When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (58 page)

The Helsinki Commission went on their trip anyway, sticking to Western Europe. And by the time they returned, everything had changed. Carter had won the election, and almost overnight, the an tagonistic relationship between the nascent commission and the administration was transformed. Carter's language of human rights was their language. Carter's inaugural address, which in content and tone made the president's humanitarian priorities clear, came partly from a set of bullet points composed by Dante Fascell. Fascell's proposed language, typed in all caps, found its way into the speech: "
THE PROMISES MADE IN HELSINKI
MUST
BE KEPT — ESPECIALLY THOSE THAT PROMISE TO RECOGNIZE BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS AND TO PROVIDE FOR GREATER MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE, INFORMATION AND IDEAS AMONG NATIONS.
"

To those involved in the Soviet Jewry movement, the commission immediately proved its worth. By 1976, Soviet Jewry had become nearly synonymous with human rights. The refuseniks had become poster children for the failure of Kissinger's détente, with their individual stories of families torn apart or kept in jobless limbo for years. Now that the situation had flipped and government forces were massing behind an approach that would put humanitarian concerns first, the movement stood to benefit. In fact, the Helsinki Commission's opening hearing, in November of 1976, presented the results of its first, extensive research project: a look at the emigration policies of the Soviet Union. Unable to examine the problem firsthand, the commission sent eight Russian-speaking staffers to absorption centers in Israel to talk with recent arrivals. In this way, they were able to paint a surprisingly complete picture of the barriers to emigration, covering all the cases that the refuseniks had been trying to publicize in the West for years—from the man whose son was drafted to prevent him from leaving to the family that lost their apartment as a result of their application. The report's findings were read on Capitol Hill as an example of the type of abuses the new commission hoped to highlight. Western activists were learning what the refuseniks had already discovered: an emphasis on human rights could greatly amplify their cause.

***

The tension between the grass roots and the establishment that characterized the movement in the West for most of the 1960s was largely neutralized by the mid-1970s. To be sure, there were still differences in tone and strategy, but in many ways, a convergence had taken place. In the wake of the Jackson-Vanik amendment fight, the grass roots had become more organized, and the establishment was now freely borrowing from its toolbox. In addition to shifting their focus to lobbying efforts in Washington, the organizations that made up the National Conference on Soviet Jewry were more willing to hit the streets. Malcolm Hoenlein, the former Student Struggle member and now head of the New York body coordinating all establishment Soviet Jewry activities in the city, organized demonstrations every spring that were basically larger versions of Yaakov Birnbaum's 1960s rallies. Starting in 1971, an annual Solidarity Sunday drew anywhere from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people in parade demonstrations that ended in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza outside the UN after a procession down Fifth Avenue. At the 1975 event, 353 chartered buses brought marchers from all over the tri-state area, with the single largest delegation a caravan of nine buses from suburban Merrick, Long Island. Local politicians and presidential candidates showed up yearly to pay their respects. The scenes of massive, singing crowds waving homemade signs and blown-up photos of the "prisoners of Zion" were covered widely in the press, a regular reminder of Soviet Jewry's centrality for American Jews. At that 1975 rally, a gigantic banner hung over the crowd:
THEIR FIGHT IS OUR FIGHT.

The Jewish establishment had learned the power of loud, clamoring public pressure, and the grass roots had internalized the need to focus. Although they refused to be "responsible"—a constant plea from Jewish leaders—in their denunciations of Soviet leaders, the activists were also employing more conventional forms of protest. The Union of Councils, started by Lou Rosenblum as a ragtag collection of local groups, had proved incredibly durable. Rosenblum himself had decided to retire from Soviet Jewry activism to focus on work and family, but the organization he had started as an end run around the establishment now had affiliates across the country, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Des Moines to Omaha. Rosenblum's use of these chapters to apply local political pressure during the Jackson-Vanik campaign had turned the Union of Councils into a true alternative national Soviet Jewry organization.

In the mid-1970s, Irene Manekofsky, a forceful, matriarchal figure running the Washington chapter of the Union of Councils, had as many high-level contacts on the Hill as any of the Jewish establishment leaders, and she frequently hosted fancy fundraisers for the city's most influential personalities (at least one was written up in the society pages of the
Washington Post
—fish-wrapped broccoli and cheese soufflés were served). Activists at these local councils matched the work of the National Conference or the Lishka, recruiting Jewish tourists who were going to the Soviet Union and then briefing them on whom to visit, how to escape the KGB's attention, what telephones to avoid using, where bugs might be hidden, and what to bring the refuseniks (pantyhose and jeans). When the tourists returned, they were debriefed, and the Union of Councils, just like the Israelis, amassed a growing body of information detailing the situations of specific individuals.

What distinguished these activists from the salaried men and women working at the offices of Jewish organizations in New York City was the sense of personal connection—they imagined themselves working
for
the refuseniks. If the National Conference dealt with Soviet Jewry on a larger, more abstract scale, an issue to be packaged and sold to the government and the American public, members of the Union of Councils thought in terms of people. They were helping their friends, the ones whose voices they could now recognize over the phone, whose children's names they now knew by heart.

Each of the councils revolved around a small number of passionate volunteers, many of them housewives with the time and energy to devote to the cause. Lynn Singer was the perfect example. A fiery self-admitted loudmouth and
yiddishe
mama, she lived with her husband, Murray, a piano teacher, and her two kids in the suburbs of East Meadow, Long Island. Within months of becoming involved, she was organizing massive rallies and making herself known as a lovable irritant to the local politicians. She eventually became head of the Long Island affiliate of the Union of Councils and called Moscow and Leningrad almost every day and at all hours. The refuseniks became her friends, and helping them was an integral part of her life. Most Soviet Jews who came through New York eventually spent a night on her couch, including Sylva Zalmanson, who was released early from prison and received an exit visa in 1974.

For some American Jews, activism was triggered by a life-altering trip to the other side of the iron curtain. Two young couples from Philadelphia, Connie and Joe Smukler and Stuart and Enid Wurtman, single-handedly brought the issue of Soviet Jewry to their city after they spent a few days in the Soviet Union meeting face to face with refuseniks. They devoted weekend after weekend to speaking in living rooms and in front of congregations; they identified with them. Most American Jews had Russian Jewish roots, and it seemed that only a simple twist of fate—what if their own grandparents had not left half a century before?—had saved them from the same miserable circumstances. It was like seeing an image of themselves in an alternate reality. Another couple from Philadelphia described the sensation in their 1977 debriefing report: "Their dress, their speech, their physical appearance, their values, their temperaments, are so familiar to us, and we are so comfortable with them, that it is hard to believe we are sitting in a Moscow apartment under KGB surveillance, rather than in suburban Philadelphia."

In the early 1970s, the Union of Councils made an important discovery in Michael Sherbourne, a sober, professional London high-school teacher who taught metalwork and engineering. A self-taught Russian speaker, Sherbourne became a popular contact for the refuseniks. He took down and quickly translated their statements and then passed them on. And unlike the Lishka, which filtered what it received, and American journalists in the Soviet Union, who had to worry about pleasing their editors back home, Sherbourne had only one concern: to get the refuseniks' messages and news out exactly as they wished.

Michael Sherbourne had come to the movement by chance in 1968 after he attended a talk by a recently emigrated Soviet Jew. Soon his wife was reheating his dinner again and again as he made as many as six phone calls a night to Russia—some of the Russian operators even recognized his voice—and the work took over his life. It was Sherbourne who coined the term
refusenik,
looking for an English equivalent for the Russian word
otkaznik.
He passed on all the information he got directly to the Israeli embassy in London, but he had no qualms about also sharing it with the grass roots. His first contacts were in England, where he became close with a formidable women's Soviet Jewry group called the Thirty-fives, named for the age they'd been in 1971 when they'd staged their first protest around the cause of Raiza Palatnik, also thirty-five, an arrested refusenik from Odessa. Soon Sherbourne was passing on information to the United States as well. In December of 1972, a few years into his phone calling, he began feeling that the Israelis were either distorting or withholding certain information from the Lishka-sanctioned newsletters, so Sherbourne started his own bulletin, recording every bit of news he collected. He spoke with everyone as regularly as he could, from Volodya Slepak, Alexander Lerner, and Dina Beilin to those involved with
kulturniki
activities. And in 1974, he got on the line with Anatoly Shcharansky, the first of what would be almost four hundred phone conversations with him over the next three years. Sherbourne and Shcharansky developed a deep bond, sometimes talking for more than forty-five minutes—a rich English benefactor subsidized all of Sherbourne's calls—and Sherbourne eventually acted as a go-between as well for the statements Shcharansky passed along from Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents. Sherbourne saw himself as a vessel, a way for messages to emerge from the Soviet Union. For Soviet Jewry activists who wanted to know everything about their refusenik friends—from their position on a piece of legislation to whether someone's sick baby was feeling better—Sherbourne's calls provided the kind of sustenance that gave the Western side of the movement energy and will.

But just as American Jews were beginning to cohere, tensions between grassroots groups and the establishment once again flared. A new conflict, which first presented itself in 1976, pitted these two forces against each other over an issue that touched the most sensitive place of both Israeli and American Jewish identity: the dropouts. The term itself was a Zionist concoction, meant to stigmatize those Soviet Jews who got out of the Soviet Union and then abandoned their Israeli exit visas and opted instead to go to a Western country, most often the United States. What had started as a small trend quickly ballooned out of control. In March of 1976, 50 percent of Soviet Jewish emigrants dropped out. The alarm bells were sounding for the Israeli government, and especially the Lishka. Unlike American Jews, Israelis had always seen the refusenik movement as having one overriding purpose: to bring more Jews to Israel. Soviet Jews were the great demographic hope. They would help to maintain the population of a Jewish state that was perpetually worried about the higher birth rates of its Arab citizens and its occupied Palestinian population. Soviet Jews, as every premier since Ben-Gurion had understood, were the secret weapon. When the dropout trend became visible, the Israelis immediately began arguing with American Jewish leaders about all the reasons why drastic measures needed to be taken to stop it. They argued that the Soviets would cease issuing visas altogether; that one visa used by a Jew headed for the West and assured assimilation was one visa lost to someone who sincerely wished to live in Israel. But the real source of their opposition was that the dropouts undermined the very reason for Israel's effort. Why should the Jewish State continue to pour resources into fighting for emigration if those Jews who left did not end up in Israel? What was the point?

The question of who exactly was dropping out preoccupied even the most informed Soviet Jewry activists throughout 1975 and 1976. The trend was shocking because it involved a population of Soviet Jews who were practically unknown in the West. These weren't the brave Zionist refuseniks, the Zalmansons of Riga or the Slepaks of Moscow, people who had an almost desperate desire to live in Israel. These were the silent majority, Jews who were not pulled toward Israel so much as pushed out of the Soviet Union. After the initial waves of Jews from the Caucasus and the Baltics, the next Jews who applied to leave were the minuscule groups of Zionists in the urban centers of Moscow and Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, and Minsk. Those who were given permission became the next wave, while those who weren't became refuseniks. The émigrés inspired a larger group of Jews who were beginning to suffer the effects of Soviet anti-Semitism. These were the highly assimilated Jews, people who often identified more with Russian culture than Jewish culture and were extremely well educated. But once they started seeing their children rejected from university programs for which they were more than qualified and heard how more and more factories and labs would not hire Jews to do certain jobs, they realized they had no future in the Soviet Union. Restricting education was a particularly huge blow to a group that valued it so highly. Throughout the 1970s, Jewish enrollment in Moscow institutions of higher education decreased by half. Many who were interviewed once they'd left the Soviet Union said they could have lived with having
Jew
written in their passports; they could even have stood being called
dirty zhid
every once in a while. But what they simply couldn't tolerate was a ceiling on their children's educational opportunities. And since they were motivated primarily by economic and educational factors, they felt that America was the place to go.