“Why did two Jews survive the sinking of the Titanic?”
“Because they were talking.”
When telling the joke, you have to gesticulate wildly but rhythmically, as if you’re swimming. This was one of many Soviet anti-Semitic jokes I grew up with that mocked “dandruffy kikes.” We supposedly “smelled of garlic.” We spit when we talked. And we spoke too intensely, aggressively, violently. “How did your shirt get ripped? I walked between two Jews while they were talking.” “When are Jews dangerous? When they talk.” And on and on.
I confess, of the hundreds of anti-Semitic jokes I heard in my youth, the Titanic one is my favorite. Whatever the joke’s originator had intended or known about Jews, it captured something deeply Jewish. Here’s one of our eternal survival skills: we have been passionately arguing with each other, in good times and bad, for better and worse, for 3,900 years.
Sometimes, those arguments kept us blessedly distracted. At one of our lowest moments, in 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed our Temple, our holy city Jerusalem, and our independence, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai wrangled one small concession from the victorious Emperor Vespasian: opening a yeshiva in Yavneh, forty miles from Jerusalem. Blocked from governing our homeland, we stayed alive as a stateless people by arguing about texts.
Throughout 1,900 years of exile, we would be martyred by Christians, humiliated by Muslims, menaced by Cossacks, hunted by Nazis, and tormented by the KGB—and yet we kept arguing. Sometimes we fought about big philosophical questions. Sometimes we quibbled, equally passionately, about picayune rituals.
These arguments not only kept us alive; they helped us thrive. One of our greatest collective accomplishments, the Talmud, is a sixty-six-volume transcript of what? Arguments. Our rabbis then built an elaborate system of specific laws based on those intense, sweeping debates, even though many of the philosophical questions remained unresolved.
One key to modern Israel’s start-up success is the rich, contentious culture of questioning anyone, anywhere, anytime, regardless of rank or stature. The shouting starts in the Israeli army—up and down the chain of command—and continues, feeding Israelis’ aggressive, out-of-the-box creativity in high tech and pharma.
The classic Jewish argument is a particular kind of clash. It’s over issues that people take personally and will shout about vehemently. It respects few boundaries. It has zero tolerance for the hypocrisy of doublethink or the sensitivities of political correctness. And it pivots on the dialectic, the clash between opposing views that requires each person to understand the other side—to annihilate the counterarguments while partially absorbing them.
The classic joke has a rabbi mediating between combatants. He says, “You’re right” and “you’re right.” Then he admits that the outsider’s cry—“They can’t both be right!”—is “right too.” The punchline captures the Jewish argument’s freewheeling, open, yet ultimately constructive nature.
The modern Zionist idea, and eventually the state of Israel, emerged from a deep, decades-long Talmudic debate, starting in the late 1700s, about the Jewish people’s future in the modern world. Over the years, as various movements formed in response to this crisis, Reformers yelled at Orthodox Jews who yelled at Conservative Jews who yelled at socialists who yelled at Bundists who yelled at Zionists. Even as Zionism developed, the clashes between Theodor Herzl’s Political Zionists, Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionists, Abraham Isaac Kook’s Religious Zionists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, and David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir’s Labor Zionists were often bitter and nearly paralyzing but ultimately productive.
A few years after I arrived in Israel, a neighbor who moved to Jerusalem from New York saw me playing with my children in the backyard. Looking wistful, she said, “You know, Natan, it was such a great time when you were in prison. Back then, we were all united. We all protested together. Those rallies were great places for dating too—I know many marriages that resulted. There was such a loving atmosphere between us and Israel.” Sighing, she asked, “Where is it now?”
Despite having no intention to return to the Gulag, I almost shared her nostalgia. In the ’70s and ’80s, that feeling of joining our people in a historic struggle was so overwhelming, it outshone our many differences. Soviet Jewish Refuseniks, Diaspora Jews, and Israelis all felt like one big fighting family.
Our movement represented a remarkable alliance. Zionism and liberalism, the fight for Jewish identity and for human freedom, united easily under one banner. Zionists and Orthodox Jews and civil rights crusaders and anti-Communist cold warriors all cooperated. Only the most marginal players in the Jewish world—harsh anti-Zionists and uncompromising Communists—could not fit themselves into this broad communal coalition.
Like my neighbor, people tend to feel nostalgic about our moment of unity, focus, and effectiveness. But back then, it rarely felt so orderly. The dialogues were sometimes charming and sometimes enlightening, but usually irritating.
At first, the competing worldviews and sensibilities struck me as ego-driven or turf-oriented distractions. Eventually, I realized we were hashing out the enduring questions of the Jewish and Zionist world, which continue to shape today’s Israel-Diaspora tensions. We updated the struggle between Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionism and Herzl’s Political Zionism, asking: Do we focus on renewing Judaism or on building a Jewish state? We continued exploring the mystery that started with the Enlightenment in the 1700s and intensified after 1948, wondering: Is total assimilation inevitable in the Diaspora, or can one adapt just enough to be accepted yet stay Jewish? We addressed an even older question, debating: What’s the Jewish mission, to better the Jewish people’s lot or better the world?
Our movement ended in the 1990s. These arguments—and my involvement with them—continue.
Although the KGB targeted us Refuseniks as members of an underground organization seeking to undermine the Soviet regime, we insisted that our movement was legal, even under Soviet law. Our methods and goals remained clear. Our statements, press conferences, and demonstrations had one major aim: to publicize our case and contrast the declared Soviet policy on human rights with our unfortunate reality as Soviet citizens. Admittedly, planning public protests, collecting signatures, and transmitting messages to the free world required secrecy until the last minute. Otherwise, the demonstrations would never have occurred, the petitions would have remained unsigned, and the letters would have been intercepted.
Dodging the KGB bugs in our apartments and the listening devices eavesdropping on our conversations in the streets, we often used “magic slates” for any sensitive exchanges. Every Refusenik’s apartment was overstuffed with these children’s toys, brought in by our Jewish friends from abroad along with Hebrew manuals, Jewish books, and Star of David souvenirs. It was easy to scratch letters with a stylus onto these flimsy, colorful wax boards covered by a sheet of acetate. Then—poof!—it was just as easy to erase them by raising the acetate sheet. Often decorated with Disney cartoon characters like Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, and Goofy, these magic slates were essential weapons in our war with the KGB. Anytime someone brandished this little children’s plaything, we knew the conversation was turning serious.
One day in the summer of 1975, the American embassy’s diplomatic attaché, Joe Presel, told me that the largest delegation of US senators to visit the Soviet Union would arrive in two weeks. The red-carpet treatment would include meeting with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, at the Kremlin. The timing was significant. Congress’s passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment in January 1975 infuriated the Soviet Union. The summertime delegation suggested that both countries hoped to rebuild relations.
Joe then reached for the ever-present magic slate, signaling there was more to the story. He scribbled that two senators, Jacob Javits, a Republican, and Abe Ribicoff, a Democrat, wanted the delegation to meet with Refusenik leaders before meeting Brezhnev.
I was thrilled. Our movement was constantly trying to mobilize members of Congress. Usually, the best we could do was write a letter, get a tourist to smuggle it out, and trust one Jewish organization or another to deliver it. Face-to-face meetings with senators or representatives were rare and risky. Even when a prominent senator like Ted Kennedy bravely broke the taboo, he visited Refusenik scientist Alexander Lerner at midnight, only after completing all of the scheduled talks. This deprived the Soviets of the opportunity to cancel any meetings in protest if they objected.
Usually, when such distinguished visitors arrived, I introduced them to leading Refuseniks, then arranged for them to meet Andrei Sakharov too, in support of the broader human rights movement. Although these meetings buoyed us psychologically, they remained off the dignitaries’ official itineraries to avoid a confrontation with Soviet authorities.
Now, for the first time, a leading delegation of fourteen American senators would incorporate a meeting with Refuseniks into the schedule. They would then take our concerns to the top Soviet leaders. The senators were telling the regime clearly: you can’t improve relations with the United States if you oppress Soviet Jews.
Joe asked, “Can you get five or six key activists to Senator Jacob Javits’s hotel suite without the KGB finding out in advance and disrupting the plan?” Even most of the senators would only get last-minute invitations to the briefing, which was planned during their few hours off on the Sunday before meeting Brezhnev.
Knowing how many factions and personalities I had to satisfy, I needed more seats at the table. I insisted, “You have fourteen senators. Give me fourteen Refuseniks.” Joe agreed.
Over the next two weeks, I tried to be as discreet as possible as I made the arrangements. I worried that the KGB would stop us at any moment.
The day before the Refuseniks met the senators, we gathered in our spot on Archipova Street across from the Moscow synagogue. Those of us in the know were excited but a bit nervous too. We all remembered how the KGB celebrated President Nixon’s 1974 visit by arresting a dozen of us potential troublemakers.
Our biggest challenge came from an unexpected source. Vladimir “Volodia” Prestin—a leading Refusenik and a decent, elegant man, known respectfully as “the Count”—approached me that Saturday. Volodia was a Hebrew teacher passionate about resurrecting Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Ideologically, our small movement was finding itself increasingly split between the kulturniki, activists like him who were committed to a Jewish cultural revival within the Soviet Union, and the politiki, the Refuseniks focused on the political fight for freedom, centered on the right to emigrate to Israel.
I was instinctively a politiki but didn’t take the debate seriously. We all signed the same petitions. We all attended the same protests. We all tried learning Hebrew, and some of us taught the language too. And we all shared whatever texts we could find about Jewish history, Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Zionism, and Israel. I assumed the split was mostly about fragile egos and silly turf wars, yet another reflection of our people’s long, loud history.
“Natan, I want you to know it’s great that this meeting is taking place,” Volodia said that tense Saturday. “And I don’t want to disappoint you. But we are not attending this meeting. Our group will request another, separate meeting with the senators.”
“You’re kidding me,” I exclaimed. We weren’t planning on meeting a bunch of congregational rabbis happy to bop around the city indulging our little tiffs. These were fourteen of America’s most powerful politicians, here for a heavily monitored, high-profile visit. We were about to enjoy an extraordinary moment of recognition. Now, we risked senatorial outrage, international embarrassment, and KGB mockery as the gang that couldn’t even meet properly. I couldn’t imagine how to explain this to my friend Joe the diplomat, let alone to the senators I didn’t know.
At the same time, Volodia was the last person I would expect to be petty. He explained himself fairly. “Natan, you know yourself. You guys will dominate the meeting, talking about the Jackson amendment, the Jackson amendment, the Jackson amendment—then about emigration quotas, which will get you back to the Jackson amendment.”
I claimed we would also speak about freeing prisoners of Zion—Jews imprisoned for their Zionist activity—boosting emigration, ending the arbitrary visa rejections, and stopping illegal harassment. “I understand,” Volodia replied. “But who will speak about the most important problem, that it’s almost impossible to get access to Jewish education and culture? The future of Soviet Jewry depends on this. We’re trying to revive a rich Jewish culture the Soviets decimated. We don’t want our cultural agenda hijacked by your passing political concerns.”
Still, I warned, the KGB could exploit our split to fragment the movement. I added that I had no idea how to ask for separate meetings. “I also lack the authority,” I told him.
He reassured me. He would make the request through his journalist contacts. I started working the back channels. I tried calming emotions on both sides while keeping the meeting secret.
Senator Jacob Javits’s sense of humor saved us. When a reporter conveyed Volodia’s request for a separate meeting, Javits didn’t sweat it. Well practiced in our people’s quarrelsome, quibbling ways, the veteran Jewish senator from New York said, “We don’t have time for two meetings, but my suite has two adjoining rooms. Let each group choose its own salon.”
The next day, ten senators joined Javits and Ribicoff for a comprehensive discussion with the fourteen Refuseniks. We were thrilled that twelve of the fourteen-member delegation participated. Although Javits’s suite had two rooms, no one noticed any divisions among the Refuseniks. We had enough time to air all our concerns, to the frustration of the many KGB tails, who stood outside the hotel or in front of Javits’s suite, unable to interfere as we prepped the senators to meet Brezhnev.
The KGB agreed that this meeting was momentous. Two years later, it won the KGB’s version of a gold medal. Beating hundreds of other gatherings, protests, and petitions, it ranked as one of the key finalists the KGB chose to include in my indictment. The KGB singled out my role in organizing the meeting as one of the nineteen episodes to be classified as “high treason” in “aiding the capitalist countries in their struggle against the Soviet Union.”
All the squabbling before the meeting risked exposing the conflicts among the Refuseniks. Days later, one of my closest and most helpful reporter friends, Robert Toth of the Los Angeles Times, told me, “I am going to write an article about the split.”
“Don’t do it, Bob,” I pleaded. “The article will harm us, and you’re our friend.” We believed we had to keep our disagreements far below the public radar to avoid aiding the KGB.
He replied, “If I don’t, somebody else will. The other reporters know about this and are talking. Why should I stand by while they get the scoop? Besides,” he added, “trust me, your movement will survive this—and might even learn from it.”
I refused to cooperate. Bob interviewed others. His subsequent article was headlined “Split Among Activist Soviet Jews Breaks into Open over Talks with U.S. Senators.” It emphasized the growing division between “emigration” and “culture” among Refuseniks.
“You don’t understand,” he later explained. “It’s good for this discussion to go public. If it’s a serious split, articles like these can help you argue it out—and sort it out.”
Bob was right. Opening the debate emphasized the ideological differences, not the personal fights. And this focus on tachlis, Yiddish for substance, sharpened both sides’ arguments.
Volodia and his kulturniki allies rooted their argument in math and poetry. Thinking statistically, they argued that the Six Day War only transformed, at most, a few thousand Jews into activists. None of us had any idea if or when we would be free. Volodia would languish for eighteen years in total. “Today, there are maybe thirty prisoners of Zion and barely three thousand Refuseniks. Rather than focus on a small minority’s political fight, let’s remember the millions,” Volodia and his allies insisted. “There are three million Soviet Jews deprived of Jewish education, knowledge, and identity.” And, they often added, “if we can inspire them with the Jewish education and culture they deserve, the masses will keep the Jewish flame alive for decades, no matter how long the fight takes.”
We politiki agreed the numbers were small. But if the price of emigration wasn’t so high, and the chances of emigrating weren’t so low, the floodgates would open. So we, too, were mathematicians and poets. We were fighting for the masses at a historic moment. We could tap the Jewish world’s post-1967 energy while exploiting the Soviets’ increasingly desperate attempts to woo the West.
Tactically, we also feared that shifting our movement to emphasize Jewish education would make it easier for the Soviets to fool the world. The authorities could claim that Jews had the same freedom that Christians did. They could open some Jewish school to parallel the official Christian church, make a big splash, invite journalists, con the Americans, and rob our movement of its potency. It was harder to fake emigration statistics or pretend to free prisoners who remained imprisoned.
We were really squabbling over priorities and timing, not core values or mission. Everyone in our small, overextended movement was doing double duty. We were all cultivating our newly discovered Jewish souls while asserting our newly activated Zionist pride.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were replaying a classic argument about how to best strengthen the Jewish people. When the formal Zionist movement began in the late 1800s, the Cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am dismissed Theodor Herzl’s Political Zionist dreams of a state as a grandiose delusion distracting from the national cultural revival the Jews needed.
Both thinkers agreed that, after centuries of persecution, Jews were in crisis. But they disagreed, as we did in the 1970s, regarding how best to mobilize the Jewish masses. Herzl’s Political Zionists wanted a Jewish state as soon as possible to save as many Jewish lives as possible. Examining the fundamental cause of Jewish misery, Herzl articulated his “chief tenet”: “Whoever wishes to change people must change the conditions under which they live.” Moreover, “All human beings ought to have a home.”
The notion of Jews moving to Palestine en masse is “a fantasy bordering on madness,” Ahad Ha’am scoffed. He also doubted that “the land will afford them adequate sustenance.” The “truth is bitter,” he warned, “but with all its bitterness it is better than illusion.”
Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionists emphasized Jewish education. More worried about the “problem of Judaism” than the “problem of the Jews,” he wanted to save Jewish souls.
As with the politiki and the kulturniki, both Herzl and Ahad Ha’am were correct, and in many ways overlapped. In both cases, as usual, while the bickering over priorities continued, the Jews’ biggest problem—Jew-hatred—became the great leveler. By the 1940s, the Holocaust, then the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, proved we needed a state. The cultural renaissance followed.
In the case of Soviet Jews, the KGB targeted both factions. The persecution against political activists that intensified in the 1970s broadened in the 1980s, as the KGB harassed Hebrew teachers and other kulturniki too. The debate about saving Jewish bodies by getting them to Israel or saving Jewish souls by educating them wherever they are continues today.
Nearly thirty-five years after my conversation with Volodia on Archipova Street, I became the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Since 1948, the organization has brought nearly 3.5 million Jews on aliyah to Israel from dozens of countries. By the time I became chairman, fewer Jews needed an “aliyah of rescue.” After the Soviet Union fell, most Jews lived in freedom. Moving to Israel, therefore, became less a matter of fleeing persecution and more a matter of choosing freely.
In this new era of an “aliyah of choice,” I believed that strengthening Jewish identity had to become the Jewish Agency’s central mission. “Let’s focus on reconnecting young Jews to their history, culture, heritage, community, and Israel,” I declared. “Deciding to make aliyah is now a consequence of this connection.”
When traditionalists resisted this reform, my old friend Volodia called. “Congratulations,” he needled me. “Welcome to the club. Finally, you understand that Jewish education comes first.”
I didn’t want to argue with him about timing and priorities. Instead, I described a recent experience: my first attempt at the Jewish Agency to mediate between two groups of emissaries from Israel we had sent to the former Soviet Union. Although both groups worked for us, the chinuch shlichim, the educators, and the aliyah shlichim, the emigration recruiters, wouldn’t work together.
I gathered them in one room. Playing peacemaker, I said, “We’re from the same organization. We have the same aim. Let’s see how we can unite our efforts.”
They all started shouting.
“What Jewish culture? Bah,” the immigration types scoffed. “It’s an indulgence, like painting the toenails of a corpse. Bring ’em to Israel: that’s how they’ll learn about Judaism and Jewish culture.”
“Enough!” the educator types responded. “You care about bodies, not souls. You don’t care whether they’re Jews or not—you only want volume.”
“Sound familiar?” I asked Volodia.
We both laughed. Volodia added, “At least the KGB isn’t lurking behind their backs. Let them argue.”
“And two million Jews have already left the Soviet Union,” I said.
In the beginning, everything looked simple. Israel helped Soviet Jews rediscover our identity. Israel sent us invitations to join our relatives. Even if these relatives were fictitious, the possibility of reunification with our Jewish family was very real.
Through the words of a song written by a young Jew from Belarus, Israel Reshel, we celebrated Israel’s colors. We sang, “Kachol v’lavan, ein tzeva acher.”
The blue and the white
I have no other colors
The blue and the white
I’m merely returning home.
This simple song, with barely a dozen words, captured our sense of rebirth. We were beginning our way back to our people, our language, our country. It became our anthem.
Those lucky enough to receive permission to emigrate quickly collected their things and parted with friends at Sheremetyevo International Airport. These goodbyes were always dramatic. Nobody knew if they would see each other again. No one knew who was next in line to get a visa—or go to prison.
With no direct flights to Tel Aviv possible—because the Soviet Union had broken diplomatic relations with Israel following the 1967 war—the lucky person traveled to Vienna. There, a Jewish Agency representative greeted every Soviet Jew. After a day or two of processing, the Soviet émigré made aliyah to Israel, gaining automatic citizenship. One more person, one more family, reached the homeland.
The Jews arriving in Vienna by train or air soon realized they were now free people. They could choose: continue on to Israel or “drop out” and move elsewhere. Once they informed the Jewish Agency that they wanted to go to the United States, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) stepped in.
Founded in New York City after the anti-Semitic Russian pogroms in 1881, the legendary HIAS helped resettle many of the two million Eastern European Jews who arrived in America until the 1920s. The organization rescued more than three hundred thousand displaced Jews in the chaotic years following World War II. Subsequently, by helping Jews expelled from Communist Europe, Muslim Arab countries, and Ethiopia, HIAS remained the American Jewish immigrant’s best friend.
By the 1970s, HIAS was considering closing its Vienna office. There were few Jews left in Europe to emigrate anywhere. Then, as the number of noshrim (Hebrew for dropouts) started to grow, HIAS developed a new mission: to bring Soviet Jews to America.
HIAS searched for American relatives or representatives of American Jewish communities who were willing to sponsor these Soviet Jews. If successful, the émigrés could get refugee status from the American government. HIAS now generously funded offices in Vienna and Rome, and started helping Soviet Jews find their way to the goldene medina, America.
The number grew every month. By 1976, at least half the Soviet Jews escaping Russia with Israeli visas were dropping out of the aliyah process in Vienna. These dropouts disappointed most of us activists. Sometimes, friends who had fought to return to “our historical motherland” only admitted at the airport that they had decided not to go to Israel. I could not help feeling let down.
However frustrated we in Moscow were with the dropouts, Israelis felt even more betrayed. They believed these “ingrates” were abandoning the Zionist mission and mocking all the resources invested in getting them to Israel. Moreover, the dropouts were endangering the entire struggle. How, the Israelis reasoned, could the Soviets tolerate citizens using this family reunification fig leaf to join the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ greatest enemy, the United States of America?
Israel’s leaders resented American Jewish organizations for “stealing Jews from us” and wasting a precious visa that could have gone to a future Israeli. They demanded that their American Jewish allies close HIAS’s European offices and quit luring Soviet Jews to America. They asked the American government to stop giving dropouts refugee status. “With a Jewish state open to every Jew,” the Israelis reasoned, “there can be no Jewish refugees.”
Most American Jews’ grandparents and great-grandparents had left Russia for America, not Palestine. “We can’t close our gates to our cousins,” they explained. “We cannot shut down the organizations that helped us. And we certainly can’t ask the American government to stop welcoming these oppressed fellow Jews as refugees.”
Having failed to convince American Jews directly, Israeli officials asked Refuseniks to join their campaign. Even before Israel’s Liaison Office intervened, many Jewish activists had criticized the dropout phenomenon. Dozens of Refuseniks—including some prisoners of Zion—signed emotional appeals asking their fellow Jews to feel a broader sense of responsibility for this struggle to “let my people go—to Israel.” They saw immigration as a communal responsibility, not just a vehicle for indulging émigrés’ individual ambitions.
I sympathized with the Israelis emotionally and ideologically. Still, as hard as it was to say no to their request to denounce the dropouts, I couldn’t say yes. A small group of us politiki—including Vladimir Slepak, Dina Beilin, Sasha Lunts, Alexander Lerner, and Vitaly Rubin—sent a letter disagreeing with the Israeli government’s official position. We wrote it as unapologetic Zionists fighting for our right to go to Israel. We affirmed that Israel was the only place for us. Still, we believed that Israel’s role was to welcome Jews home, not block them from going elsewhere.
We believed in the Zionist project enough to stick by our commitment to free emigration and free choice. It would hurt our movement if Soviet Jews compared the commissars of Communism, forcing Jews to stay, with some imagined commissars of Zionism, forcing Jews to go to the homeland.
We also doubted the Israeli claim that the Soviets cared whether emigrants moved to America or Israel. Today, historians who have researched the Soviet archives confirm that we were correct. The Kremlin fury centered on Jewish emigration from the Soviet “paradise,” not to America instead of Israel.
During this tense dialogue, the head of the Jewish Agency, Arye Dulzin, demanded that American Jews stop helping the dropouts. When he claimed to be speaking in the name of Soviet Jews, not just Israel, American Jewish activists waved around our letter, abruptly ending the debate.
The telephone calls and tourists’ messages from Israel reprimanding us dissidents included some unofficial warnings: “After such disloyalty, don’t expect to get a place in the preferred absorption centers in Tel Aviv or the Jerusalem hills. We will send you to the edge of the universe, in the newly started development town of Arad.”
So, before being threatened with exile in Siberia, I was threatened with exile to the Negev.
The tensions over dropouts continued until the early 1990s, when the decaying Soviet Union permitted emigration to all countries and direct flights to Israel. But in 1986, when I arrived in Israel, the fight was at its height. As I prepared for my first visit to America to thank many of our freedom-fighting allies, including President Ronald Reagan and the congressional leadership, Israeli officials and Jewish activists briefed me. We were all wondering how to keep building the movement’s momentum.
I received two off-the-record requests. Prime Minister Shimon Peres asked me to cool my critiques of Soviet authorities; irritating them too much might endanger future emigration. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir requested that I ask America’s leaders to stop granting refugee status to Soviet Jewish dropouts. I was a new immigrant, appreciative of everything Israel had done for me. I felt particularly grateful for Peres’s and Shamir’s efforts. But I refused both requests.
Moshe Arens, the cabinet minister responsible for Soviet Jewry, also approached me. “I get it,” he said. “I understand your position respects free choice. I made aliyah from America. I, too, cherish human rights. But, remember,” he added, “we are responsible for the Jewish people’s future. Watch what’s already happening. Those who go to America assimilate quickly. They will disappear as Jews. You fought so hard for Soviet Jews to join the Jewish people. Don’t you feel some responsibility to help keep them Jewish?”
Arens’s words were particularly convincing and sobering. This threat was real. In the future, I would watch survey after survey show how the number of Jews in America abandoning Judaism galloped ahead. Increasingly, the children of Jews who had left the Soviet Union led the way.
Why? The defining American Jewish institutions didn’t speak to them. Soviet Jewish identity was wired differently and took other forms. Synagogues were too religious for these mostly nonreligious, proudly nationalist Jews. American Jewry’s many fundraising organizations were too giving oriented for the Soviet Jews, who arrived with nothing from an economy of privation dependent on state, not private, funding. While the American Jewish community helped them most generously, few of the arriving Soviet Jews joined any existing organizations.
Even today, when I address audiences in the big Russian Jewish émigré communities in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Chicago, young people often ask me if it is true that Israel didn’t want their parents coming to America. I describe the dropout battle and quote Arens. I then say, “So, it’s your obligation, and mine, to prove him wrong. You Jews are going to build a Jewish future.”
I still believe there are no shortcuts when ingathering exiles. You cannot separate Zionism from freedom of choice. Jews will only move to Israel, let alone stay there, if they want to, not because they’re forced.
But I wonder, could we have done better? Couldn’t the leaders in Israel and the rest of the Jewish world have conferred, thinking one step ahead? While helping the immigrants resettle, couldn’t they have created programs to help the newcomers integrate into their new Jewish worlds, on their terms? We might have developed a Birthright or some other game-changing innovation thirty years earlier.
Unfortunately, the charged atmosphere around the dropout issue made it impossible to have the constructive dialogue we needed. Israelis would have had to accept reality, debating how to help the Soviet Jews, not stop them. American Jews would have had to accept that their US-born ways of “doing Jewish” were not universal and didn’t suit these immigrants. The Jewish organizations would have had to understand that their responsibilities didn’t stop with delivering subsidies and job-seeking advice. They should have developed identity-building programs tailored to this new phenomenon of Russian American Jewry.
Instead, Israelis were too busy mourning the émigrés as bad Jews, and Americans were too busy welcoming them as good Americans. It took decades before a constructive dialogue about new kinds of Russian Jewish identities began.
In 2015, when French Jews felt menaced by terrorism and anti-Semitism, I spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the factors discouraging them from making aliyah. As head of the Jewish Agency, I mentioned the high apartment prices, the nonrecognition of French diplomas, and other issues facing them in Israel. Many, therefore, were choosing other destinations, including Canada and Australia.
“We have great relationships these days with the Canadians and Australians,” Netanyahu said. “We can ask each government not to let the Jews in—and tell them to try Israel first.”
Clearly, neither the Canadians nor Australians would restrict French citizens’ freedom of choice. Moreover, I was disappointed that this proprietary attitude persisted. Bibi was not some heavy-handed socialist Ben-Gurionite, but one of the most sophisticated westernized Zionists, who had lived in America for years. Yet he, too, like most Likud liberals I knew, was deeply committed to democratic individualism but still believed that if Israel belongs to the Jews, the Jews, in many ways, belong to Israel.
Although relations with the Israelis turned testy at times, the dropout battles didn’t cloud our day-to-day cooperation. My relations with our Israeli “bosses” only became strained when I linked the Jewish struggle for free emigration with the democratic dissidents’ broader struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union.
Among Soviet Jewish activists, my connection with democratic dissidents made me a maverick. To Israelis, it made me suspect. It’s too easy to oversimplify this fight in retrospect. It wasn’t a conflict between the white-hat, altruistic crusaders for civil rights versus the black-hat, selfish Jewish nationalists. It wasn’t a struggle between naive democratic dreamers and hard-nosed Zionist realists. Instead, it was the sort of tactical debate every movement faces about focus, alliances, and mission creep. In our case, it played out against a long-standing Jewish debate about how best to save ourselves, while also trying to save the world.
Most Soviet Jewish activists sympathized with the democratic dissidents. We all despised Soviet totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. We cheered anyone who defied these modern-day pharaohs. Many of us revered Andrei Sakharov, whether we knew him or not. He showed us all, Jews and non-Jews, how to stand for what we believed in, even if it meant sacrificing a position at the top of the Soviet pyramid.
Nevertheless, most Jewish activists believed that our movement should keep its distance from the dissidents. Many reasoned that, having announced that we wanted to leave the Soviet Union, it would be dishonest to tell the Russians how to live.
For many activists, the distance from dissidents and the Soviet Union’s problems often went hand in hand with the Jewish awakening. Zionism created a new stage in Jewish history. Finally, we were working for ourselves. We were solving our problems in our homeland, or struggling to get there. “Let’s not distract ourselves with other causes that might muddy the focus on building our nation,” many Zionists warned.
The Jewish activists in the USSR felt this keenly, because so many Jews over the centuries had been so involved in so many nationalist and cosmopolitan causes. We were czarists and Ukrainian nationalists. We were Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. We were Leninists, Trotskyites, and Stalinists. In the end, what did it accomplish? Nothing, or worse.
Since the rise of modernity, these causes often served as escape hatches for Jews from Judaism and the Jewish people. When trouble erupted, the prominence of so many Jews in these movements often backfired. Rather than earning any goodwill, the Jews were often blamed, intensifying the anti-Semitism. Jews were overrepresented among revolutionaries and among victims of revolution. Jews led many KGB departments during the bloodiest years of Stalin’s purges, and Jews led the long list of the many victims.
Israelis shared this historic wariness. They saw how many idealistic Jews invoked their favorite universal causes to justify abandoning the Jewish people. For Israelis, recent history—the anguish of the Holocaust and the emergence of Israel—dictated the agenda. The Jewish people shouldn’t deviate from the most pressing priorities: building the state and ingathering exiles.
More practically, the leaders of Israel’s Liaison Office feared that the KGB viewed the human rights cause as threatening the entire Soviet enterprise. As shadowy government operatives themselves, they believed they had an informal understanding with the KGB. Zionists should focus on rescuing Jews while distancing themselves from subversive activities. The Russians might then tolerate occasional spurts of emigration from this small marginal minority, especially if pressured by the West. Allying with the democratic dissidents, however, would be declaring war against the entire Soviet system.
I believed the Israelis were being naive. There was no playing nice with the KGB, especially on emigration. Letting Soviet citizens feel they had the freedom to choose anything, let alone where to live, was too threatening to the stability of the regime. The Communist system was too rigid for such autonomy: it had to control the lives of millions of doublethinkers.
Besides, we activists didn’t want a few thousand Jews out today and a few thousand more out tomorrow. We wanted a mass exodus of Jewish people from the land of oppression. We wanted to rip a hole in the Iron Curtain and free millions.
Having said we want to leave, I agreed it didn’t make sense for us Refuseniks to fight for a different way of life in the Soviet Union. But I befriended dissidents for a different reason. Dissidents became a part of my life as a free person as soon as I abandoned the world of doublethink.
I gained the strength to be a free person by discovering my people. Essential to this new freedom was speaking my mind. The new person I was becoming would no longer simply be inspired by the moral example of Andrei Sakharov’s essay or the Prague Spring supporters’ Red Square protests. I would speak on their behalf.
For me, it was a gradual process. As you free yourself from doublethink, you fight for your own freedom. Eventually, naturally, you sympathize with others, you say what you feel, you start fighting for their rights, because you are no longer afraid to say what you think.
Beyond your own individual liberation, you understand that you now belong to the free world. You want it to be strong. The more people who join you in freedom, fleeing the world of doublethink, the more you all strengthen your new world, this free world.
Still, I never expected that supporting the dissidents would risk getting me excommunicated from my national struggle, which had freed me in the first place.
I also made a more tactical calculation. I saw how important supporters like Sakharov were for us. No one else attracted as many cameras and journalists as he did, and his activism would earn him the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. After I became close to Sakharov, American Jewish leaders frequently asked me for Sakharov’s signature on this, his involvement with that. As so often happens, the right thing to do was also the shrewd thing to do.
In 1975, I started volunteering to help Sakharov in his relations with foreign correspondents and other important visitors. He and his wife, Yelena Bonner, appreciated my fluency in English and my comfort with journalists. Having worked as the spokesman for our movement, I had learned how to translate our message. Journalists had particular ways that worked for them, and their editors, when reporting stories.
Over the years, I have met many supposedly great people. They often shrink in your estimation when you see them up close. Sakharov was the opposite. My admiration for him only grew. His humility, his sincerity, and his generosity made him even greater in private than he appeared in public.
Another Refusenik, Vitaly Rubin, was also close to the dissidents. Thanks to him, I met other legendary figures. They included Yuri Orlov, a physicist who would also serve nine years in prison; Andrei Amalrik, the brave writer who published an essay in 1970 asking the unthinkable, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?; Alexander Ginzburg, the poet who helped Alexander Solzhenitsyn distribute the royalty revenues from The Gulag Archipelago and some of Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize funds to political prisoners; and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a prominent Russian historian who was expelled from the Communist Party back in 1968 and fought for Russian human rights into her nineties, until the day she died, December 8, 2018.
Initially, our Israeli partners tolerated my connection with the dissidents as my little hobby. Occasionally, some Israelis warned me not to go too far with this distraction. Then came Helsinki.
When the Soviet Union and thirty-four other nations signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, Soviet officials celebrated it as a victory. Many dissidents mourned it as a loss. Since it first seized control of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states after World War II, the Soviet Union had sought to legitimize its newly expanded borders. The “first basket” of the accords, formally called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, delivered that international approval. The Soviet Union also wanted greater economic cooperation with the West. The “second basket” promised that payoff. In return, the Soviets had to accept the “third basket,” which included promises to respect basic human rights, facilitate family reunification, and allow cultural exchanges. But all the liberal, democratic commitments were nonbinding. Soviet officials were masterful at paying lip service to these rights, at the United Nations and elsewhere. By 1975, the West had a long record of stomaching Soviet lies.
Dissidents feared the Soviet Union would fool the West yet again. Yuri Orlov, Andrei Amalrik, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and I had many heated debates, wondering how we could hold the Soviet Union to these new commitments. I proposed that we write letters inviting Western politicians, media organizations, and human rights organizations into a dialogue about how to fulfill the “spirit of Helsinki.” By showcasing how various countries honored the agreements, I hoped to create a public atmosphere that would discourage the Soviets from trampling our rights.
Orlov feared that letters would just be more chatter. Cleverly and courageously, he proposed establishing a monitoring group. He figured that such an ongoing body would trigger the kind of Soviet backlash against us that would force the West to notice the constant Soviet violations of this freshly signed agreement.
Led by Orlov, eleven of us established the Public Group for Monitoring the Fulfillment of the Humanitarian Articles of the Helsinki Final Act by the Soviet Union, dedicated to updating the West about Soviet compliance. It would become famous as the Helsinki Monitoring Group or the Moscow Helsinki Group. Vitaly Rubin and I were the two Jewish activists involved. When the Soviets rushed Vitaly’s emigration along and he left for Israel, Vladimir Slepak replaced him. I also became this group’s unofficial spokesman, responsible for sharing the reports we produced and the evidence we found with Western journalists and politicians.
Being in this group introduced me to the struggle of different groups throughout the Soviet Union. Suddenly, I found myself speaking on behalf of Tatars exiled from Crimea, Pentecostalists persecuted for teaching their religion to their children, Lithuanian priests, Armenian nationalists, and so many others. From my vantage point, it was clear that all these struggles were interconnected. Ultimately, each of their successes contributed to our mutual aim of tearing a bigger and bigger hole in the Iron Curtain separating Soviet totalitarianism from the free world.
Within ten months, each of the founding monitors would be arrested or exiled. By then, we had changed the conversation about Helsinki and human rights. Our group published more than twenty documents. The reports detailed the Soviet empire’s constant assaults on human rights. We highlighted the oppression of dissidents, the suppression of Jewish emigration, the suffering of political prisoners, and the persecution of Catholic priests in Lithuania, Pentecostalists in Siberia, Crimean Tatars in Kazakhstan, and many other targeted groups.
Public groups dedicated to monitoring the Helsinki agreements started popping up in many countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. On Capitol Hill, Congress established the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, originally involving eight members of the House of Representatives and eight senators, along with three administration representatives. This unique bipartisan initiative scrutinized our documents, amplifying the voices of the victims of Communist cruelty.
Soviet violations of Helsinki’s nonbinding third basket clouded every future negotiation between the USSR and the West. This ongoing scrutiny put the Soviet Union under unprecedented, and unanticipated, pressure. Demands that it respect these commitments hounded the regime until it collapsed a decade and a half later.
It turned out that, in 1975, the Soviet Union had signed its own death warrant.
But in 1976, the situation looked different. I was sure that I was doing exactly what needed to be done, not only for the broader struggle for human rights but to advance our Jewish agenda. This growing coalition of freedom forces could only benefit the cause of Jewish emigration.
Israel’s Liaison Office disagreed. Zionist activities and anti-Soviet initiatives seemed to be overlapping for the first time. Leading Zionists and dissidents were both signing anti-Soviet documents, and the Israelis genuinely feared the Soviet reaction. “How can we say to our Russian counterparts that we don’t interfere in your internal affairs?” they snapped. They concluded that the danger to the Zionist movement was so great that they had to cut me off.
When the KGB started targeting the members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, one of the leaders of the Liaison Office invited Avital for a frank, off-the-record conversation.
“Your husband has crossed all the red lines,” he said. “He’s become a dissident. He is no longer part of our Zionist movement and his behavior endangers it. Soon he will be arrested. And we, the state of Israel, won’t defend him.”
He then offered some fatherly advice for Avital: “Forget about him. He’s ruining his life and will eventually ruin yours too. You’re still young. We will help you start a new life.”
This conversation triggered two urgent telephone calls between me and Avital. Our discussions were strained. We knew the KGB was taping every word. She could not tell me with whom she had spoken and what she was told exactly. And I couldn’t tell her what my next steps would be. Still, Avital conveyed the message the Israelis wanted me to hear: “You have gone too far. Your involvement with the Moscow Helsinki Group and the dissident movement is dangerous for you and for our Refusenik cause. Stop.”
Many tourists had delivered similar warnings numerous times before. But this time, I couldn’t ignore the message, because the messenger was Avital. Is she simply passing the message on, or does she believe it? I kept asking myself. If she did, we had a problem.
Luckily, I got the clarification I needed very quickly. Somehow, Avital arranged another call to Moscow the next day. And somehow, she conveyed the message about where to be when her call came through. That second call was simple. “Forget yesterday. It was a moment of weakness. I believe in what you are doing,” she said. “I am with you.”
Shortly thereafter, on March 4, 1977, a full-page article in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia appeared. It accused me and other leading Jewish activists of spying for the United States. As usual, it was a lie. But this time, the authorities were raising the bar, from anti-Soviet activities to high treason, which is punishable by death.
Immediately, eight KGB men surrounded me. Their walking cage encased me wherever I went. The message was clear: “There’s nowhere to go, and arrest is imminent.”
Avital knew it was senseless to ask Israel’s Liaison Office for help. Instead, she turned to her close friends and spiritual mentors, Rabbi Tzvi Tau and Hannah Tau. Since moving to Israel, Avital had discovered the world of Judaism in their home. With their teaching and coaching, she became a devout Jew.
Although it was late at night, Rabbi Tau rushed Avital and her brother Misha to his teacher, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook. The son of Palestine’s legendary chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, the younger Rabbi Kook was already eighty-five years old, and ailing. When they translated the Izvestia article and he heard the accusations of espionage being bandied about, Rabbi Kook immediately understood the threat. Despite the late hour, he called disciples to his house. “Again, the Soviet Jews are in big danger,” he explained. “If one Jew is accused of espionage, every Jew is endangered. Remember. We are our brothers’ keepers. Now is the time to close the books and fight.”
The next day, Rabbi Kook’s followers established what became the headquarters of a global solidarity network, called I Am My Brother’s Keeper. Hundreds of Rabbi Kook’s students started organizing, lecturing, and writing to promote solidarity with the endangered Soviet Jews. Thanks to them and to hundreds of thousands of people, both religious and nonreligious, all over the world, Avital was never alone in her travels. She was always accompanied by some of Rabbi Kook’s followers, who often mobilized local support wherever she campaigned, during the nine years I was in prison.
Long before our world went digital, there was a Jewish Internet. All the different subnetworks of the Jewish world used all kinds of “routers” to get Avital the phone numbers, influential contacts, strategic advice, financial assistance, hospitality, and moral support she needed. In the years to come, this worldwide web of relationships would help her reach nearly every important leader in the free world.
Even after my arrest, Israel’s Liaison Office didn’t stop its attempts to “save the purity of the Zionist movement.” One leader of the Brother’s Keeper organization, Rabbi Oded Wolanski, was broadly respected for the sophisticated religious lessons he taught in all kinds of venues, from yeshivas to the army.
Rabbi Wolanski was summoned to meet with the number-two man in the Liaison Office at one of the off-the-beaten-path places the administrators, with their spy training, liked. “Sharansky is not Zionist,” the grizzled government representative told the young rabbi. “You should stop working on his behalf. It is dangerous for our movement.” Rabbi Wolanski disagreed. He said he knew this Sharansky quite well through Avital. Moreover, many students were reading his letters, to learn about Zionism in action.
The conversation turned ugly. “You think you are the state,” the officer said. “We are the state. You think you know whom you are defending. You know nothing. What you are doing now is endangering Soviet Jews. You better stop. Immediately. Or anachnu nashmeed etchem” (we will destroy you).
During this time, the Liaison Office sent letters to Israeli diplomats and leaders of Establishment Jewish organizations in key cities, advising them to abstain from supporting Avital. The letters had a “we know something you don’t know” tone and emphasized that no one quite knew why the KGB had arrested her husband.
The Liaison Office also stepped in as two young lawyers, rising stars in the international human rights world, started building a case to defend me. Both Irwin Cotler, at McGill University, and Alan Dershowitz, at Harvard University, received direct messages to stay away from me. They didn’t.
It quickly became obvious that Israel was much bigger than a few bureaucrats. No government body could limit Jewish solidarity, not in the Jewish state and not in any other Jewish community around the world.
The protests against my arrest gained strength, day by day, month by month. Inevitably, the Liaison Office had to join the struggle. Once involved, the Israeli government proved essential during every stage of the effort that eventually freed me.
I first met Nehemiah Levanon when we appeared together at a conference in New York on the Soviet Jewish struggle, two years after my release. Levanon had retired in 1982, after working at the Liaison Office for three decades and heading it for twelve years.
Levanon was a true Zionist pioneer. For all his heroics, he had retired to the kibbutz he helped found in 1943, Kfar Blum. He did chores there like everyone else, working in the cultural center and at the communal dining room.
After we spoke, I invited him to breakfast the next morning. He was friendly but reserved. I asked him, “Yesterday, it was clear to the audience that we are comrades in arms in the same war on the same side, fighting on different fronts. So I wonder. Back in the first, most difficult days after my arrest, the KGB was debating whether to make a case against our entire Zionist movement. It was obvious that their decision depended on the world’s reaction. When all kinds of people, including President Jimmy Carter, mocked the espionage charges against me as an obvious lie, why did you send letters to Jewish organizations discouraging them from working with Avital and hinting I might be a spy?”
Levanon was taken aback. After thinking for a long, awkward moment, he answered carefully. “I didn’t send the letters. It was Tzvi Netzer,” Levanon’s number-two man, who was no longer alive. Netzer was famous for his brusque, take-no-prisoners approach. “But we never suspected you personally,” Levanon added. “We feared some of the journalists and diplomats around you might be CIA agents. We also worried about Avital’s brother, Misha. His English was too perfect. Only Russians who graduated from the KGB spy school spoke English so well.”
Indeed, Misha spoke the Queen’s English. Whatever Avital’s brother did, he mastered it: archaeology, history, military service, establishing a network of activists for our struggle, or learning languages. At the time, my extraordinary brother-in-law was enjoying a successful army career and would soon be Israel’s first military attaché to Moscow. In 1996, after a day of escorting Russian generals around the Golan Heights, he would die of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.
During our breakfast, Levanon offered up lame excuses. It was obvious that, if history repeated itself, he would do it again. He believed that keeping the line of separation between the Jewish emigration movement and the dissident movement was in Israel’s best interests. If that meant sacrificing any pawns from the Jewish side, then so be it.
Nevertheless, by 1988, it was the big picture that counted. The Soviet empire was collapsing. All the prisoners of Zion were being released. Many Refuseniks were finally free, some after decades of waiting. The smell of victory was in the air, and Levanon and I both had reason to celebrate our mutual victory.