Primed by the SSSJ activist handbooks, which dealt with those very questions, I would dutifully offer proofs that the Soviets could be pressured: The suspension of the economic trials, and the shelving in 1964 of a crass anti-Semitic treatise called Judaism Without Embellishment that had been published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Meager gains, to be sure, but enough to convince SSSJ activists that we had found a formula for redemption: The more protests, the more Soviet concessions. As for whether Soviet Jews still wanted to be Jewish, we cited the gatherings that began in the early 1960s in which first hundreds, then thousands of young Jews danced and sang Yiddish songs outside the last remaining Moscow synagogue on the holiday of Simhat Tora. The phenomenon was a mystery. How did they know to assemble on that night? Who dared organize them, in a society where any form of organization outside the Communist Party was illegal? Why did the Kremlin permit it? And why did they gather on Simhat Tora, hardly the most central Jewish holiday? The celebrations seemed to confirm Birnbaum’s intuition that, beneath the repression, renewal was stirring.

When critics from the establishment and the Orthodox community accused SSSJ of recklessness, we responded by emphasizing our responsibility. SSSJ prided itself on its cordial relations with the police and even with Soviet officials.¹⁶ Before every rally, Richter would prepare a list of “approved slogans,” and marshals would confiscate any signs considered inflammatory. An early leaflet inviting activists to a planning meeting emphasized the tone Birnbaum sought. “We intend to keep this a highly responsible movement,” it declared. “Out of this student ferment there is emerging a wave of constructive, dynamic, yet responsible action.”¹⁷ For SSSJ, “responsible” meant not only peaceful but legal. Even non-violent civil disobedience, which the civil rights movement and the nascent anti-Vietnam War movement had legitimized, was off limits. Birnbaum recognized that the American Jewish community could barely tolerate SSSJ’s level of protest, and that civil disobedience would frighten off the Jewish establishment and thwart the goal of transforming it into an activist force. Effecting a fundamental change in American Jewry required not just a vision and a plan, but patience.

Limited in its ability to attract the media by its commitment to “responsible” protest, and lacking the resources to draw massive numbers of demonstrators, SSSJ compensated in other ways. Richter rented small halls for rallies and then issued press releases about overflow crowds. He set up a sound truck in Manhattan’s Garment District during lunch hour, and the papers reported a rally of thousands, not realizing that most “demonstrators” were in fact passersby, stopping briefly out of curiosity. SSSJ also drew media attention through its creative use of religious holidays and symbols. On Passover 1965, the Jericho March, led by seven men wearing prayer shawls and blowing shofars, encircled the Soviet Mission to “topple the walls of hate”; on Hanuka that year, protesters marched behind a seventeen-foot-tall menora. This was not gimmickry. Rather than manipulating religious rituals for political purposes, we believed we were revealing their redemptive significance.

SSSJ’s goal of embarrassing the Soviet regime was advanced through its “celebrations” of Soviet holidays, co-opting them to expose the hypocrisy of Communism. SSSJ’s inaugural demonstration on May Day was a classic example of turning Soviet symbols against themselves. The anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7 was another favorite time to demonstrate. One year we interrupted a pro-Soviet celebration in a Manhattan hotel, attended mostly by elderly Jewish Communists; another year, we tried to deliver to the Soviet UN mission a giant birthday cake inscribed with the words, “Let My People Go.” When SSSJ probed Soviet sensitivities, no tactic was more satisfying than mockery.

 

Central to Birnbaum’s vision of diaspora empowerment was the creation of a symbiotic relationship between the freest part of the diaspora and its most oppressed. By publicly demonstrating their concern for Soviet Jews, American Jews would overcome their inhibitions and assume their place as a self-confident community within American society. The renewal of American Jewry would be an inseparable consequence of the redemption of Soviet Jewry.

Toward that end, the Six Day War was a turning point for both American and Soviet Jews. American Jews now publicly celebrated Jewish power and suddenly longed to participate, however vicariously, in the Zionist success story. For Soviet Jews, the effect was even more profound. For many among the “Jews of silence,” Israel’s victory evoked not only Jewish pride but a willingness to challenge the Kremlin. Though there had been a nascent Zionist consciousness among some young Soviet Jews before 1967, including a lively Zionist samizdat, the war created widespread public identification with Israel. Young Moscow Jews greeted each other by covering one eye, simulating Moshe Dayan’s eye patch. For the first time since the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks destroyed the Zionist movement in the Soviet Union, Zionist circles began operating openly in major Soviet cities.

The Soviet Zionist revolt began with a stunning act of courage by a Moscow university student, Yasha Kazakov. Shortly after the Six Day War, Kazakov wrote an open letter to the Kremlin: “I consider myself a citizen of the State of Israel. I demand to be freed from the humiliation of Soviet citizenship.”¹⁸A voice, a name: Suddenly “Soviet Jewry” was not a silent abstraction. Kazakov’s letter, exhilarating in its daring, was smuggled abroad and published in the Washington Post. A few days later, he was given a visa to Israel. With a single incident, Birnbaum’s key intuitions were confirmed. The Simhat Tora gatherings were not a fluke but a premonition. Clearly, at least some Soviet Jews wanted desperately to be Jewish and were ready to sacrifice for that identity. And public exposure in the West would protect them. Finally, as thousands of Soviet Jews began risking their freedom to apply for exit visas, Birnbaum’s insistence on emphasizing the demand of “Let My People Go” was affirmed. The Soviet Zionist renewal marked the end of what he called SSSJ’s heroic years. No longer would the organization be operating on faith and hope alone, but also on proven fact. All that remained to be tested was our resolve.

The next letter-writer to come to the attention of the West was Boris Kochubiyevsky, a Kiev engineer. “As long as I am capable of feeling,” he wrote Soviet officials, “I will do all I can to leave for Israel. And if you find it possible to sentence me for that, then all the same. If I live until my release, I will be prepared to go to the homeland of my ancestors, even if it means going on foot.”¹⁹ Kochubiyevsky was sentenced to three years in prison. After his trial, a copy of his open letter was smuggled to the Western press. In SSSJ we were convinced that had his case been noticed by the West before his arrest, he would have gone to Israel instead of to prison, just like Kazakov. The difference in the fate of the two Zionist dissidents confirmed SSSJ’s belief in the power of public opinion. With Kochubiyevsky’s arrest, we now had our own political prisoner—a “prisoner of Zion.” Instead of protesting abstract human rights abuses like the ban on matza or the closing of synagogues, we now had a living symbol of Soviet oppression.

The most dangerous phase of the movement had begun. Soviet Jewish activists now placed themselves in the position of a fifth column, in direct opposition to the Kremlin’s pro-Arab and increasingly vicious anti-Zionist policies. Soviet Jews moved from underground distribution of samizdat literature to overt protest, with letter-writers banding together to issue collective emigration appeals; one Hebrew teacher posted advertisements for his illegal ulpan in the Moscow subway. No one could imagine the consequences. Would the Soviets relent, crack down, or try to ignore the growing revolt? In fact, they simultaneously adopted all three approaches, giving visas to some and prison sentences to others, while consigning most to a “refusenik” limbo of unemployment and harassment. The policy’s unpredictability seemed deliberate. A Jew applying for a visa never knew if he would end up in Israel or Siberia.

The fact that the Soviet Jewry struggle was no longer exclusively defined by activists in the West, but also by Jews in the Soviet Union, required new tactics and concepts. As opposed to the establishment’s call for the renewal of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, Birnbaum insisted that free emigration should now become the movement’s central demand. Moreover, SSSJ was the first to realize that the movement needed to personalize the campaign. Along with several small adult anti-establishment groups, SSSJ grasped the new opportunities to transform the movement from an abstract struggle for “Soviet Jewry” into a concrete struggle for Soviet Jews, with names and stories. SSSJ publicized individual protest letters from Soviet Jews and organized demonstrations in support of refuseniks and prisoners of Zion. Over the years, the personal campaign became an essential feature of the entire movement, drawing new recruits and energizing veteran activists. The pilgrimage to visit refuseniks became an American Jewish activist’s rite of passage; dissidents like Anatoly Sharansky and Andre Sakharov became household names among American Jews, with teenagers wearing bracelets bearing these and other names; and synagogues across America began observing the bar- and bat-mitzvas of individual Soviet Jewish children by adding an empty chair to their own congregants’ celebrations. Indeed, Birnbaum’s vision of a symbiotic relationship encouraging Jewish renewal in America and the Soviet Union became a central feature of Jewish life. American Jews were inspired by the courage of Soviet refuseniks, who in turn were fortified by American Jewish support.