Zionism has always had two facets since the end of the 19th century: Restoration and Resurrection on the one hand and Relief and Rescue on the other. The former was institutionalized in the First Zionist Assembly with Theodore Hertzl’s call for a Judenstadt while the latter was the American response led by Louis Brandeis. These two facets remained in tension throughout the 20th century. The case in point in Gal Beckerman’s striking read is the ‘struggle to save Soviet Jewry’, an epic adventure that lasted some thirty years and resulted in the migration of one and a half million Jews from the Soviet Union to Western democracies and Israel.
An unintended consequence of this struggle was a unique historical phenomenon, namely that the ‘evil empire’, as Ronald Reagen designated it, voted itself out of existence. This act of political and ideological suicide ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with a nuclear holocaust for a half century following the devastating war against the Nazi Reich. During the 1940s a third of the Jews, nearly all of whom lived in Europe were massacred by the Nazis and in the wake of the war most of the survivors made their way to the newly recognized State of Israel which was the culmination of Hertzl’s dream some fifty momentous years prior to 1948.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lasted from 1917 to 1991, an experiment that produced the most democratic constitution in history and the most repressive regime of all the totalitarian ideologies since the ravages of the papal Inquisition. The USSR fought a war of attrition against Jewish nationalism throughout its existence and bequeathed a legacy of hatred against Jews that manifests itself among Israel’s enemies and detractors to the present day.
Against this background Beckerman chronicles the awakening of the 3,000,000 Jews in the USSR to their national heritage and its repercussions on the State of Israel and the Jews in the United States. Beckerman’s task was to chronicle this awakening and so he only hints at the broader ramifications. His main sources were the refuseniks, those Jews who requested the right enshrined in the Soviet Constitution to move to Israel, and here is his major contribution. In a sound journalistic style he rehearses the untold stories of numerous refuseniks and their vicissitudes within the Soviet system. Most of them were sent to harsh labor camps east of the Urals in an attempt to break the movement if not the individuals themselves. What Beckerman does not address is why the Soviet leaders did not just kill these dissidents as Nazi Germany had done and contemporary Arab and Muslim leaders are doing. Surely ethics did not stop the massacres in Cambodia which were a throwback to Stalin’s treatment of his designated enemies. Rather they followed mutatis mutandis the British policy during its empire, namely the old Roman sentence of relegatio or banishment from the area of dissidence, although the British were not loathe to re-establish order by killing thousands of Hindus and Arabs when their public order was threatened.
Under the Soviet regime the Jews lost their internal identity at the same time that the state branded them as zhid in their identification papers. How can a person or a people survive without a religious or a secular system of education to carry on the memory of their ancestral identity? Tribes and smaller ethnic groups might do so as in the congeries of the Caucasus, including its ancient and scattered Jewish communities. But what of the urbanized and secularized and highly educated Jews in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and other cosmopolitan centers? As we learn from history an outside stimulus is needed to stimulate a response to the devastating effects of an overbearing ideological leveling. While the USSR boasted of its multi-ethnic composition supported by the state, only the Jews were denied the right to a Hebrew and Israel oriented identity. By way of a Manichaean counter to this ancestral call, the Soviet system promoted Yiddish as the national language and culture and Birobidzhan as a new homeland to replace the hope and later the reality of Israel.
The stimuli were not long in appearing. Leon Uris’ monumental Exodus provided a rough outline of Jewish history and the birth of modern Israel. This information was circulated through the underground samizdat, as were the speeches of Ben Gurion and other literature. Beckerman does a good job explaining the effects of the samizdat as an underground means of communication of literature and ideas among the dissidents. Next the Eichmann Trial which began in 1961 and coincided with the commemoration by Jews of Riga, on the fringes of the Soviet empire, to provide a memorial to tens of thousands of Jews massacred by Nazis and Lativians in Rumbuli. This awakening was the first hairline crack in the Soviet dike.
Coincidentally the youth revolution of the 1960s led to an upsurge of human rights concern in the United States that ultimately led to its influence on American politics.
Soon the issue of freedom for Soviet Jews became the subtext for a series of amendments that put increased pressure on the Soviet leadership. The floodgates slowly opened in the late 1970s and while the emigration rose and fell depending on Soviet attempts to deal with the internal and external pressure. Ultimately restrictions failed and increased emigration paralleled the decline of the Soviet behemoth until Gorbachev’s move to change the system led to the decision of the Soviet governments to vote itself out of existence.
Such a focal point seems to be the author’s exuberant thesis. Perhaps somewhat naïve but nonetheless an ambitious midrash on a phenomenon that counters the American view that Ronald Reagan’s policies of massive outspending on defense ultimately bankrupted the Soviets leading to the demise of its system. Despite the accuracy of Beckerman’s interpretation, he has presented a fascinating contribution to a Judeocentric view of the last third of the twentieth century and another view of the attraction of Israel and the West for the search and attainment of freedom by Soviet Jews.
His extensive list of interviews and bibliography does not include, inter alia, Baruch Gur-Gurevitz, Open Gates. The Inside Story of the Mass Aliya from the Soviet Union and Its Successor States (translated from the Hebrew by Naftali Greenwood. Jerusalem, Israel: The Jewish Agency for Israel, 1996). It also lacks a bibliography and notes.