriman, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union who was then serving as assistant secretary of state, received a memo saying that the State Department's "position has been that it is difficult for our government to contribute to direct solution of the problem of minorities in a territory where a foreign government exercises sovereign control." But even more so, "the Department believes that formal U.S. Government representation to the Soviet Government would not be in the best interests of Soviet Jews. These representations could, in fact, antagonize the Soviet Government to the detriment of Soviet Jews."

It was apparent that they would get nowhere with the State Department, so Ribicoff and Goldberg decided to go directly to the president. If Kennedy was going to listen to anyone, it would be these two. Both men had helped the young senator from Massachusetts get elected and had been duly rewarded with high-profile posts (before winning his Senate seat, Ribicoff had been the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). But the president couldn't do any better than Rusk. Only a year had passed since the Cuban missile crisis, and the last thing he wanted was to irritate Khrushchev. He suggested that a delegation of American businessmen headed for the Soviet Union could discreetly broach the subject. But this also seemed weak. Ribicoff and Goldberg asked the president if they had his permission to talk to the new Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to arrange a visit to Moscow to address Khrushchev. Kennedy said he wouldn't stand in their way.

The subsequent four-hour meeting with Dobrynin on October 29 was even more frustrating. The Soviet ambassador, who had already proven himself during the missile crisis to be a smooth translator of Soviet policy for the American administration, categorically denied that anti-Semitism existed in the Soviet Union. Point by point, he refuted all charges of religious and cultural deprivation, and he said the accusation that economic trials were being used to execute Jews was baseless. "We are proud of our Jewish citizens," Dobrynin told them. "They are treated like everyone else." He would promise the Americans nothing.

A few weeks later, on November 19, Goldberg and Javits met in New York with the members of the powerful Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The Supreme Court justice and the senator reported on their disappointing meeting with Dobrynin. Goldberg then presented the first tangible proposal: the Jewish leaders should organize a conference for the following spring that would gather together various Jewish groups in order to establish a unified plan. This would at least telegraph to the Soviets that the community was serious, and it might even put some pressure on the American government. He cautioned, though, that if they moved forward, they should be careful to avoid linking the problems of Soviet Jewry with the U.S.-Soviet relationship in any way. Like the Israelis, Goldberg wanted the protest to be carried out on a higher plane. As for the "troika," Goldberg promised they would keep pressuring the president to arrange a meeting with Khrushchev. Three days later in Dallas, Kennedy was assassinated.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations had the power to mobilize but not quite the will. Founded in 1953, the Presidents Conference, as it was colloquially known, was a reaction to complaints from members of the Eisenhower administration who were dealing with a constant stream of Jewish leaders arriving to discuss the issue of Israel, each one making essentially the same points. A deputy of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that the major organizations, including the three big defense ones—the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League—and the various religious authorities consolidate their forces, at least on the topic of Israel. They formed an umbrella group of twelve. This provisional conference soon became a permanent organization with its own executive. It also became the de facto foreign policy arm of the American Jewish community, especially following the 1956 Sinai campaign, when Israel's belligerence needed to be explained and defended.

Though the issue resonated with some of the individual members of the Presidents Conference, the condition of Soviet Jews, as much of it as was known, had never provoked anything more than a rhetoric of concern. Goldberg's modest proposal—of directing attention to the problem with a communitywide conference—was anathema. The Jewish establishment was plagued by its own stultifying redundancy. In 1952, Jewish leaders concerned about their own paralysis had commissioned a study, the McIver Report, which came to the conclusion that there were too many organizations doing the same thing and wasting their energies fighting over limited resources. The three defense organizations were all founded early in the century and, despite slight differences in tone and organizational culture, all had essentially the same goal: to fight anti-Semitism at home and abroad. Then there were the organizations that represented each of the three major religious denominations, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. These sometimes united under the title of the Synagogue Council of America. On top of these groups were the community's two major umbrella organizations: the Presidents Conference, the official political voice of the community, and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, which also included representatives of all the other organizations. This group was a coordinating body founded in 1944 to synchronize the activities of Jewish communities at a local level. All this led to a near-constant jockeying for funds and power. There was already some resentment about the Presidents Conference siphoning money and purpose from the individual groups. Any new initiative—even a conference—would necessarily mean more competition.

Adding to this anxiety was the fact that most of the men who made up the leadership of the Jewish establishment did not think it was time to abandon a strategy of quiet diplomacy. Nahum Goldmann was the very embodiment of this view. A dapper elder statesman of the Jewish world, Goldmann was both president of the World Jewish Congress and head of the World Zionist Organization, which effectively made him the most powerful Jewish leader after the Israeli prime minister. He was a Lithuanian Jew who had grown up in Germany and worked in the Jewish division of the foreign ministry until Hitler came to power. Though a lifelong Zionist, he believed in the importance of maintaining a vibrant Jewish community in the Diaspora (part of the reason he founded the World Jewish Congress, an organization devoted to Jewish life outside of Israel).

Goldmann believed foremost in caution, in using a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. In early 1964, he told an interviewer from the Hebrew University's student publication the
Ass's Mouthpiece,
"It is wrong to generate too much activity on behalf of Russian Jewry, because this could endanger the very existence of three million Jews." He also thought it was simply bad strategy—and bad manners—to put the Russians on the spot. Even though he had been willing to support the efforts of the Lishka and Moshe Decter—Goldmann was one of the few who knew about the secret arrangement—he wanted to avoid a head-on clash with the Soviets at all costs. If he could have it his way, the issue would be settled at a private meeting between him and Khrushchev, not by any sort of public action. He was often heard to say that all he needed was a bottle of vodka and an hour with the Politburo. This thinking quickly gained him the reputation of being a
shtadlan,
the old Yiddish expression for the individual in the shtetl who served as a liaison between the villagers and the local Gentile authorities. It was the
shtadlan
who would privately beg for the revising of anti-Jewish laws.
Shtadlonus
became derogatory shorthand for a leader who never wanted to be too obtrusive, who didn't feel he had the right to make demands. When young Jews like Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron in Cleveland looked at what leaders like Goldmann had done during World War II and the way they were now turning their backs on Soviet Jewry, they saw
shtadlonus.

Goldberg, Javits, and Ribicoff were so eager to further the cause of Soviet Jewry that they had dropped this task in the wrong lap. Only a singular figure—someone from outside the walls of the entrenched establishment—would have the independence and the nerve to demand more.

If Goldmann was the consummate insider, a mannered and worldly German Jew with brilliantined hair, elegant double-breasted suits, and sometimes a pipe clenched between his teeth, then Abraham Joshua Heschel was the epitome of the outsider. There was something biblical about him, with his unruly cloud of white hair and his elfin goatee. His lilting Yiddish accent made his constant stream of aphorisms sound poignant rather than pretentious. When Heschel told his rapt listeners that there "should be a grain of prophet in every man," they heard his words and saw his wizened face and believed that Heschel's body must contain a silo's worth.

Heschel was born in Warsaw, a descendant of the great rabbis of Eastern Europe, among them his namesake, the Apter Rebbe, and even—though he was often too modest to admit it—the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov. Heschel, a prodigy in his youth, was trained at a traditional yeshiva and later received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. In 1937, Martin Buber, escaping Europe for Palestine, named the thirty-year-old Heschel his successor as director of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the innovative Jewish Free University in Frankfurt started by the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. But the Nazis soon kicked Heschel out of Germany, and in 1940, after a few wandering years, he was offered a teaching position at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the main seminary of the Reform movement. It was an invitation that saved his life. But this strain of Judaism turned out to be too starved of ritual for him, too liberal, and in 1946 he found a new home at the Jewish Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here, at the prominent school of Conservative Judaism, where he taught ethics, he began writing the beautifully composed books of Jewish philosophy that gained him a reverent following.