They suffered in silence for decades. Deprived of the right to work, to gather, to pray and to speak, they tiptoed their way through life like soldiers in a minefield.
Their government demonized them as “enemies of the people” in the press and in schoolrooms. Always conscious of the fact that at any moment they could lose their jobs, their families, their freedom, and their lives, they burrowed those lives behind thick walls of secrecy.
These are not the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. These are victims of the Soviet Union, and the walls behind which they hid formed the Iron Curtain, the 20th Century’s longest humanitarian crisis. To the world they became known as the Prisoners of Zion.
Tuesday night in Jerusalem several former Prisoners of Zion declared at a conference: “We demand compensation for our suffering.”
(Photo: Alexandr Barshay)
Just as the Jews of Europe have received reparations for the horrors they endured in the Holocaust, so should the tens of thousands of Jews whose lives were destroyed by the Soviet government—so claims Yosef Mendelevitch, a speaker at the conference and a dissident well-known throughout the Russian community. Now a respected Rabbi at Jerusalem's Machon Meir yeshiva, Mendelevitch was part of a group of fifteen Soviet Jews who captured global headlines in 1970 by attempting to steal a small Soviet airplane in a desperate act to leave for Israel. The plane never left the ground, but the group succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of Soviet Jews, and for the next twenty years Jewish leaders in the West, including the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, battled for a tragically basic right: the right of Jews to leave the Soviet Union.
For westerners, it is hard to imagine wanting—much less needing—to take such great risks to leave one's country. However, for all but a lucky few in the Soviet Union, leaving was not an option no matter how unbearable life became. The Soviet government required official permission in order to emigrate, and then almost invariably denied the request on the following grounds: If a person likes his life in the Soviet Union, he should not want to leave. If he wants to leave, it means he is a “dissident”, a critic of the Soviet regime who could endanger the reputation of the government if allowed to go abroad. Such an Orwellian feat of logic became only part of an absurd institution, a country-turned-prison of 200 million inmates.
As Mendelevitch's group of would-be hijackers languished in Siberian prisons, other protesters, including Natan Sharansky, later to become a minister in the Israeli government, joined them in jail. Meanwhile, throughout the 1970’s thousands of Jewish families began to suffer once again as the USSR reverted to Stalin-era tactics of intimidation and oppression. The Jewish community began to cope again with that most familiar companion of Jews living in foreign lands—fear.
Alexander Razgon, another activist and speaker at the Tuesday conference, described the condition of the Jews at the time. “Children knew that they had to defend their lives. For the adults, it was like a pogrom—every moment of their lives they faced death.” Razgon related the typical story of a Jewish man, the son of a couple who requested permission to make Aliyah when he was six years old. He grew up as the inevitable target of hate in a school system that taught anti-Zionist propaganda as part of their curriculum. He married, raised a family of his own, and lived his whole life within the context of being a “Zionist”, a walking, talking dirty word, an involuntary activist branded for life because he refused to publicly denounce his parents for their “anti-Soviet” orientation.
Rabbi Mendelevitch noted that in that period, while emigration was the main theme of the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, Jews still trapped in the USSR had to deal with hardships ranging from revoked work permits and university degrees to surveillance, harassment and imprisonment. A new term, “refusenik”, soon became a household term to describe a whole demographic of everyday citizens who were refused permission to leave the Soviet Union. Although most refuseniks were not Prisoners of Zion, they enjoyed little more freedom than those incarcerated. The Soviet government mass-marketed paranoia as it tried to extirpate “Zionist” elements from its midst. Some Jews, unlike the man in Ragzon’s story, did denounce Zionism and the government often succeeded in coercing Jews to expose individual “Zionists”. Razgon told the audience about another man from a town in the Ukraine who was tormented to the point where he jumped from a window to his death.
As Jewish doctoral students fought for the right to defend their dissertations, a struggle for exit permits quickly became the first and only civil rights campaign ever mounted in Soviet Russia. Jews, in their desperation, lost their fear and dared to organize and demand “outrageous” perquisites—the right to “national self-identification and access to and distribution of information” , according to Razgon. Mendelevitch, in a post-conference interview, added that Jews also began to agitate for the right for Jews to live as Jews. “They wanted to study a little Hebrew, and yes, to build Jewish schools and synagogues.”
By 1987, with the Soviet empire crumbling, most political prisoners were released and “rehabilitated” (a term usually reserved in democratic societies for serious felons and mental patients) into society.
Today Jews are free to leave Russia and the former Soviet republic, but for some it has been a costly victory. Many refuseniks died before they saw freedom. Many children managed to leave the USSR after years, and sometimes decades, of waiting, never to see their parents alive again.
For generations, words like “freedom” and “rights” appeared more in underground Soviet humor than in Soviet civilian consciousness. Mendelevitch claims that “the very concept of human rights that could be violated was not understood” before Jewish activists began risking their lives for these rights. He argued that thanks to the heroism of Jewish dissidents, the 300,000 Jews that left for America proved to be the first crack in the Iron Curtain. “Through letters and packages” from Soviet Jews in the U.S. to their relatives trapped in the USSR, Soviets were given their first unadulterated glimpses of life in the West. “Every Russian citizen began to understand that if he ‘acts like the Jews’ he could also end up in America.”
When asked what role the Prisoners of Zion played in helping bring about the fall of the Soviet system worldwide, Razgon replied with a touch of irony that perhaps the Soviet government was not so far off the mark after all in its anti-Zionist fear-mongering. While the “Zionists” agenda was to leave the Soviet Union and not destroy it, that is precisely what their freedom movement contributed towards. By forcing the Soviet government to confront the reality of a mass exodus which brought international disgrace to the Soviet regime, a small group of unarmed Jews, says Mendelevitch, managed to achieve what the American superpower couldn’t: the toppling of the Soviet monopoly of evil.
In fact, Rabbi Mendelevitch charges that “all nations owe a debt [to the prisoners of Zion] that they do not appreciate and do not acknowledge” to the extent that they should. “As a former Prisoner of Zion, after my release I was invited to speak in countries around the world, in South Africa,…in Argentina” and other nations that have recently recovered from abusive regimes.
However, according to the speakers at the Jerusalem conference, two countries notably stand out in their refusal to recognize the suffering of the refuseniks and the Prisoners of Zion: Russia and Israel.
A third speaker at the conference, David Maayan, is also a former Prisoner of Zion who works on behalf of the group to receive recognition and compensation from the Israeli government. However, he notes that “within Israel and beyond, we cannot boast too much about our accomplishments. Unfortunately, in Israel it is impossible to do anything tangible on this issue. So far, the measures taken by the Knesset are not enough…. We requested to be treated differently from war veterans.”
In 1989, Maayan co-authored an open letter with colleague Yosef Mitchener to Soviet President Michael Gorbachev, published in the Russian newspaper Most, demanding official recognition of this issue. Nearing 80 years of age, his hands shook slightly at the conference as he read aloud from a 1987 declaration published by the Soviet government. “During the years of Soviet power, millions of people became victims of repression for their political and national beliefs…. The Russian federation expresses condolences to them and their families…. The goal is to rehabilitate all victims of political repression, starting from the 7th of November, 1917…a reinstatement of their full benefits and rights as citizens and due compensation for their suffering”, reads the document.
In 1991, based on this declaration, the Prisoners of Zion sent a letter to Russian President Yeltsin requesting this “due compensation.” They received no reply from the President, and after repeating their request to the Public Procurator and to the Duma (parliament), the government replied that their request is “being investigated.”
Although Mendelevitch admits that there was a time when the Russian government paid reparations to rehabilitated citizens, the government later refused to pay reparations to those who left for Israel on the basis that they are no longer citizens of Russia. Since then, the Russian government has ceased reparations payments altogether.
The Prisoners of Zion hope that the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, will be more sympathetic. “We have a new leader, a young leader, and the real possibility of being heard”, said Mendelevitch. “Putin, as former head of the KGB, would not be in a position to cooperate with us, and he may very well have played a leading role in the persecutions.” To that end, the group has written a petition, to be signed Wednesday at an international symposium of Russian-speaking Jews in Jerusalem.
However, as Mendelevitch points out, there are still many former Soviet officials who live in fear of being “discovered”, much as Nazis after WWII. He cited this repeatedly as another reason why the Russian government has been reluctant to live up to its promises, particularly as many former officials currently hold positions of power in the new government and in industries throughout the country.
Said Rabbi Mendelevitch: “As in Germany, there is a great moral responsibility that the Russian government bears for the suffering and death that it brought upon its Jewish residents. Germans are responsible for the crimes of their fathers and forefathers, and so are the Russians…. We demand that the Russian government recognize the suffering their predecessors inflicted on us.” Specifically, the group demands that the government establish a full-time commission of inquiry, along with staffers who will work full-time to establish guidelines and process reparations. “Let us sit in the Kremlin. We will bring experts to prove that it's not propaganda, that it's a basic right”, declared Mendelevitch.
While almost twenty years have passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, the world has yet to fully understand the monumental contribution of these Jewish dissidents to mankind. The Prisoners of Zion hope that these reparations will fulfill a moral imperative if not a financial one.
When asked about the ultimate goal of their efforts, Mendelevitch replied that“[t]his is about the fate of the Jewish people and the international Jewish community and the fate of tens of thousands of people who were broken by their government …. Their names remain and their bravery remains and the memory of their struggle for the rights of Jews and for the rights of citizens of all governments remains…. We don't have the option of allowing the former Soviet Union to forget this… We will not leave this matter alone.”