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The Essay: The utopian dream that turned into a nightmare for Soviet Jews

Many Soviet Jews initially thought they were building a new Israel, but were soon to be disillusioned

December 29, 2022 14:38
Stalin GettyImages-52015542
UNKNOWN, ISRAEL - JANUARY 1: An undated file photo of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. (Photo credit should read STF/AFP via Getty Images)
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One hundred years ago, on 30 December, 1922, four republics, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia, agreed to form a union of states — the Soviet Union. This was to be “a decisive step on the path of unification into a World Socialist Soviet Republic”.

The same year also saw the first trials of Zionists in the USSR. Two years later mass arrests and the eventual exile of thousands of Zionists to the Gulag took place while another 21,000 were eventually allowed to leave. By 1927, the emigration had been reduced to a trickle of a few hundred.

The Hebrew language continued to be taught clandestinely and Hebrew poets such as Elisha Rodin and Haim Lensky wrote privately without hope of publication.

In 1934, the remaining members of the central committee of Zeirei Zion — perhaps the last Zionist group in the USSR — were arrested in Moscow.

Much of this oppression floated over the heads of Jewish organisations in the UK as their immediate concern was Nazism in Germany and their imitators in the UK.

For many Jews in the USSR after the October Revolution, “the dawn of humanity” had arrived and they joined the Communist Party in droves with the intention of building a new Israel in Moscow. The words of the revolutionary anthem, The Internationale, were, for them, more than lyrics:

“Those who were nothing will become something ... no one will grant us our salvation. No god, no tsar, no hero.”

The Jewish sections of the Communist Party, until they were liquidated, sought to impose a different Jewish reality to rival the traditions of millennia.

Shabbat challot were presented in the shape of a hammer and sickle while Passover was commemorated in a Bolshevik retelling of the October Revolution as the true meaning of liberation from Egyptian slavery. Jewish children were named after Soviet leaders. One eminent scientist who eventually reached Israel revealed that his name was not Mikhail, but that his parents had named him Melic — Marx, Engels, Lenin, International Communism.

In September 1939, Poland was devoured by both Hitler and Stalin. A year later the surrounding Baltic states were occupied by first the Red Army, then later the Wehrmacht.

Many Jews escaped the genocide by fleeing deep into the interior of the Soviet Union. Here they unexpectedly became the teachers of a hitherto assimilated generation of Soviet Jews. On returning after the war, they constituted a nucleus for an expanding emigration movement.

In parallel but outside the borders of the USSR, Mossad le-Aliyah Bet was established in April 1939 on the eve of war to bring Jews from Eastern Europe to the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine. It was headed by Shaul Avigur, originally from Latvia and a founder of the pre-state intelligence services in 1934. This was a fundamental landmark in the genesis of the diaspora campaign for Soviet Jewry.

Avigur was a puritan in all respects, dedicated solely to his work and defined by secrecy and frugality: someone who disdained small talk and social events — a man who lived in the shadows.

In the aftermath of the Shoah, Mossad le-Aliyah Bet resumed its work and brought survivors illegally to the Yishuv. On the one hand, this movement of Jews to the Land of Israel — the Brichah (escape) — was spontaneous and unorganised; on the other, Avigur was pressing all the levers while maintaining a cohort of emissaries in Eastern Europe.

By the late 1940s, the heavy hand of Stalinism had effectively eliminated all this work and Brichah activists were among the first to be eliminated. Nadia Nemirovskaya, her husband and son were arrested in 1950 — all three died in the Gulag.

Other Soviet Jews such as Baruch Weissman kept a secret Hebrew language diary in which he noted Jewish reaction to the events of the time.

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