Given the dominant role that the personalized campaign would ultimately play, and its centrality to the movement’s later success, it is surprising to recall the opposition SSSJ initially faced on this issue from the Jewish establishment. The Conference on Soviet Jewry rejected the activists’ argument that Soviet Jews who exposed themselves should be known not only to the KGB but also to the West. The Conference took its cautious cue from the Israeli government’s Liaison Bureau, the secretive organization entrusted with maintaining contacts with Soviet Jews and generating international support for their emigration. Founded in 1952, the bureau initiated Soviet Jewry documentation centers in New York, London, and Paris, and sent emissaries to meet clandestinely with Soviet Jews and provide them with material about Israel and Judaism. But the Liaison Bureau bitterly opposed the campaign to publicize the plight of individual refuseniks, fearing a backlash from the Soviets. That fear turned ugly in 1969, when the letter-writer Yasha Kazakov, along with another former refusenik named Dov Sperling, arrived on an American speaking tour. Incredibly, the bureau warned American Jewish organizations that Kazakov and Sperling were KGB provocateurs. SSSJ and other non-establishment groups ignored the warning and enthusiastically endorsed the two men. The following year, Kazakov held a nine-day hunger strike at the UN to demand the emigration of his parents, and SSSJ activists kept vigil with him.²⁰

Eventually, the Liaison Bureau recognized the power of the personal campaign and shifted its policy; inevitably, the Conference too changed its tactics. The change was publicly marked in November 1969, when Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir read from the Knesset podium the famous letter of the “Georgian 18”—heads of eighteen Georgian Jewish families who wrote, “We will wait months and years. We will wait all our lives if necessary, but we will never renounce our faith or our hopes.”²¹

But the establishment’s relationship with SSSJ remained ambivalent, alternating between cooperation and suspicion.²² Understandably, the establishment resented the student movement for refusing to submit to its discipline. In a sense, SSSJ represented a revolt not only against passivity and the strategy of quiet diplomacy, but also against the establishment’s right to speak for American Jews on matters of political importance. For its part, SSSJ showed contempt for the establishment’s scattered efforts, dismissing them as “do-nothing.” This surely overstated the case: The Anti-Defamation League, for example, sponsored an academic group that placed ads in The New York Times. And the Conference organized a series of nationwide protests beginning in 1964, which, though mostly small, nevertheless created an awareness of the Soviet Jewry issue around the country and demonstrated a reach that only the establishment could achieve.

Still, as the 1960s drew to a close, American Jewry had not yet committed its vast resources to saving Soviet Jewry. Establishment efforts were chronically under-funded, poorly coordinated, and most of all, unsystematic. Indeed, SSSJ was often more effective in bringing the Soviet Jewry issue to the public than all the major organizations combined. Even after the Soviet Zionist movement began, American Jewish organizations still refused to equip the Conference with a budget and a permanent staff.²³ “Organized American Jewry places great emphasis on professionalism,” Birnbaum wrote in 1969, “yet is handling the crisis of Russian Jews in an utterly amateurish fashion. For example, there is not even a part-time staff person in daily touch with the media in our communication-conscious society.... Equally distressing, there is no central clearing-house for information and source material.”²⁴

Yet if the movement’s future still seemed threatened by establishment passivity, a new threat soon appeared from a different direction. In 1968, Meir Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League. For the first two years of its existence, the group focused almost exclusively on domestic issues, especially the growing black-Jewish rift. Then, in the final hours of 1969, the JDL sponsored a “Hundred-Hour Vigil” at the Soviet mission. Several hundred protesters rioted, while others chained themselves to a Soviet airliner at Kennedy Airport. Nothing like it had ever been done in the name of Soviet Jewry, and suddenly the movement that prided itself on responsibility and restraint had its own equivalent of the militant SDS and the Black Panthers. The violent 1960s had finally caught up with the Soviet Jewry movement.

For Kahane, restraint meant betrayal. “He shouted at me, ‘How dare you be responsible when Jews are in danger?’” recalls Birnbaum. “I argued that so long as they’re not killing Jews, we can’t act violently, which would only alienate the American Jewish community from the struggle.”²⁵ In 1966, Kahane had written an article for the Jewish Press calling for the creation of a “Soviet Jewry Liberation Front,” which would confront the Soviets with massive civil disobedience.²⁶ Nothing came of that effort. Only with the creation of the JDL did Kahane find the recruits for his militant Soviet Jewry campaign, which combined violence and occasional acts of terrorism, such as a sniper attack on the Soviet UN mission, with street sit-downs and similar acts of civil disobedience.²⁷ In Kahane’s view, the uglier the protests, the more coverage they would receive.

From its inception, SSSJ had sought to build coalitions with sympathetic non-Jews, especially liberals. By contrast, Kahane argued that the Jews had no real friends; at best, they could form temporary alliances of convenience with non-Jews. His approach was perhaps epitomized by his bizarre 1971 connection with the Italian-American Civil Rights League, founded by renowned mafioso Joe Colombo. Civil Rights League members attended JDL demonstrations; when Colombo was shot in June 1971, Kahane was the only outsider admitted into the hospital room. Birnbaum was enraged at Kahane for sullying the name of the Soviet Jewry movement with his unsavory alliances. For Kahane, those alliances were merely the expression of the Jewish people’s fate, which was ultimately to find itself alone in the world. (Kahane further developed his theology of radical Jewish separatism after he moved to Israel later that year, and that theology became the basis for his far-Right Kach movement.)²⁸

Kahane squandered his efforts on violence and on self-defeating initiatives like the Colombo alliance. The JDL’s tactics finally resulted in loss of life in January 1972, when a secretary was killed in a firebomb attack on the offices of Sol Hurok, impresario of the Soviet-American cultural exchange. The group’s Soviet Jewry activity had lasted barely two years, and had resulted in trials, prison terms, and depletion. In the end, Kahane succeeded for a brief time in placing the Soviet Jewry cause in the headlines in a way others had not—but at the cost of exacerbating the movement’s internal divisions, and undermining the civility of debate within the Jewish community.

The period between 1967 and 1970, then, was one of dynamic uncertainty for the Soviet Jewry movement. Soviet Jews, infused with pride over Israel’s victory and encouraged by diaspora activism, began publicly confronting their government. SSSJ’s emphasis on heroic dissidents was adopted by both Israel and the American Jewish establishment. Yet the awakening of American Jewry, and the worldwide campaign which followed, was by no means a foregone conclusion: The establishment remained, for the most part, hesitant to invest the resources required for a full-fledged public campaign, while violent extremists threatened to discredit the cause. The powerful, widespread movement that would come later was still, at this stage, an unfulfilled vision.

 

Beginning in December 1970, the vision became a reality. The Kremlin placed on trial eleven Soviet citizens, nine of them Jews, who had intended to hijack an airplane to Israel but were arrested before they reached the plane. When two of the defendants in what came to be known as the “Leningrad Trial” were sentenced to death—on Christmas Eve, no less—the international outcry was overwhelming. Two dozen governments, along with Communist parties in the West, protested, forcing the Soviets to commute the sentences. For the first time since the founding of the movement, Soviet Jewry dominated headlines. More importantly, the Soviets’ capitulation proved, even to skeptics, the effectiveness of public protest.

Soviet Jews escalated their confrontational tactics, going from letter-writing to staging sit-ins at government buildings. The Kremlin responded with additional trials of activists, but it simultaneously allowed a substantial increase in emigration. In 1970, 1,000 Jews received exit visas; in 1971, the number was 13,000.²⁹ The Kremlin’s sudden shift on emigration was in all likelihood meant to deplete the Zionist movement by sending its core activists abroad. If so, it was a serious mistake. The appearance in Israel of leading refuseniks energized the movement, imbuing it with a sense of success that encouraged Jewish agitation on both sides of the Iron Curtain.