When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (12 page)

Abram asked for a voice vote on the new addition to the resolution, and a resounding and nearly unanimous "Yes!" came from the delegates. Herb Caron and Lou Rosenblum felt victory flutter in their stomachs. In their minds, they had brought down the establishment.

The next day, they went back to their congregation on the west side of Cleveland, satisfied that they had finally managed to turn the community's attention toward saving Soviet Jewry, that they had succeeded where even Jabotinsky in his time had not. They thought that their work was done. But all that had been achieved so far was talk. Movements, as everyone knew well by 1964, were not built on words. They needed feet marching. And in New York City, five hundred miles from Ohio, where hundreds of thousands of American Jews lived, no one had yet taken to the streets for Soviet Jewry. If the mass movement that Heschel and Lou Rosenblum and the Israeli agents of the Lishka desired was to become reality, it would have to begin there.

***

In early 1964, on one of his first days in the city, Yaakov Birnbaum, a tall Englishman in his late thirties, made his way up the sloping streets of Washington Heights, the hilly immigrant enclave at the northern corner of Manhattan. He glanced up at the tenements and back down at a smudged address on a scrap of paper. From behind the shuttered windows of Cuban fruit and vegetable markets came crackling radio sounds of big-band charanga music, the spicy brass and drums of Tito Puente. It was a Sunday morning and the streets were empty, but Birnbaum could hear Spanish voices pouring out of open apartment windows, parents screaming at children, husbands berating their wives, old women singing. And Birnbaum, though tired from his train ride, stopped to listen. This was America, he thought. The energy, even in this empty, wet street, was brimming.

He felt this every time he arrived in a new place. It offered possibilities, what he called sparks. The idea came from a kabbalistic origin myth: At the moment of Creation, the container that held the eternal light shattered and smashed, throwing sparks all over the world. The job of the holy man was to go looking for these sparks and collect them. For the past two decades, Birnbaum had lived a nomadic existence, never staying in one place for more than a few years. He was still not tired of looking.

Birnbaum, then thirty-seven, wore a thick black Vandyke beard that made him look older. He had grown up in London, the son of a Viennese-born professor of philology who had fled mainland Europe in 1933. Birnbaum spent his youth in the ominous shadow of World War II. Until the age of six, he lived in Hamburg; the city's university had asked his father to develop an institute for Ashkenazi studies, one of the first of its kind. Birnbaum never forgot the day he was assaulted by a group of German boys who jumped into his family's garden and stuffed dirt in his mouth. The family escaped to England, and they received British citizenship just in time to avoid being labeled as refugees and placed in internment camps. Yaakov's father had been recruited to work in the uncommon-languages department of the National Censorship Bureau in Liverpool. Day after day, Solomon Birnbaum, an exacting, academic-minded man, read frantic pleas from Jews all over Europe relating the details of a mass-extermination campaign. Sworn to secrecy by his superiors, Birnbaum's father never openly spoke about what he knew. Instead, he returned home every night, sat down calmly to dinner with his family, and talked about the intricacies and variances of Hebrew script, his academic specialty.

Starting in late 1940 and continuing into 1941, Liverpool suffered a fierce bombing campaign, a blitz not unlike London's; it took the lives of thousands. The tense atmosphere and the hints in newspaper accounts allowed Birnbaum to deduce the extent of the nightmare unfolding just across the North Sea. At the Liverpool high school Yaakov attended, the Gentile students thought he was hysterical for his fevered warnings about Jewish massacres. "Hey, you hear this bloke Birnbaum?" one of the older boys once said. "His people are providing good fertilizer for the Germans."

When the war was over and Jewish refugees, many emaciated and close to madness, began arriving in London, Birnbaum felt that he had found his calling: He joined every effort aimed at resettlement and readjustment. He taught them English, helped them to get social services, searched for lost family members. The work ignited him. It was active, engaged, socially conscious—everything his father's job had not been. Helping one group led to helping another. In the early 1950s, Birnbaum made trips to the slums surrounding Marrakesh, aiding destitute Moroccan Jews who were hoping to immigrate to the newly founded Israel. When he did settle briefly, it was to take a job as the director of the Jewish community council of Manchester, England. But two years spent dealing with a stuffy Jewish bourgeoisie depleted him. He began to wonder why Jewish life had no blood running through it, why these Diaspora Jews were so intent on assimilating into a culture that seemed devoid of any connection to tribe, that stripped away any spiritual identity.

In the early 1960s, he embarked on the journey that would lead him to Washington Heights. He traveled to France and around the United States. He wanted to see models of religious communities more alive than that of the Manchester Jews' he had just left. He explored Buddhism and talked to Trappist monks; he spent time in Kentucky with Thomas Merton, who got a dispensation from his vow of silence so he could speak with Birnbaum. Now nearing forty and without a wife or children, Birnbaum felt that despite all the work he had done with refugees, he had failed to accomplish anything substantial with his life. His father remained distant and disapproving. Birnbaum had managed to learn a little Yiddish on his journey and wrote the old man letters in the language. In response, he received brief thank-you notes along with pages of corrections. To Solomon Birnbaum, a man who prized expertise, his son's failure was that he did not know any one thing well. The more Birnbaum traveled, the more intense his search for an enlightened community became and the more urgently he felt the need to prove something.

His travels eventually took him to Israel in 1963, where he visited kibbutzim, agrarian socialist communes, and tried to see whether he fit into the new society that was flourishing there. But Israel at the time was a rugged place in search of rugged men. With his suit and groomed beard, Birnbaum looked more like an elegant mortician than someone ready to jump on a tractor or fire an M-16. He did contemplate staying, though, and he went about trying to find work, but he quickly realized he wasn't qualified for anything. Jewish rescue wasn't a legitimate job description, and Birnbaum, fiercely independent, refused to be a simple social worker and toil within a bureaucratic machine. Israel was not providing the answer.

And then Birnbaum discovered a few sparks.

He had always been drawn to young people. Even as he grew older, Birnbaum found they understood his drive and his passion much better than adults his age. He tended to get excited, animated, when he talked about ideas, speaking furiously and with great ardor. To adults, this marked him as an eccentric, but young people found nothing off-putting about his vigor. It made him interesting.

Birnbaum found a group of American rabbinical students who shared his search for rejuvenation. Young and idealistic, they were studying at Jerusalem yeshivas for the year, and they longed, like Birnbaum, to make Judaism more dynamic. Students such as Arthur Green, a pimply-faced student from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, and Yitz Greenberg, a young rabbi from Brooklyn who was on leave from his professorship at Yeshiva University, had long talks with Birnbaum about how to make Judaism relevant and meaningful in a modern world. Birnbaum felt he had found people who understood him. They encouraged him to come to America. They told him there were young people there craving a more engaged Jewish identity.

He soon arrived on that street corner in Washington Heights. On a wet and crumpled slip of paper in Birnbaum's palm was the address of a librarian from Yeshiva University who had a room to rent. Birnbaum had landed in America in the middle of 1963 and had been living in Rochester, New York. Five months had passed, during which Birnbaum worked with senior citizens at the Rochester Y, but in early 1964 he decided he hadn't come to America to languish in a dreary upstate town. New York City and the friends he had made in Israel were calling to him.

Birnbaum's room was small and crowded with the librarian's musty books. But it would do. Its major asset was that it was on Amsterdam Avenue, only a few minutes from Yeshiva University. Birnbaum had made a conscious decision to settle not far from the institution, an area that was an island of young religious Jews—though an island that had grown smaller in the 1950s with the arrival of Puerto Ricans and Cubans to Washington Heights. Birnbaum didn't know exactly what he wanted to do but he did know it would involve Jewish students, and the best place to find them was Yeshiva University.

He stumbled through his first few weeks, like any new arrival to the city. He sat in his room scouring the
New York Times
and the
Daily News
every day, looking for work and interesting stories. It was winter, and the rain that had greeted him turned into snow. Birnbaum wore his large Russian fur hat as he walked to Yeshiva to continue his discussions with Yitz Greenberg or down through Harlem to reach the large brick edifice that housed the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he met more young rabbinical students.

One day in March, three months after Birnbaum arrived, Greenberg showed him a recent issue of
Foreign Affairs.
In it was the article by Moshe Decter that had so stirred Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron, "The Status of the Jews in the Soviet Union."

Decter's article made Birnbaum remember the troubled, distraught faces of the refugees he had seen after the war. Some of them were Russians who had escaped the Soviet Union by pretending to be Polish and claiming displaced-person status. They told Birnbaum of the vast network of prison camps Stalin had established in the east. They spoke of endless detentions and mass executions in faraway forests. But that was nearly twenty years ago. Birnbaum knew the situation had been difficult but hadn't realized it had remained so.

He soon made the acquaintance of a businessman named Morris Brafman, a Viennese Jew who had barely escaped the Nazis and had recently started a small group to raise awareness about the problems facing Soviet Jewry.

Birnbaum found Brafman at his offices on Madison Avenue, where he ran a lingerie business. A sturdy man, passionate and irrepressibly garrulous, prone to speechifying despite his thick German accent, Brafman was a staunch philosophical follower of Jabotinsky. He told Birnbaum about his American League for Russian Jews, a group he and a few other "Jabo" businessmen had started. Birnbaum, so eager he couldn't get the words out fast enough, said he wanted, needed, had to help in whatever way he could.

The following week, Birnbaum and a few Columbia and Yeshiva students went to a meeting of the league; it was held at a Manhattan banquet hall, and Brafman had invited a few local politicians. Speakers who had recently visited the Soviet Union described the tattered and torn prayer shawls they'd seen on the old men at the synagogue; they reported that the authorities had refused to give more land for Jewish burial grounds. Brafman stood up to speak and bellowed: "Do you realize what they are doing? They want to erase them! They want to destroy them!" The hall was filled with many of Brafman's fellow businessmen, and they all nodded vigorously in agreement.

Despite Brafman's bluster, Birnbaum felt roused. And he could see the students were moved as well. When the meeting was over, they walked outside in a daze. The feeling that had been slowly building, that this cause had great potential power, was now confirmed. Not only could it save three million Jews in the Soviet Union; it also could revitalize the millions of Jews in America. This could galvanize them, get them emotionally involved. He already knew that young American Jews could be moved to action for the cause of freedom. They had turned up by the thousands at the March on Washington the previous year. And preparations were being made for the Freedom Summer of 1964, when hundreds of young Jews would infiltrate the segregationist counties in the South and help black sharecroppers register to vote. What if he could convince these young activists to direct this same energy toward their own people? It was in many ways Abraham Joshua Heschel's vision, and Birnbaum was just the man to carry it out. Walking together through the streets of Manhattan, past closed butcher shops and kosher markets, Birnbaum asked the students what they thought about a youth movement for Soviet Jewry.

When Yaakov Birnbaum heard about the Washington conference, he was furious. He had read an article in the
Jewish Exponent
that quoted Morris Abram speaking shortly after the gathering: "If Soviet authorities invite us to a discussion of the status of Soviet Jewry ... we will be prepared to form a delegation to go to the USSR and meet with Soviet officials of the highest level." He was shocked that a Jew like Abram, so committed to using direct action in support of blacks in America, could sit back and do nothing tangible for Soviet Jews other than wait for a phone call from Khrushchev. To Birnbaum, the conference was just another example of what he had seen in Manchester. The dynamism had been drained out of American Jewry.

In the weeks following the Brafman meeting, he realized that he was ready to throw himself completely into this cause—to focus his restless spirit. Birnbaum had always looked to his grandfather Nathan Birnbaum as a model. A nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual, Nathan Birnbaum had coined the term
Zionism.
He was an eclectic man, a passionate assimilationist who became one of the original proponents of Jewish nationalism (in the late 1880s, he published the first Zionist journal,
Selbst-Emanzipation
) and then turned toward Yiddish, translating shtetl writers such as Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. By the end of his life, the once freethinking secularist who had refused on principle to eat in kosher restaurants founded his own neo-Hasidic group, the Olim, or Ascenders, and searched for a spiritual expression of Judaism. He embraced each one of these dramatic shifts with a prophetic spirit, and he was a constant reminder to Birnbaum to pursue a dynamic, engaged life.