Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich is a former Prisoner of Zion.
We had been sitting in prison already half a year after the attempted plane hijacking. The KGB interrogation had ended. We were already sick and tired of waiting for the trial. Let it be already, and we would know what our sentence would be. Death? Life imprisonment? We signed the announcement which we had received, according to which the trial would take place on November 15. A week before the trial they brought to the cell an additional announcement, that the trial had been postponed and would take place on 15 December. More waiting.
Finally, this date also arrived. They got us up at 5 a.m. Each prisoner was seated in a separate vehicle. Through a slit in the side of the prison-services vehicle I saw that we were traveling in a long convoy.
At the entrance to the court there stood dozens of soldiers and police. Were we not terrorists. We considered ourselves prisoners of war, soldiers in a great war, inspired by the victims slain in Romboli and other Jewish martyrs butchered on Russian soil. From them we had received the order to save the Jewish people.
The courtroom was noisy. 150 people had entered it, all of them by invitation. Select people. What could be more pleasurable than to see how Jewish blood was about to be shed? More interesting than to sit in a theater and watch a boring play.
There are three benches for the accused, exactly four on each bench. Each of us has been assigned a sergeant to ensure that we do not speak with one another. The Soviets had kept us isolated from each other during all the months of interrogation because they understood that if we were together we would strengthen one another, and their intention was only to weaken us.
Despite all the precautions, my friend Arie managed to whisper to me during one of the days of the trial, "Today is the first candle of Hanukkah." Suddenly, everything became clear to me. The postponement of the trial date had occurred because Hashem wanted us to be tried on a day on which he had wrought a miracle for his people, as it says, "You stood by them in their time of misfortune."
I knew that Hashem was sending me a blessing from Heaven. "Yosef, you have been numbered among the soldiers of the Maccabees." I was proud and fortified.
The judge asked me: "What actually caused you to want to escape to Israel?"
I answered him as befits a descendant of the Maccabees: "Did not Hashem give the Land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and I am one of their descendants. Therefore my place is there."
The judges were stunned by such chutzpa and called me "a religious fanatic."
However, this was not the main part of the miracle. The judge called each of the accused one by one, and each of us declared his wish to be in Israel. No one was afraid and none feared the punishment. Eight Jews stood in the courtroom like upright candles and declared their loyalty to the Jewish people.
For fifty years the Soviet authorities lied to the world and claimed that the Jews in their empire were loyal to the regime and were erasing themselves from the ranks of the Jewish People. It was difficult for World Jewry to accept this. Had not the Besht and the Gra, the Baal HaTanya and Rabbi Kook and all the rest emerged from this place? And suddenly darkness had descended upon thriving Jewish centers. Suddenly, yeshivot and shuls were all closed. How could this be? But slowly the Jews became accustomed to this, and saw it as fact that couldn’t be changed. They wept and regretted their fate. At first there remained a Judaism of Silence but that faded and vanished as well.
And then we rose up, and from inside the court we announced "Am Israel Chai!" We were not dead. The Torah has not died. The eternal flame of the Israelite Nation still kindled. We had come back to life from the dry bones of exile described by our prophets, and we were going to Eretz Israel. This was a true Pirsumei Nisa! The Jewish world was stunned by the miracle. The Jews of Silence had come back to life! And we, in the courtroom, each of us lit the Hanukkah light from our marrow and from our blood. The light from those candles lit up and aroused Jews all over the world rose with the cry: "Let my people go!"
In Israel and in America, in France and England, and everywhere, hundreds of thousands of Jews demonstrated opposite the embassies of the wicked Russians, and the evil ones retreated. The harsh sentences we received were lessened. Still, I was sentenced to eleven years.
A year after the trial they took us out from solitary confinement and moved us to a forced labor camp in Siberia. They placed each one of us in a separate cell compartment in the prison train. We were labeled "extremely dangerous security prisoners" - what an honor! When I finally sat down on the bench in my compartment, I opened a bag with letters sent to me during the year. I had not received any of them because of the decree of isolation. I read the first letter and couldn't believe my eyes.
It read: "Dear Yosef, I am writing to you from the Russian border. We have received Aliya visas. Hevra, it's thanks to you. Thank you!"
And another letter , and another. and finally a telegram from my sisters: "Oh, Yosef, Yosef, we have received exit visas."
It was a wonderful feeling of thanksgiving to Hashem for the loving-kindness He had shown us. Instead of being shot we had been granted to see the miracle of the exodus from Egypt in our time. Although we were being transported to the land of darkness, our brethren were leaving to Israel with pride.
[Excerpted from the book, "A Hero of Jewish Freedom." Translated by David Herman. Available at Amazon Books.]