When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (9 page)

But the real prize was New York, the great intellectual and Jewish center of the world in the 1950s. By 1958, the Lishka had a man named Moshe Decter on the payroll there. Decter was on the periphery of the group known as the New York intellectuals, the young Jews, sons of immigrants, who were revolutionizing political writing and literary criticism through journals like
Partisan Review
and
Commentary.
They were all leftists who were sobered by the knowledge of Stalin's crimes and were trying to forge a new anti-Soviet liberal philosophy for America. Decter had grown up as the son of an Orthodox rabbi in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in the late thirties he began studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the premier training ground for Conservative Judaism. The war cut his schooling short, and he served as an infantryman in North Africa and Italy. Wounded in fighting north of Bologna in the middle of 1945, he was shipped back to America, where he finished his seminary studies and began doctoral work for a degree in social studies at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. The school had become a sanctuary for dozens of European intellectuals who had escaped the war. The refugee scholars, such as Hannah Arendt and Max Wertheimer, and the French thinkers, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, among many others, created a highly charged intellectual environment. Decter became involved with the Socialist Party and other leftist political movements. And by the mid-1950s, he was close to members of what would become known as the
Commentary
crowd, prominent theorists such as Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Clement Greenberg. In 1954, he even cowrote a book,
McCarthy and the Communists,
criticizing Joe McCarthy as an ineffective and misguided anti-Communist who had undermined his own cause. Around this time, Decter married Midge Rosenthal, a woman who had been a secretary at
Commentary
and was also ensconced in this world.

Decter was an aggressive, persistent, exacting man who could be impatient and prickly. His black horn-rimmed glasses often slipped to the edge of his nose as he took long drags from his cigarettes. He was committed to ideas and knew how to be ruthless in getting his point across. And nothing made him angrier than Communism and the Soviet Union. He saw himself as a liberal Cold Warrior or, as he put it at the time, a "New Deal anti-Communist." When Decter was recruited in 1958 by Benjamin Eliav, Avigur's right hand in running the Lishka and at that time Israel's consul general to New York, he was told that he would have to suppress his extreme anti-Soviet zeal. The Israelis would provide him with detailed information about Soviet Jewish life but he was warned not to make any of it sound like propaganda. "Make it specific with facts," Eliav told him. "Do not exaggerate, and no using any bombastic expressions."

Decter got to work. In order to avoid accusations that he was an Israeli agent, a roundabout source of funding was established. Decter was set up with an office at the World Jewish Congress, the international organization headquartered on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The WJC paid twenty-five thousand dollars to the American Jewish Congress, another staple of the Jewish world, and the AJC, in turn, paid Decter. He worked alone in a closet-size room with the sign
JEWISH MINORITIES RESEARCH
on the door. Nobody knew about Israel's role in the operation. Decter published pamphlets and articles about Soviet Jews that combined information gleaned mostly from agents in Russia and his own knowledge of the Soviet Union—how many synagogues had been shut down, what Jewish education was available, whether Hebrew was being taught, how many books in Yiddish had been published in the past year. But more important, he started drawing on his contacts in the liberal political universe to publicize the issue. Norman Thomas, the standard-bearer of the Socialist Party and its six-time presidential candidate, was a mentor of sorts to Decter. After Decter managed to grab Thomas's interest, a whole range of big names followed. By the end of the fifties, Decter had gotten the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Supreme Court justices William Douglas and Thurgood Marshall, and Eleanor Roosevelt to sign a letter to Khrushchev protesting the cultural and religious deprivation of Jews (Eleanor laughed at Decter when he approached her with the idea, correctly predicting that Khrushchev would never respond). Many letters followed in which Decter's hand could be detected by the caliber of the signatories, people such as Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller and Bayard Rustin, the bright lights of the New York intelligentsia—all of whom were unaware that Decter was working for the Israeli government.

By the early sixties, Decter was Israel's most prolific disseminator of information about Soviet Jews. He also used his day job, editor of the leftist magazine
New Leader,
to expose the problem. The cover of the September 14, 1959, issue had the words
Jews in the Soviet Union
over a bloody red map of the empire. The cautiousness of the Israelis can be detected in these pages. The plight of Soviet Jews "is not to be compared with their tragic destiny under the Nazis: Covert discrimination, even the most serious deprivation of guaranteed minority rights, is still a far cry from extermination." Even though Decter was in every way ideologically opposed to the existence of the Soviet Union, there was nothing anti-Communist about his argument. On the contrary, he simply pointed out that the treatment of Jews "clearly conflicts with both Soviet constitutional doctrine and the basic internationalist, egalitarian tenets of Marxism-Leninist ideology." Even though Jewish was a Soviet nationality, "the Soviet government deprives its Jewish citizens of the bulk of even the minimal cultural and spiritual privileges enjoyed by all other Soviet nationalities and religious groups. It provides Jews with neither the means for maintaining a full cultural life nor the opportunity to assimilate completely."

By late 1962, Decter had clearly articulated this paradox as the crux of the problem. For liberal American intellectuals concerned with their own government's inability to apply the nation's founding principles to its most excluded minority, this had a familiar ring. It was then that Decter published the article that Caron and Rosenblum saw in the scholarly journal
Foreign Affairs,
the premier venue for Cold War debates. This was the publication in which George Kennan, in 1947, first discussed the idea of containment. With great precision, Decter presented the case against the Soviet Union's treatment of Jews. He wrote as eloquently as he ever had about what restrictions on Jewish life meant, instantly providing in this well-exposed forum a language for speaking about the problem: "Soviet policy as a whole, then, amounts to spiritual strangulation—the deprivation of Soviet Jewry's natural right to know the Jewish past and to participate in the Jewish present. And without a past and a present, the future is precarious indeed."

In Cleveland, Rosenblum and his friend Herb Caron were electrified by the article. It felt to them like a challenge. They had read about the inaction of American Jews in the 1930s; faced with a similar crisis, would they respond the same way, or would they act differently? Emboldened by thoughts of Jabotinsky and shocked that no one was doing anything about this "spiritual strangulation," they approached the local Jewish federation, the body that effectively oversaw all Jewish affairs in the city. When Rosenblum and Caron learned that there was no program in place to educate the community, they pushed for one and got a meager concession: a subcommittee of the federation's governing body was assigned to deal with Soviet Jewry. It was something, and at least this way, thought Rosenblum, they could widen their reach and inform more than just their small enclave. So in the spring of 1963, Rosenblum and Caron and a handful of others from Beth Israel arrived at the subcommittee's first open meeting. Immediately it became apparent that this had been an empty gesture, a way of placating a noisy bunch of nobodies from the other side of Cleveland. By the close of the meeting, the representative appointed by the federation to handle the issue had declared that as far as he was concerned, Soviet Jews were doing just fine.

Dejected and feeling even more like Jabotinsky—unable to rouse a sleeping establishment—Rosenblum and Caron returned to their congregation determined to set out on their own. Soon, an opportunity arose. The only time Soviet Jews appeared in American newspapers in the early 1960s was around Passover. Up until the spring of 1962, Soviet-run bakeries had made matzo in their ovens and sold it in the government stores. Sometimes people baked the matzo in their own homes and sold it—though this was technically illegal, as it was a form of private enterprise. But just before Passover in 1962, the Soviet authorities announced that from 1917 to 1961, they had unknowingly been violating the Communist principle of total separation of church and state, and therefore the government's baking of matzo would cease. That month, the frail, white-bearded chief rabbi of Moscow, Yehuda Leib Levin, stood before his elderly flock at the city's faded central synagogue on Arkhipova Street and announced that given the government's edict, they would be exempt from the holiday's strict dietary laws. American Jewish religious organizations were shocked by this development and tried unsuccessfully to ship matzo to the USSR. The baking ban elicited a protest in front of the United Nations in New York by religious students from Yeshiva University. Even though the
New York Times
reminded readers of the forgotten fact that, being overwhelmingly nonreligious, "the majority of the Jews in the Soviet capital would not be aware of the presence or absence" of matzo, the paper still published at least a dozen stories about the issue that spring.

As Passover of 1963 approached, the media was again saturated with coverage, starting in mid-March with an Associated Press report that the Soviets had denied the chief rabbi's application to reinstate the baking. Other stories followed, about four men arrested and charged with profiteering for illegally selling matzo and about an Italian performance of
The Diary of Anne Frank
at Moscow's Maly Theater (an unusual event in itself, possible only because of Khrushchev's thaw) in which the audience, almost all Jews, wept openly. They were moved by the play, but as the
Times
reported, they were also distraught because it was Passover and the holiday had been "hampered by Soviet regulations forbidding State bakeries to produce the traditional matzohs."

Herb Caron came to the conclusion that the best way to change the matzo situation was to deprive the Soviets of something
they
wanted. The Cleveland Jewish community obviously didn't have this power. But when President Kennedy announced at a press conference on October 9, 1963, that he was going to permit the sale of $250 million worth of surplus American wheat and flour to the Soviet Union, Caron saw his chance. He would get all the clergy in Cleveland to sign a telegram to Kennedy asking that some of the wheat be earmarked for making matzo. The majority of the city's twenty rabbis quickly signed on, with two notable exceptions: the Zionist leader Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver and Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld (Lelyveld's bloodied face would be in the newspapers the following summer after he was attacked with a lead pipe for helping register black voters in Hattiesburg, Mississippi). Both prominent rabbis thought the Jewish community should avoid such brazen interference in Cold War politics. Undeterred, Caron sent out his telegram:

In selling wheat to the Russians, America's traditional concern for reducing human suffering would be made most clear by an official and urgent plea that the wheat not be used as an instrument of discrimination against a minority group. Specifically the Soviet government should make this wheat available as desired use as matzos which are essential for Jewish prayer observance ... we respectfully submit that American wheat should not become an instrument of the official Soviet policy of persecuting the Jewish minority group.

The telegram was ignored. But Rosenblum and Caron felt emboldened. They didn't need the slow-moving establishment. They would act independently. Moshe Decter in New York inspired their next move. That same October, only a few days after Kennedy's offer of wheat, Decter organized a daylong conference in New York at the Carnegie Cultural Center that drew on all the contacts he had amassed thus far. It was an unprecedented intellectual show of force for Soviet Jewry, and an indication, at least among the enlightened classes, that the issue was indeed gaining traction. James Pike, the idiosyncratic, liberal Episcopalian bishop of California, presided. In attendance were Martin Luther King Jr.; Robert Penn Warren; Walter Reuther, the union leader; and Decter's mentor Norman Thomas. The objective was to draft a statement demanding that the Soviet Union improve the condition of Jews. The process was not entirely smooth. According to the
New York Times,
"some participants held that the original statement was 'too strong,' others contended it was 'too moderate,' and still others that it was 'too long.'" The final list of demands was restrained but, nevertheless, the first of its kind. The signatories that day decided to call themselves the New York Council of 100, and the document was an "Appeal to Conscience," with the following seven demands:

1. To permit Jewish education in the Soviet Union in all its forms
   
2. To allow Jewish cultural institutions and Jewish artistic life
   
3. To remove obstacles to Jewish religious life
   
4. To allow religious and cultural bonds with Jewish communities of the world
   
5. To permit separated Jewish families to be reunited
   
6. To eliminate the anti-Jewish character of the official campaign against economic crimes
   
7. To undertake a vigorous educational campaign against anti-Semitism
   

Rosenblum and Caron answered this appeal by setting up an organization of their own. Though their motivation was Jewish, they wanted to mirror the universal, humanitarian tone of the New York Council of 100. Caron managed to convince the mayor of Cleveland to be the honorary chairman. Their board too was highly ecumenical, including the monsignor of the local Catholic parish and a prominent black city councilman. The rabbis were almost an afterthought. The name of the group was precisely chosen: since its only goal was to raise awareness about state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, it would be the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism (CCSA). The first grassroots Soviet Jewry organization was born via press release on October 17, 1963, just a few days after the New York conference.