NCSEJ WEEKLY TOP 10 Washington, D.C. June 21, 2019
[MOSCOW] Integrated Special Needs Program Opens Summer Day Camp By Kirby Goodman World Union For Progressive Judaism, June 20, 2019 https://wupj.org/news/2019/06/12755/integrated-special-needs-program-opens-summer-day-camp/
The Meodomik Integration program operates year round activities for children with special needs and their families, integrating social, cultural and recreational programs based in the Moscow Jewish Community Center, MEOD. Irina Sherban, Chair of the Russian Union for Progressive Judaism (RUCPJ), directs MEOD. It is home (Domik in Russian) to various Jewish congregations, including the Progressive congregation, Hadash.
The center opened its Meodomika Summer Day Camp in early June, bringing together children with and without special needs and their families for a week of activities, tours, workshops and other programming.
The camp’s theme, “Heading Outdoors,” highlighted outdoor games and hikes, day trips, and therapeutic art activities. 48 children, ages 6 to 14 years, participated in this year’s program, 15 of whom have special needs.
The camp is designed to allow children with disabilities to experience a joyful summer with their peers and their families. Workshops focus on building social skills among both normative and special needs children, and introducing all of them to new, creative ways to engage with Judaism. Tolerance for others and inclusivity are principal aims of the experience.
Excursions to the zoo and planetarium allowed families to visit public sites with their special needs children, something that is not always easy for them to manage. Some participants and their families visited historic sites in Moscow, while other workshops painted challah covers for Shabbat and working in the carpentry and pottery studios. Additional animal therapy sessions were offered to children with disabilities.
As one parent noted, “It is so meaningful for us to be able to experience these trips and activities together. I am grateful to the organizers and supporters for making this happen, not only for my child, but for us, the parents as well.”
Because the camp took place around the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, campers and their families explored the meaning of the holiday through formal and non-formal study sessions and discussions.
Meodomika is grateful for the support of the World Union of Progressive Judaism for this transformative program, and to Rita Fruman, Director of FSU Operations at the WUPJ, for her leadership in making Meodomika so impactful.
“My son enjoyed Meodomika so much. The friends he made were amazing for him, and the staff he learned from were both attentive and caring. They deserve a lot of praise for the work they do. We really enjoyed the excursions together and spending time outside.
Of Jews and Bolsheviks By Tibor Krausz The Jerusalem Post, June 13, 2019 https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Of-Jews-and-Bolsheviks-592445
Here’s the thing about anti-Jewish canards: despite what their purveyors may think, they aren’t insults. They’re compliments.
These old tropes may have little grounding in reality, yet even so they redound to the credit of Jews. After all, Jewish peop le are believed by their detractors to be masters of the world. They own all the big banks, run all the important media outlets, and engineer the rise and fall of entire nations. Woe betide anyone who opposes them.
They also have a finger in every pie, apparently. Both Hitler and Stalin were ostensibly mere puppets in Jewish hands. Or at the very least the “Zionists” – as an antisemitic code word has it – were allied wholeheartedly with these brutal dictators, notwithstanding their wholesale murder of Jews. (Then again, the Holocaust never really happened, did it?)
Former London mayor Ken Livingstone, a Labour Party stalwart, recently gave voice to this view by asserting that Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad.”
Is there anything then that Jews can’t or won’t do?
From a Jewish perspective, though, there has been a bit of a problem. In the fever dreams of antisemites Jews may be running the world left and right, but in reality they have been largely powerless in the face of frequently murderous anti-Jewish animus. Rather than being the masterminds of tyrannical regimes such as Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Jews were among their first victims.
Every antisemitic libel ever invented has been predicated on the same fallacy: that the Jews (who happen to be among the most factious people on earth) work in cahoots, always and everywhere, toward a shared goal, which is the subjugation and exploitation of non-Jews.
As preposterous as this assumption is, antisemitism is rarely just an excuse for scapegoating, a means by which bitter, hateful people can vent. It certainly serves that purpose. Yet antisemitism usually is a worldview, or a key component of one, which allows its holders to reduce all the ills of the world to a singular cause: the self-serving machinations of a numerically insignificant yet preternaturally devious people who punch well above their weight.
The contents of antisemitism often depend on cultural contexts, but they invariably rest on the assumption that the Jews are expert manipulators who stop at nothing to have their way. And they do so by playing a double game: Jews are ruthless billionaire profiteers even as they are also anti-capitalist agitators; they are rootless globalists except when they are hidebound blood-and-soil nationalists who lord it over a strip of stolen land they call Israel.
Nowhere were such inherent contradictions more pronounced than in Nazi propaganda, which portrayed Jews as racially inferior degenerates and yet credited them with posing an existential threat to Germany through their devilishly clever schemes. Such dichotomies may not make much logical sense, but they can forever regenerate and metastasize because they constantly mutate.
Accordingly, the main drifts of antisemitic currents have changed with the times, reflecting contemporary fears.
In medieval Europe it was the Jew as well-poisoner and Christ-killer that exercised overactive imaginations. Then, with the rise of capitalism, came the Jew as Croesus-rich banker and financial speculator.
The 20th century saw the arrival of the Jew as Bolshevik revolutionary. His putative aim now was to topple Western nations with their capitalist economies through violent class struggle. This one was a curious specimen: a godless philistine who was also somehow animated by time-honored Jewish religious beliefs and practices.
It’s the trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism” that concerns Paul A. Hanebrink, a historian at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in A Specter Haunting Europe, an edifying new book that serves as a valuable addition to the corpus of scholarship on the long history of antisemitism.
The notion that revolutionary communism was primarily or even solely a Jewish movement first gained traction in the cataclysmic upheaval that followed the Great War. The true victors of the war included the Bolsheviks in Russia, who managed to pull off an unlikely feat and seize power from the tottering tzarist regime in the fall of 1917. The Bolsheviks’ stunning takeover sent shock waves across Europe, already reeling from seismic national and political realignments on the continent.
Many people came to believe that the Bolsheviks’ victory, which would inspire similar revolts from Germany to Hungary, could not be explained simply as the outcome of historical happenstance. No, it must have been the result of a vast nefarious conspiracy. But who could conceive such an audacious plot of world domination? Only the Jews, of course.
The postwar communist uprisings were Jewish-led attempts to undo the very foundations of Christian Europe by remaking the continent with one copycat revolution after another. Or so many European leading lights, from Eugenio Parelli (later Pope Pius XII) to a young Adolf Hitler, theorized. They saw Bolshevism as a distinctly Jewish political movement cloaked in the mantle of communism, which itself was supposedly a Jewish ideology. Even non-Jewish Bolsheviks (and there were plenty of these) came to be deemed Jewish by association. When in doubt, cherchez le juif.
In the early 20th century, many Jews were indeed drawn towards radical left-wing movements, seeing them as harbingers of liberation and emancipation for the wretched of the earth, including impoverished Jews in flyblown Eastern European shtetls. Jews featured disproportionately among the leaders of communist uprisings that swept Europe after the war: Kurt Eisner and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany; Béla Kun and József Pogány in Hungary; Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in Russia.
Yet their Jewishness was often incidental and hardly an animating factor behind their revolutionary zeal. For many of these die-hard communists, Jewish ancestry was an accident of birth, not a meaningful attribute of identity. A bug, in other words, not a feature. “As they turned to Communism, all [of them] broke with the Jewish milieu of their grandfathers, some with a twinge of regret, others with a feeling of liberation,” Hanebrink observes.
Nor were Jews as heavily represented in communist movements as antisemitic firebrands would have it believed. In revolutionary Russia, Jews accounted for half of the leaders of the ultimately defeated Menshevik faction of the local socialist movement, but only six out of the 26 leaders of the triumphant Bolshevik faction were of Jewish descent – and many of the Jewish Bolsheviks would soon be purged by Stalin. In Poland, meanwhile, somewhere between a fifth and two-fifths of local Communist Party members were Jewish, yet the party’s popularity among Jews in the country remained low.
And, needless to say, not even card-carrying Jewish communists were agitating for Soviet-style revolutions in the interest of “World Jewry.” Not least because that monolithic entity (which was allegedly executing the collective will of Jews everywhere) was a flight of fancy.
Facts, however, didn’t matter to people who preferred to see Bolshevism as yet another evil scheme by sinister Jews. “After 1917, a wide variety of groups and parties across the continent and even across the Atlantic shared the belief that Bolshevism was caused or led by Jews,” Hanebrink writes. “War and revolution made Judeo-Bolshevism seem an utterly new danger. But the fear and loathing it excited derived from a particular set of much older anti-Jewish prejudices,” the historian adds elsewhere. “The Judeo-Bolshevik peril was constructed from the raw materials of anti-Judaism, recycled and rearranged to meet new requirements.”
The trumped-up threat of Judeo-Bolshevism became a hallucinogenic Rorschach inkblot onto which many Europeans could project their paranoid fears of a world remodeled in a Jewish mold: un-Christian, un-European, untamed and uncivilized. Extreme rightists sought to tap into such fears by reveling in “exposing” the Jewish origins of prominent revolutionaries, who themselves had often sought to shed that ancestry by adopting new names and secular identities. In pamphlet after pamphlet, speech after speech, Trotsky was “outed” as Bronstein, Zinoviev as Apfelbaum, Kun as Kohn, and Pogány as Weiss.
“Repeated often enough,” Hanebrink notes, “these genealogical facts seemed to offer privileged insight about the deeper realities of Europe’s revolutions.” Namely that they were all part of a grand design to dismantle the old Christian order in favor of a newly minted Jewish one.
Oftentimes such fevered theorizing was no mere idle chatter. Between 1918 and 1921, hundreds of anti-Bolshevik pogroms took place in Ukraine, leaving tens of thousands of Jews dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. Many Jews fared no better in Poland, Hungary and Russia either. They were dispossessed, lynched or murdered by ravening thugs who saw them as treacherous fifth columnists — “Asiatic saboteurs” in the words of the influential French journalist Maurice Barrès.
But the worst was yet to come. Hitler owed his meteoric rise, at least in part, to deep-seated fears of the Judeo-Bolshevik menace. He would both feed and exploit these fears. Hanebrink goes so far as to surmise that “Judeo-Bolshevism made Adolf Hitler.” That’s certainly true insofar as Hitler turned the fight against this phantom enemy into a pillar of Nazi ideology. By waging war on the Soviet Union and murdering millions of Jews at the same time, he set about eradicating Judeo-Bolshevism once and for all in what he saw as Germany’s historic duty to rid the world of it.
No sooner did German forces invade the Soviet Union in 1941 than they began slaughtering “Jewish Bolsheviks” – that is to say any Jews they could find. After a massacre of 33,771 Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev in just two days in September that year, the German field marshal in charge, Walter von Reichenau, ordered his troops to carry on killing Jews so as to deprive the virus of Bolshevism of its alleged carriers. “The idea of Judeo-Bolshevism was crucial to the genesis of the Final Solution,” Hanebrink writes.
And it wasn’t just the Nazis. Many Romanians, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others would join the murderous hunt for “Jewish Bolsheviks” across Central-Eastern Europe. The massacres would continue sporadically in Eastern Europe even after the war.
Ideas have consequences, and the pernicious idea that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement would survive the genocide of Jews who were murdered in the name of fighting Bolshevism. It remains with us to this day, animating discussions about communism in far-right circles where it’s alleged to be a Jewish conspiracy.
And so it goes.
The Heroic Soviet Jewish Activist You Never Heard of By Adina Hershberg Aish.com, June 17, 2019 https://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Heroic-Soviet-Jewish-Activist-You-Never-Heard-Of.html
Most Jews have heard of Natan Sharansky, but few know of Hillel Butman (pronounced Boot mahn), a giant of a man who recently died at the age of 87.
“Hillel Butman was the first, before the rest of us,” Sharansky said. “Already in 1966, a year before the Six Day War, he founded the Zionist Youth Movement in Leningrad. Who thought about Zionism back then, before 1967? It was very rare. He established an underground organization; taught Hebrew, literature and Judaism; established secret ‘ulpanim’ in which the young people met; and he tried to scream to the world the cry of the Jews in Russia who wanted to go home to Israel. Dozens of people, and then hundreds of people and then thousands of people got carried away by this movement.”
Butman was born in Leningrad in 1932 into a typical Jewish Russian family. His family was neither religious nor Zionist, nor did they know anything about Jewish history or Palestine. But they were not assimilated. His father had a seat in the Leningrad synagogue where he attended High Holy Day services. He enjoyed singing Yiddush songs. The family ate matzah during Passover.
When World War II broke out, Butman was a young boy. He and his family were evacuated to Siberia. When he returned to Leningrad in 1945 and completed school, his life changed dramatically. “I came out of the walls that defended me,” he recalled. “I began feeling antisemitism from two sides—‘above,’ meaning the government, and ‘below,’ meaning the streets.”
Even though Butman was the best student in foreign languages, he was not accepted to study to be a translator for the army or the police. He applied to be a journalist and stood in a line to present his documents. A woman took the documents from someone who was standing in front of him and from someone who was standing behind him. He understood what that meant. Eventually he was accepted and then pushed out of military school. These experiences with antisemitism were his best teacher to become a Zionist.
He soon met a Russian Jew named Lilly who he described as his “Zionist Mother” . She taught Butman Hebrew and introduced him to other idealistic Jews. After Lilly’s passing in 1960, Butman became a Hebrew teacher for those who were brave enough to learn it.
In Leningrad 1966 he and five like-minded Jews formed the Leningrad Underground Zionist Organization. By 1970 the group had grown to 39 members. The organization had two goals: to break through the walls of isolation for Soviet Jews and force the Soviet government to permit Jews to make aliyah, and to fight against assimilation. “When there is no Jewish culture, no Jewish press and no Jewish schools, there are no Jews,” Butman said.
The Israeli government played a part behind the scenes with its lishka (“bureau”). It maintained contacts and provided resources throughout the USSR during the 1950s and early 1960s. The lishka used “agricultural attaches” from the Moscow embassy to travel throughout the Soviet Union to deliver Jewish mementos such as miniature Jewish calendars and Star of David pendants, which were usually handed off in a handshake. These tokens meant a great deal to the Soviet Jews.
Israel also had writers in other countries who brought the persecution of Soviet Jews to the fore. The hope was that journalists, policy elites and ordinary citizens would do what Israel could not risk doing on its own. Outside the Soviet Union, activists mainly employed conventional means of protest, including mass rallies in New York City of up to 250,000 participants.
But in the USSR and in the US, it was really the passions and commitments of individuals that really launched the struggle to free Soviet Jewry.
Remembering a story that he had read about a Portuguese ship that was hijacked by anti-Fascists and that led to public awareness of their struggle, Butman thought that the Leningrad Underground Zionist Organization could come up with a similar plan to publicize the plight of Soviet Jews.
Butman met the late Mark Dymshitz, a Jew who had been thrown out of the army and who wanted to make aliyah. They formulated a plan in which they would hijack a plane in Leningrad and fly it to Sweden. On board would be Zionist Jews who sought to move to Israel. Their cover story was that they were flying to a large family wedding. They decided to take control of the cockpit without any arms in order to avoid harming the pilots. If the pilots refused to fly to Sweden, Dymshitz planned to fly the plane himself. They would carry a starter pistol, the type fired at racing competitions that looked and sounded like a regular pistol. The plan was known as Operation Wedding.
Butman and Dymshitz presented their daring plan to the cell in Leningrad. The initial excitement of the cell’s members gave way to fear. The operation’s failure could put the Zionist movement out of business in the USSR. They decided to ask the Israeli government in a clandestine manner. The answer came back, “The professor who is the leading medical authority does not recommend the use of the medication.” Dymshitz then turned to a cell in Riga, and its members agreed to take on this challenge.
Butman knew that there were three possible outcomes: The KGB would arrest them in Leningrad before they boarded the plane; it would shoot the plane down if it took off; or they would be arrested in Stockholm for hijacking the plane. Butman figured that all three scenarios would work because the goal was to bring attention to the plight of the Jews in the USSR.
The 12 members of the group arrived at Smolny Airport near Leningrad at dawn on June 15, 1970. (Butman had decided not to be part of the group because he feared that too many people knew about it.) They realized that they were being followed, but decided to walk toward “the noose,” as Butman called it in his book From Leningrad to Jerusalem, which describes the days of his struggle and that of his friends.
A few steps before boarding the plane, Dymshitz and friends were arrested by the KGB who had known about the plans for months. Later Butman would say that it had been an act of despair to publicize the fact that Soviet Jews were not being allowed to emigrate to Israel. “We wanted to say that we are not silent. We are crying, but nobody is listening to us.”
The same day Butman was approached by three KGB agents. “We are waiting for you,” was all they said.
Leningrad Trial I, began on December 15, 1970. The defendants were charged with high treason. Some were sentenced to prison; Dymshitz and Edouard Kuznetsov each received a death sentence. Butman received a ten-year prison sentence. In response to international protest, the sentences for Dymshitz and Kuznetsov were reduced from death to imprisonment. Dymshitz was released in a prisoner exchange after serving nine years.
For years I had worn a Soviet Prisoner of Conscience necklace--- a large Star of David with Mark Dymshitz’s name on it. I remember attending a rally for Soviet Jewry in New York City in which recently released Dymshitz addressed the crowd before boarding a plan to Israel. There was an electrifying excitement in the air. It was wonderful to finally take off the necklace.
Butman spent time in various Soviet prisons. Jewish and non-Jewish groups and members of the US Congress lobbied for his release. Supporters wrote letters to him, some of which he actually received. One 13-year-old Israeli boy pledged to write him every other day until Butman was released. Butman wrote to his wife Eva (who had made aliyah on July 12, 1973) and told her to tell the boy not to write him so much. “He is a little child. He has homework. He changed it to once a week.”
The Jewish prisoners were separated and they were not allowed to communicate with each other. Sometimes they bailed water out of the toilets and yelled to each other through the pipes. They smuggled notes to each other and to the outside world. Sometimes their runners were Russian criminals.
Criminals distributed the food. As a criminal handed the food through an aperture in the door, he rolled down his sleeves to his fingertips. When he would put his hands through with the soup, the prisoners would put a message up the sleeves of the criminal. The criminal would then pull out his hands with the message.
In August 1978, Butman was in the Vladimir Prison. “They tried to isolate political criminals from one another,” he related. “I was sitting in my cell alone, thinking, dreaming. I thought I heard a voice, ’Butman…Butman…’ Somebody wanted me to come to the window. The window was high. I could only see a little of the sky, never earth or trees. I figured it was just a thief who had nothing else to do. It was a Russian criminal who lived on the floor above me. He cried out ‘Butman, Sharansky will be in contact with you.’ Sharansky was in a cell to the right of the thief. He knew I was there. I didn’t know he was there.”
Later on, Sharansky sat in the prison cell adjacent to Butman’s cell. Butman would pass notes to Sharansky.
Butman insisted that serving nine years in the Soviet Gulag was a small price to pay in exchange for Soviet Jews being able to live freely. While he was in prison, he was unaware of the mass aliyah that was taking place.
Unlike Jews in the free world, Soviet Jews were in the domain of a Soviet power that supported and armed the Arab armies, and the Soviet government worked indirectly to destroy the State of Israel. The question of their dual, civic loyalty as well as the daily threat of the KGB nearly made a Zionist Jew in the USSR into an oxymoron. Perhaps that is why “Operation Wedding” is considered one of the most heroic events in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry.
“When Butman was released from prison together with his cellmate, Prisoner of Zion Rabbi Yosef Mendelevitch,” Sharansky recently told an Israeli journalist, “they handed me the scepter in a certain sense, but in fact if to think big—Butman handed the scepter to our entire generation, and then to Yuli Edelstein’s generation (presently a Knesset member who had been imprisoned in the USSR for his Zionist activities) and to the whole glorious movement of Soviet Jewry.”
Butman came to Israel on April 29, 1979, greeted with a hero’s welcome. He was embraced by that 13-year-old letter writer, who by then was grown up and wearing his Israeli army uniform.
After living on a kibbutz for a year, Butman and his family moved to the neighborhood of Ramot in Jerusalem. He studied law in Israel and passed the bar. He was rarely recognized on the streets of Jerusalem, but his neighbors know his story.
Once a year he would get together with some other former Prisoners of Zion and they would eat and remember.
Upon learning of Butman’s passing, Yuli Edelstein wrote, “In the introduction to his book From Leningrad to Jerusalem Butman asked the question: ‘Did we do our job in a good way?’ We will answer him today: You did well, very well. The Soviet Union no longer exists, the Iron Curtain is only a historical concept—but your perseverance, your breakthrough, will be engraved forever in the annals of the Jewish Nation.
“Hillel was the symbol of a whole generation of young people, me included, who felt that the time to take the Jews of Russia from slavery to freedom had arrived…In the utter darkness that prevailed behind the Iron Curtain, he succeeded to light the candles of Judaism and Zionism,” wrote Edelstein.
In a 2014 interview, Butman declared, “I am proud that in my life, 80 generations of my family that came here before me were here in Jerusalem until the Romans threw them out of the Land of Israel. I was chosen to be the face, the one chosen to close the circle. I, Hillel Butman, after 80 generations, came back.”
This former Krakow synagogue is now a bar, and Polish Jews are protesting By Cnaan Liphshiz JTA, June 14, 2019 https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/polish-jews-protest-use-of-former-krakow-synagogue-as-cafe
(JTA) — Polish Jews protested the use of a former synagogue in Krakow as a bar.
The protest about Chevra Tehilim prayer house in Kazimierz, in the city’s old Jewish quarter, appeared this week in a statement on the website of FestivALT, an independent arts collective, ahead of its third annual alternative Jewish arts festival in Krakow.
FestivALT’s organizers, who have staged protest interventions at the former synagogue, called the opening there in 2016 of Hevre Cafe “one of the worst examples of the exploitation of the neighborhood’s Jewish heritage.” The operators of the bar- cafe leased the building from a local Jewish community, which still owns it.
The program of the FestivALT festival this year, a 10-day affair beginning June 20, includes a panel discussion at the Galicia Jewish Museum about the issue. According to FestivALT, in 2016 the bar’s owners destroyed a wall and the original niche that held the Torah ark in order to install a new door, among other damages to the building that in 2001 was returned to the Orthodox Jewish community of Krakow.
FestivALT plans to erect a reproduction of the destroyed wall opposite the cafe. The building began serving as a synagogue in 1896. The Nazis destroyed much of the interior during the Holocaust, though some of the former synagogue’s impressive frescoes survived.
The progressive Jewish community Beit Krakow tried unsuccessfully to obtain use of the building in 2012. Four years later a cafe opened there. Since then, the condition of rare frescoes have “significantly deteriorated,” FestivALT wrote.
Boaz Gadka, the Orthodox rabbi of the Krakow community, told JTA that the lease of the former synagogue was done according to religious laws and was necessary as his community has too many synagogue for its needs.
“Let us commend the community leaders for their efforts and notwithstanding use the synagogue for something more honorable. It will soon return to the community,” he wrote in an email.
Hevre did not reply to requests for comment on FestivALT’s protest. The FestivALT event this year focuses on “women and agency,” including their sexual exploitation during the Holocaust. It features theater, visual art installations and burlesque cabaret performances.
Romania hosts inaugural summit for anti-Semitism envoys By Cnaan Lipshitz JTA, June 17, 2019
BUCHAREST (JTA) — Government coordinators in the fight against anti-Semitism from over a dozen countries gathered Monday in this Romanian capital for the first professional conference of its kind. The meeting took place amid significant increases in the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Austria, among other countries.
Organized by the World Jewish Congress and the government of Romania, the summit included Elan Carr from the United States and Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s first coordinator on combating anti-Semitism.
Envoys from Bulgaria, Poland, Russia and Azerbaijan, among other countries, met leaders of Jewish communities from across the world at the International Meeting Of Special Envoys and Coordinators Combating Anti-Semitism. Talks centered on exchanging working practices and efforts to have additional government adopt the definition of anti-Semitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA.
Despite the anti-Semitic increases in many countries, important achievements have been made over the past three years, von Schnurbein said.
“We had journeyed from acknowledgment of the problem to various actions to fight it,” she added.
Von Schnurbein noted the code of conduct signed in 2016 by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft and the European Commission requiring the firms to delete the majority of reported illegal hate speech within 24 hours. Compliance has risen to 72 percent in February from 28 percent in 2017, she added.
She said another success was the 2016 adoption by the European Parliament of the IHRA definition, whose significance is in its inclusion of some forms of vitriol against Israel.
Ultimately, though, von Schnurbein said the EU’s effort to fight anti-Semitism will be measured in the numbers of European Jews who see a drop in anti-Semitism.
“Ultimately, we must aim for our next survey to show Jews are more secure and see their future in Europe,” she said, where they are free to “express their identity, including support for Israel.”
How the Soviet Literary Establishment Censored Vasily Grossman By Robert Chandler The New Yorker, June 19, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-soviet-literary-establishment-censored-vasily-grossman
The Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate,” completed in 1960, is an epic story centered on the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany that marked the turning point in the Second World War. The novel includes many subplots—some civilian, some military, some set in German or Soviet concentration camps. A central and powerfully argued theme is the equivalence of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. This made “Life and Fate” anathema to the Soviet authorities, and the K.G.B. confiscated most copies of the typescript. Eventually, however, a microfilm was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and, in 1980, the text was finally published, in Switzerland, in the original Russian. In 1986, I translated and published a version in English.
Since that time, “Life and Fate” has been hailed as a major work of art and has been translated into most European languages, and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Vietnamese. However, many readers do not realize that Grossman did not intend “Life and Fate” to be a self-contained novel. It is, rather, the second of two closely related novels, originally conceived as two halves of a single work. The story line of “Life and Fate” begins where the previous novel ends, and the characters in the two novels are largely identical. The first novel was published in several different editions in the nineteen-fifties, under the title “For a Just Cause.” Those editions were heavily censored. My wife Elizabeth and I have published a translation of the novel, using Grossman’s original and preferred title, “Stalingrad,” and restored many of the lost passages.
The original publication process of the novel is a case study of Soviet editorial practices and censorship. Grossman worked on the manuscript from 1943 until 1949 and then spent three years battling with his editors. Anticipating difficulties from the beginning, he recorded all relevant official conversations, letters, and meetings in a document titled “Diary of the Journey of the Novel For a Just Cause through Publishing Houses.” In 1949, Grossman was allowed to publish “By the Volga,” a selection of extracts from the military chapters of “Stalingrad.” He had been an acclaimed war correspondent, and it was relatively easy for him to publish material on themes that he had already covered. His difficulties with his editors were over the civilian chapters—and, above all, passages relating to the novel’s central figure, the Jewish nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum.
In early 1951, Alexander Fadeyev, the chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, sent Grossman a number of demands. He was to add new chapters about the heroic work of miners and factory workers in Siberia and the Urals. He was to insert the current official view on the wartime alliance, one that criticized England and America for their reluctance to open a second front against Nazi Germany and for the apparent willingness of Churchill and Roosevelt to leave the Soviet Union to do most of the fighting. And he was to remove the figure of Viktor Shtrum—a demand clearly motivated by official anti-Semitism. Grossman replied, “I agree with everything, except Shtrum.” Alexander Tvardovsky, the chief editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, in which “Stalingrad” was to be serialized, proposed a compromise: Grossman should make Shtrum the student of a world-famous and purely Russian physicist. Grossman agreed to this suggestion and promptly wrote a new character into the novel, Dmitry Chepyzhin.
Fadeyev and Tvardovsky wanted to remove Shtrum because it was a time of extreme Russian chauvinism, and it was unacceptable for the hero of a novel about the Battle of Stalingrad to be anything but a purebred Russian. Grossman, by maneuvering to keep Shtrum, was being far bolder than either of his literary bosses realized. The scholar Tatiana Dettmer has discovered that Shtrum was modelled on a real-life figure: Lev Yakovlevich Shtrum, one of the founders of Soviet nuclear physics. Lev Shtrum was born in 1890 and executed in 1936; like many of the victims of Stalin’s purges, he was accused of Trotskyism. After his death, his books and papers were removed from libraries and he was deleted—with great thoroughness—from the historical record. Grossman bestowed on the central figure of his books the name, the profession, the family, the interests, and even the friends of an “enemy of the people.” Grossman was anything but naïve; he would have known the danger to which he was exposing himself and his novel.
With these changes, “Stalingrad” was serialized in Novy Mir, in 1952, and then republished as a book—first in 1954, and then in 1956. The three editions differ a great deal from one another, and they differ even more from Grossman’s early drafts. There are instances where the omissions (mostly in 1952, before Stalin’s death) and reinsertions (mainly in 1954 or 1956— after Stalin’s death, in 1953) relate to matters of obvious political sensitivity. These involved criticisms of collective farms and mentions of military defeats or of labor camps. More often, however, the differences in the text are less a matter of substance than of tone. Many of the passages omitted in the heavily censored edition, from 1952, are not in any way anti- Soviet. They must simply have been considered too silly or frivolous for a novel about something as important as the Battle of Stalingrad. During the last years of the Stalin regime, only the most dignified of literary styles was acceptable. Soviet soldiers and officials could not be portrayed as behaving childishly or selfishly at a moment of critical military importance.
There were also many other taboos. One of the strongest seems to have been any overt mention of petty crime. In the third edition, from 1956, a young lieutenant’s mess tin is “stolen” (ukrali) when he graduates from military school; in the more heavily edited editions, from 1952 and 1954, it “disappears” (propal). Another surprisingly strong taboo was the mention of insects. There are a great many references to lice, fleas, bedbugs, and cockroaches in the first draft, almost none in the 1952 edition, and only a few in the 1956. One example concerns a particularly slovenly soldier. The first draft reads, “If the company was being examined for lice, no one turned out to have more lice on him.” In the published editions, however, that part of the sentence reads, he “would be the only man on whom lice were discovered.”
A particularly telling instance of censorship occurs in a passage about one of the most appealing characters in the series, the modest but heroic Major Berozkin. Here, the first draft and the 1956 edition are identical. Both read:
He had fought in the summer of 1941 in the forests of western Belorussia and Ukraine. He had survived the black horror of the war’s first days; he knew everything and had seen everything. When other men told stories about the war, this modest major listened with a polite smile. “Oh, my brothers,” he would think. “I’ve seen things that cannot be spoken about, that no one will ever write down.”
Now and again, though, he would meet another quiet, shy major like himself. Recognizing him [ . . . ] as a kindred spirit, he would talk more freely. “Remember General N.?” he might say. “When his unit was surrounded, he plodded through a bog in full uniform, wearing all his medals, and with a goat on a lead. A couple of lieutenants he met asked, ‘Comrade General, are you following a compass bearing?’ And what did he answer? ‘A compass? This goat is my compass!’ ”
The general acts courageously. He does not take off his uniform and medals, even though these may attract the attention of German soldiers. And he is resourceful: a sure-footed goat is more likely than a compass to lead him safely out of the bog. Nevertheless, it is undignified for a Soviet general to entrust his life to a goat. And so, in the 1952 and 1954 editions, the final paragraph was omitted. Grossman was able to reinstate this paragraph, in 1956, but there were many passages that he wasn’t able to restore, some of which include examples of his best writing—moments of delicate irony, of slapstick comedy, of subtle psychological understanding, of shockingly vivid observation. And so, in 2019, the battered text of “Stalingrad” finds a home in a new edition. Our hope is that it will reveal the full breadth and emotional generosity of Grossman’s original vision.
A moment for truth: Pioneering Holocaust remembrance in Belarus By Ezra Mehlman Times Of Israel, June 20, 2019 http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-moment-for-truth-pioneering-holocaust-remembrance-in-belarus/
June 29,1942. 5 a.m. Slonim, Belarus. By the time the trumpet blast sounded, and the lorries creaked through the ghetto gates, the Jews knew better than to run. In November of the previous year, 10,000 men, women and children — nearly half of the ghetto’s population — were rounded up in the marketplace and driven eight kilometers out of town to the nearby village of Czepelova. There, they were stripped naked, lined up in groups of 10, and shot in burial pits by a drunken group of Germans and Lithuanian auxiliaries. The child observers to these massacres, many of them requisitioned by the killing squads to perform tasks that day such as cooking, entertaining the Germans, and sifting through clothing, describe a mass graves that “lived” for days as the muffled cries of victims buried alive persisted long after the day ended.
No. Today the Jews would hide. As hundreds of hooligans streamed through the ghetto’s gates — Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians among them — “all of them shouting for the final battle with the Jews of Slonim,” they would find hardly a soul in the streets. The Jews had entrenched themselves in makeshift shelters dug into the foundations and basements of their homes. While the crowd ran through the ghetto yelling, “Jews, out of your hiding places!” trucks wound through the narrow streets and sprayed gasoline on the squat buildings. Within minutes, the ghetto was ablaze. Human candles streamed out of basements and were shot. Babies were thrown into fires still alive. Those who emerged from their homes were marched in a long column back out to Czepelova or another killing field at Petrelovitch Hill and shot as their neighbors had been the previous year. Somewhere in this column, perhaps — we will never be sure — marched my great-grandmother and a great- aunt. Survivor Nachum Alpert describes a group of the town’s Christian residents, dressed in their festive clothes for a religious holiday, watching the event from outside the ghetto gates.
Two weeks later, with the smoldering ghetto in ruins, the destruction of the 700-year old Jewish community in Slonim was near-complete. What we know of these final moments comes from Jews who, presumed dead and suffocating from the weight of the corpses above them, crawled their way out of the pits and ran to the forest, many surviving the balance of the war in partisan units. The remaining 200 or so Slonim Jews designated as “useful” by the Germans and allowed to remain in the ghetto would be shot at the end of 1942.
Yet, even with the extermination campaign finished, the assault on Slonim’s Jews was far from over. The effort to assassinate their memory would now begin. Driven by an understanding that they would not be able to hold parts of the East and fearful of potential war crimes prosecution, the Nazis frantically returned to the burial pits in Slonim in June of 1944 as part of a covert operation called Aktion 1005, a campaign painstakingly detailed by German historian Andrej Angrick. With the Red Army fast approaching, they requisitioned locals to open up the graves with hooks, stack the corpses on funeral pyres, and incinerate the bodies, hiding evidence of their barbaric acts. As a final step in the cover-up, the local diggers were shot, eliminating the final non-German witnesses to one of the darkest chapters in human history.
What happened in Slonim wasn’t special or unique. Between 1941 and 1942, more than 1.5 million Jews were killed in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and other republics of the USSR as part of what Father Patrick Desbois has termed the “Holocaust by bullets.” As Desbois illustrates in vivid detail, these Jews were not gassed under the high walls of industrialized killing centers like those of Treblinka, Sobibor or Belzec, but shot in broad daylight by the Einsatzgruppen, German mobile killing squads and their eastern European collaborators. Their bodies now sit in largely unmarked graves right outside the towns where they used to live, if even that far. It is common to find these graves desecrated by robbers, a kolkhoz (collective farm) built on top of them, a drainage ditch dug through them, human bones scattered through a Ukrainian or Belarusian field.
For four decades after the war, public discussion of the Holocaust in these areas was suppressed under Soviet rule. Historical narratives of the period of German occupation were focused on acts of wartime heroism of Soviet partisans in the “Great Patriotic War.” Where discourse was allowed on Nazi atrocities, the Jewish-specific nature of these massacres was frequently obscured, history books preferring to identify the victims as “Soviet citizens,” rather than members of a particular religious or ethnic group. With 20 million Soviet civilians killed during World War II, the Holocaust was regarded as a mere chapter — brutal, for certain, but one of many — in a grim era of German occupation.
The Imperative
How does one go about reconstructing the memory of a community that has been so totally eradicated — first spiritually in the toppling of its institutions and the enslavement of its population, then physically in the extermination of its citizenry, and finally historically in the obscuring of the events of the Second World War by the victorious Soviet regime? Can this one little Belarusian town serve as a launching point for a new type of Holocaust remembrance, one that seeks an accurate retelling of the past, while acknowledging that the absence of a native Jewish population requires local ownership? Can Jewish history be celebrated as part of a shared multiethnic heritage, as something of relevance to a society that no longer has a Jewish presence?
That is our imperative. A mission this massive begins with a single building.
The Great Synagogue of Slonim, as it was back in the day, and before World War II. (Courtesy) Bearing witness to the events of Slonim is the Great Synagogue, a majestic baroque structure built in 1642 and located in the center of town. Pictures from the turn of the 20th century show market days in a prosperous village that was 70 percent Jewish, the square brimming with vendors, selling textiles, grain, all other wares from horse drawn carriages. This square was also where the Jews were regularly rounded up, humiliated, beaten, and marched out of town during the various extermination campaigns. In 2019, the imposing synagogue sits behind a wooden fence in decrepit condition, defaced by graffiti.
What do the residents of Slonim think, as they walk past this beautiful, rotting behemoth every day?
The Slonim Synagogue Restoration Project
Two years ago, a group banded together with the goal of saving this structure and formed the Slonim Synagogue Steering Committee. It is a collaboration that fuses together three diverse strands: those of us who have family ties to Slonim, experts in restoration and Jewish history (represented by the Foundation for Jewish Heritage), and a group focused on reinvigorating the fledgling local Belarusian Jewish community around this project (represented by The Together Plan). In partnership with the City of Slonim, the Steering Committee plans to harness these three elements — the stories, the stones, and community — to convert this hulking, decaying structure into a center for a new type of Holocaust remembrance.
The Stories
In 2017, I immersed myself in a far-reaching family history project which brought me into contact with a number of the other Slonim descendants. As affected as I was by the discoveries of what my family had to endure, I was further moved by the vivid anecdotes passed along and documented by others — children left to fend for themselves in the forest after witnessing the murder of their parents, teenagers who only survived a massacre by fainting into a burial trench at the exact moment of gunfire. It has been said that the unfathomable nature of genocides is the precise condition that allows their continued existence — if people cannot contemplate the execution of millions of people in a short period of time, might they doubt that these events actually happened? Rather than imagining the eradication of an entire population, it is therefore perhaps easier to picture one’s child, mother, or father killed 1.5 million times. For these reasons, the preservation of family stories, and the incorporation of personal narratives into a physical restoration project, are an absolutely vital component of our project.
These families are represented by steering committee chair, Simon Kaplinsky, whose father was born in Slonim. “We must avoid allowing the heinous deeds of the Nazis from obscuring the long and intertwined history of the Jews and Christian peoples of Belarus. Although there was friction at times between the two, there is also a long history of tolerance and prosperity. I hope that our saving of the synagogue will not just be a memorial to the Jews of Slonim. It needs to be a facility for the people of the City to remind us all of the common history of all the citizens of the City over the centuries.”
The Stones
The physical restoration of the property is being overseen by the Foundation for Jewish Heritage, a British charity focused on the preservation of historically important sites throughout Europe. Having mapped over 3,000 historic synagogues throughout Europe and ranked them in terms of significance and danger of deterioration, the Foundation identified the Slonim synagogue as one of the three most critical structures, prioritizing its preservation campaign. “Often the last physical evidence of vanished Jewish life is the former synagogue building. Through preserving the remarkable Great Synagogue in Slonim, we have the opportunity to create an important site of education that can have an impact across Belarus and beyond, commemorating, and celebrating, a centuries-old vibrant Jewish presence that was in the town — and in the country as a whole. While the building no longer serves as a synagogue given the tragic loss of its community of users, it can still serve as a profound place of meaning,” said Michael Mail, the CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Heritage.
The Great Synagogue of Slonim undergoing restoration: Internal cornice paintings. (Courtesy) Our immediate task is to perform emergent repairs to the structure itself, an objective on which we have made progress across the last year, repairing the roof and conducting a comprehensive survey of cracks. After the building has been structurally secured, we plan to initiate a feasibility study to evaluate the universe of options for what this building could become: a center for cross-cultural exchange, an event space, educational center, a memorial, a multi-religious prayer hall? With the feasibility study complete, we will initiate the final, substantive renovation phase of this project.
The Community
Strong local ownership is crucial to the success of this project. The Together Plan, a British charity centered on reinvigorating Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union, is working with community leaders to ensure that the project is a celebration of a shared national identity, rather than perceived — or enacted — as a form of western imperialism. Belarus is, quite literally, a country built on top of Jewish graves. There were 800,000 Jews killed in the country of Belarus between 1941 and 1944. The bones are everywhere — wherever there was a village, there is a mass grave. Earlier this year, a construction crew building a parking lot in Brest, Belarus unearthed a burial pit containing 1,000 Jewish corpses. It was not the first such exhumation and will certainly not be the last.
While the destruction of the Jewish community was near-absolute, some 20,000 Jews still exist today in Belarus, primarily in Minsk. Debra Brunner, the Director of the Together Plan, said, “In Slonim, our focus is on creating dialogue around the Synagogue and it’s future potential. The aim is to give voice to representatives from the local community — the municipality, historians, heritage experts, teachers, librarians, museum curators and Jewish and non-Jewish people living in Slonim. It is critical that we work alongside the people of Slonim and the Belarus authorities to help them find their voice so that the Slonim Synagogue, an edifice of such strategic and vital heritage value, becomes a building that can tell its own Jewish story, whilst playing a central role in bringing life, creativity and value to the civil society of Slonim, of Belarus and beyond.”
Moment for Truth
Only since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has open dialogue and examination of the Holocaust in this region been permitted. As opportunities gradually emerged to reconstruct a historical narrative that included Jewish elements, revisionist histories also began to take hold. In 2018, Poland officially criminalized the assignment of any blame to the “Polish nation or state” in the destruction of the country’s Jewish population. Latvia annually commemorates the Latvian Legionnaires, its local Waffen-SS unit, who oversaw the murder of 90% of the country’s Jewish population, with an annual march. Slonim’s own museum does not mention the events surrounding the extermination of the town’s Jews during the Holocaust.
With the youngest Holocaust survivors now in their 80s, there will soon be no one left to tell the stories of what transpired in this dark era. As a wave of ultraconservative movements sweeps Europe once again, the likes of which has not been seen since the Second World War, reminding the world of the dangers of fascism and ethno-nationalism has never been more urgent. In Slonim, we are being given a moment for truth, an opportunity to tell the story as it happened. In this endeavor, we will need all the help we can get.
Holocaust survivors to receive increase in compensation from Germany By Uri Bollag The Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2019 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Holocaust-survivors-to-receive-increase-in-compensation-from-Germany-593140
Holocaust survivors are set to receive an upgrade in the compensation they receive from the German government, after an agreement was signed on Thursday between the finance ministries of Israel and Germany.
The Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority – which is housed within the Finance Ministry and leads the initiative to improve the conditions of Holocaust survivors in Israel – assessed that there was a need to increase the stipends the German government pays directly to survivors.
The lengthy negotiation between the authorities resulted in the signing of a memorandum of understanding, according to which survivors will receive an additional 100 Euros to 400 Euros per month. This increase will raise total funds that Germany pays them each year to 15 million Euro.
“I am pleased to announce the significant addition to the benefits of Holocaust survivors who are receiving direct stipends from Germany,” said the authority’s director, Ofra Ross, who called the addition “unprecedented.”
She further thanked the German representatives for their professional negotiations and goodwill in reaching this agreement.
The Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority has also implemented measures to improve the lives of survivors. The steps include grants of NIS 10,000 a year, exemptions on paying for medicine, increased nursing assistance, and employing volunteers to ease their loneliness.
There are some 200,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel, with around 50,000 living at or below the poverty line.
Aviva Silberman, founder of Aviv for Holocaust Survivors, which helps survivors navigate and get informed on their rights, welcomed the agreement.
“Finally they raised the compensation level for Holocaust survivors,” Silberman said, explaining that the compensation law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz) hadn’t been updated since the 1960s.
“For years nothing was done about it,” Silverman said. “While here in Israel they kept on updating and raising the payments, the BEG was stagnant and stayed at the same amount. It is very meaningful.”
Ultimately, however, the new agreement will affect only around 7,000 survivors, partly because most survivors who signed up to the BEG until the ’60s are deceased by now, and, as Silberman explained, because survivors are categorized according to different criteria.
Survivors from North Africa, for example, who suffered from the Holocaust but were not directly swept up in it, do not receive compensation from Germany. The same goes for emigrants from the former Soviet Union and survivors who did not undergo forced labor.
“The payment structure for Holocaust survivors is complex,” Silberman said.
While Israel’s Finance Ministry has recognized many more survivors in recent years, they still do not receive appropriate compensation for the suffering, with some of them receiving as little as NIS 4,000 a year.
“It is the role of the Germans to take care of these populations as well,” Silberman added. “It’s not Israelis who are responsible for the Holocaust. It’s not you and me who have to pay survivors from our taxes.
“While the government does need to take care of these additional populations, it also needs to come from Germany,” she said, adding that “I think they should continue to negotiate with the Germans as successfully as they did now, so that they recognize these populations as well.”
A Chat with Sharansky By Jay Nordlinger National Review, June 17, 2019 https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/natan-sharansky-dissident- hero/?fbclid=IwAR0VLpNhw1XCeWDejQcivLZlIxb4ceQmCCbV9sAu5Rc1A6n6z-PVYT5ySps
Natan Sharansky looks the same as he always has — and he is a welcome sight. So is Avital, his wife. She came out of the Soviet Union before he did — a good twelve years before. She campaigned for the release of her husband, who was in the Gulag. I tell her, “I remember watching you on Nightline and other programs.” Her husband remarks, “The biggest mistake the KGB made was letting Avital out.”
From what I can tell, they have a tender, warm relationship — truly spousal.
We are sitting in a coffee shop here in Jerusalem, with mutual friends. The Sharanskys are known in this shop, as I understand it, and basically left in peace. In other places, Natan would be surrounded. “By admirers and autograph-seekers?” I ask. No, he answers: By people wanting him to return to politics.
This is a turbulent season in Israeli politics. (When is it not, really?). There has been one election in April and there will be another — a re-do, so to speak — in September.
Let me provide a brief reminder of who Natan Sharansky is: He is one of the hero-dissidents of the Soviet Union, a leading “refusenik,” which is to say, a person who was denied the right — refused the right — to emigrate to Israel. After nine years in the Gulag (1977 to 1986), he was released, and allowed to come to Israel. He wrote a memoir, one of the great prison memoirs ever: Fear No Evil. He eventually entered Israeli politics, reaching high levels. Later, he was the head of the Jewish Agency, a huge non-profit that is devoted to a strong Jewish identity.
There are people who regard Natan Sharansky — for his courage and eloquence in Soviet days; for his perpetual advocacy of freedom and democracy, for people everywhere — as one of the great figures of the age. I am one of them.
I wrote about Sharansky at some length in 2005, when I interviewed him. For that piece — “Being Sharansky” — go here.
He was born in 1948, the same year as modern Israel. His name was Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky. (“Natan Sharansky” came when he landed in Israel.) He was a math whiz and a chess whiz — I mean, really good. Not like the best kid in the neighborhood. Like, extraordinarily good. Here in the coffee shop, I ask him, “How’s your math?” Good, he answers. He finds that he can do calculations and work out problems in his head that younger people cannot — because they have relied on computing devices.
Sharansky and Charles Krauthammer often played chess together. Krauthammer once told me of how he teased Sharansky. “No fair,” he’d say. “You spent nine years in the Gulag, goofing off, working on your chess, mentally, while the rest of us had to go out and make a living.”
I have recently interviewed Vladimir Bukovsky, another great Soviet-era dissident. Let me quote something I wrote about that:
“Do you have a lot of math?” I ask Bukovsky. “Yeah,” he says. “I love math.” I say, “Must be something in the Russian water. Russian kids seem to be math whizzes.” This is a misimpression, says Bukovsky. “It’s like chess,” he adds. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, the Russians are so good at chess!’ To begin with, it’s the Jews who are so good!”
I bring this up with Sharansky — who makes an interesting point: Jews often exercised their minds in yeshivas (schools that focus on religious texts). In places where these institutions were denied — e.g., the Soviet Union — maybe Jews channeled these energies into chess?
He and I talk about dissidents and science. Sharansky himself was a prodigy, as you know. And Sakharov, let’s not forget — Sharansky worked with him, by the way — was not only a human-rights hero: He was one of the top physicists in the world. “A genius,” Sharansky says.
Boris Nemtsov, too, was scientifically inclined — more than inclined: He was a serious scientist. He earned his Ph.D. in physics at 25 and was a protégé of the great Vitaly Ginzburg, a Nobel Prize winner. Nemtsov left science, however, for politics, thinking it critically important. He led the opposition to Putin until he was murdered, within sight of the Kremlin walls, in 2015.
We have a little talk about Putin, Sharansky and I. Vladimir Bukovsky says that Putin is a pure Soviet man — a product of the Soviet system, a product of the KGB. True, says Sharansky, except in one respect: Putin is not hostile to the Jews, as Jews. They can’t criticize him, of course, but no one can. There is not official anti-Semitism, and Putin has some sympathy for the Jews. When he was young, certain Jews were important to him.
Other than that — and that is an interesting exception — yes, a Soviet man, no doubt.
Charles Krauthammer told me something else, concerning Sharansky: He came out of nine years in the Gulag basically untouched, unscarred — in mental and emotional balance. “It’s as though he had gone to the Caribbean to lie on the beach for nine years,” Charles said. I mentioned this to Bukovsky, when we talked several weeks ago. The same was true of him, he said (twelve years in the Gulag): “If they don’t break you, you come out all right. If they do — you don’t.”
Does Sharansky agree? Yes, he does.
I remember something from his book, Fear No Evil. For a time, he was able to study the Bible alongside a fellow zek, a fellow prisoner, a Christian named Volodya. They called their study sessions “Reaganite readings.” Why? Because they had heard that the American president declared a particular year — 1983 — the “Year of the Bible.”
Here in the coffee shop, I ask Sharansky about Volodya: What became of him? Does he know? Has he ever seen him, post- Gulag? Yes. The man was a Christian activist, and he taught French to earn a living.
Nine years in the Gulag were hard, of course — very. Almost unspeakably so. In Israel, Sharansky spent nine years in politics: 1996 to 2005. These were not easy either, he says, in their own ways. (Sharansky was the head of four different ministries plus deputy prime minister.)
I remember well that Sharansky argued against an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, on the grounds that it would be very bad for Israelis and perhaps worse for Palestinians, who needed to build up democratic institutions, else they would be at the mercy of extremists. Does he still believe that the withdrawal was a mistake? “Of course,” he says. “And I argued and argued with Arik about it” (“Arik” being Ariel Sharon, who was prime minister in this period).
One of Sharansky’s biggest admirers is George W. Bush — who, in 2006, gave Sharansky the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Where is it?” I ask. At home, says Sharansky. Recently, there was a break-in at the house, and the medal was not taken. Neither was the Congressional Gold Medal — which Sharansky received when he came out of the Soviet Union, in 1986.
Sharansky and GWB are kindred spirits, and the former serves on the latter’s human-freedom board. They have a meeting in a few days, says Sharansky.
He and I talk about liberal democracy, which is under siege in many places. It is a rare thing, Sharansky emphasizes: enjoyed by very few people, and all too briefly. This is a melancholy subject.
Sharansky is working on a new book, which may have the title “Nine, Nine, Nine.” The title refers to nine years in the Gulag; nine years in Israeli politics; and nine years at the head of the Jewish Agency. You know what my American political mind thinks of, don’t you? You got it: The “9-9-9” plan touted by Herman Cain in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries. (Cain was proposing the replacement of all current taxes with a 9 percent personal income tax, a 9 percent federal sales tax, and a 9 percent corporate tax. My friend and colleague Kevin D. Williamson wrote against this plan under the memorable title “Nein! Nein! Nein!”)
I tell you honestly, I was hoping to get a glimpse of the book — not the forthcoming one, much as I’m looking forward to reading it. I’m speaking of another book, a small one, yet an overwhelmingly powerful one. And I do glimpse it, as Sharansky pulls it out of his shirt pocket and we discuss it.
Let me quote from my 2005 piece, please:
At the close of our conversation, I ask him about his Psalm book. Does he still have it? A pocket book of Psalms was given to him by his wife, Avital, a few days before he was arrested. He went through hell to hang on to this book. The authorities often deprived him of it. Once, he went on a “work strike,” entailing several months of the punishment cell — until he got that book back. In another period, “I took my Psalm book and for days on end … recited all one hundred and fifty of King David’s psalms, syllable by syllable.” (I quote from Fear No Evil.) …
One other thing about the Psalm book: It “was the only material evidence of my mystical tie with Avital.”
Toward the very end of his ordeal, at the airport in Mos•cow — Sharansky had no idea what was happening to him — he refused to board the plane before they gave him back his Psalm book. In front of photographers, he dropped to the snow, yelling for it. They gave it back to him. Once aboard — when they told him he was being released — he recited the Psalm he had always designated for his liberation day, Psalm 30: “I will extol thee, O Lord; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.”
Anyway, back in New York, sitting in a hotel dining room, I ask whether he still has the book. He grins a little, reaches inside his jacket, and produces it. There it is, this tiny book, big as life. Apparently, he has it on him always, the way one carries wallet and keys. Has he ever been in danger of losing it (I mean, lately)? “Sometimes I forget where I’ve put it, and it becomes more of a problem with age.”
Well, 14 years later — and 42 after he received it — he still has it. In all candor, it’s a pleasure to lay eyes on it. A pleasure, also, to lay eyes on Natan and Avital. They are a big, big deal to many of us, wherever we live, and whether we get a chance to meet them or not.
Georgia's president blames Russia over violent protests By Nathan Hodge, Milena Veselinovic, Bianca Britton and Luka Gviniashvili CNN, June 21, 2019 https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/europe/georgia-protests-intl/index.html
The president of Georgia has accused Russia of meddling in its internal affairs and stirring anger that led to protesters attempting to storm the Georgian parliament on Thursday.
Thousands of people tried to storm the parliament in the capital, Tbilisi, Thursday evening, protesting a visit from Sergey Gavrilov, a member of the Russian Communist Party.
Following the chaotic demonstrations, President Salome Zourabichvili wrote on Facebook late Thursday: "Russia is our enemy and occupier. Today, the Fifth Column orchestrated by Russia might become more dangerous than open aggression."
Zourabichvili described the events in parliament as "humiliating the country and insulting its dignity," but added that "in no case does this justify the artificially stirred wave of anti-state actions aimed at storming the parliament and overthrowing the authorities."
On Friday, Moscow expressed its "extreme disapproval" over the protests, which it labeled a "Russophobic provocation."
"One certainly can't help being extremely concerned over the fact that there were aggressive outpourings directed at Russian citizens," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a conference call. Controversial visit
According to Russian state news agency TASS, Gavrilov opened a session of the assembly at the Georgian parliament building and infuriated Georgian opposition deputies by sitting in the speaker's chair. Reuters reported that the lawmaker also addressed delegates in Russian, rather than the local language.
Members of the opposition rushed the podium in protest. Gavrilov told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti that he was doused with water by protesting Georgian deputies.
"They broke into the hall, seized the rostrum and my seat," he said. "We had a break, they started looking for me, tearing up documents, pouring water on me ... showing portraits of Putin."
As protesters outside tried to enter the parliament, police used tear gas to disperse them, CNN witnessed. Some protesters appeared bloodied from skirmishes with law enforcement, while others had taken official shields and riot gear from the police.
Georgia was part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and in recent years has struggled with tensions with Russia over Moscow's support for its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Gavrilov told RIA-Novosti that he believed Georgian protesters demanded his removal because of his alleged participation in the separatist conflict in Abkhazia in the early 1990s. A member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gavrilov has said he never participated in any armed conflicts.
Georgian police used tear gas to disperse thousands of protesters attempting to storm the country's parliament. Georgian police used tear gas to disperse thousands of protesters attempting to storm the country's parliament.
Tensions flared between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 over a Russian-backed separatist movement in the province of South Ossetia, when then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops to regain control over the self-proclaimed autonomous region. Russia responded by moving tanks and soldiers through South Ossetia and advancing farther into Georgian territory.
When the fighting ended, Russia's military pulled back only as far as South Ossetia, which it sees as an independent state.