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Students get a history lesson on Zev Yaroslavsky’s contributions to Soviet Jewry

Last week, the power elite of Los Angeles gathered at Walt Disney Concert Hall to pay homage to retiring L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.
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November 24, 2014

Last week, the power elite of Los Angeles gathered at Walt Disney Concert Hall to pay homage to retiring L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Children sang. Cellists performed. Former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reminded the thousand or so friends of Yaroslavsky who assembled that Yaroslavsky was Jewish and a friend of Israel, a fact that escaped the notice of the others recalling the retiring supervisor’s numerous accomplishments in public life.

A couple of years ago, while I was teaching at New Community Jewish High School in West Hills, Yaroslavsky visited the campus to offer a lesson about Los Angeles County government for the students in an Advanced Placement American Government class. The work he spoke about to those students included many of the concerns his friends and colleagues spoke of in Disney Hall: transit, homelessness, preservation of open space in the Santa Monica Mountains, reforming the Los Angeles Police Department, supporting L.A. County’s fine-arts facilities — including the John Anson Ford Theatres, Disney Hall, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hollywood Bowl.

Many of the AP Government students who met the supervisor were also my students in a senior seminar titled “Contemporary Challenges of the Jewish World.” My sense of what constitutes “contemporary” is pretty elastic, as most of the cases come from the last half of the 20th century. Shortly after Yaroslavsky’s visit, my students were analyzing the effectiveness of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a measure that denied trade benefits to the Soviet Union so long as it denied Jews (and other prisoners of conscience) the right to emigrate freely. Because the Soviet Union had dissolved 20 years before I taught those lessons, and the rescue of Soviet Jewry had never been part of these students’ personal experience, I showed them “Refusenik,” a 2007 documentary about the effort.

The film portrayed a 22-year-old Zev Yaroslavsky visiting Jews in the Soviet Union. It showed a young Yaroslavsky holding clandestine meetings with Soviet Jewish activists. It also portrayed his efforts to smuggle Jewish religious books and articles to the people he visited.

As would seem only reasonable, Yaroslavsky and the people interviewed in “Refusenik” tended to support the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. It took some deep digging to find sources contending that Jackson-Vanik, though based in motives we could all support, might have been counter-productive.

Knowing that their teacher would not have presented a topic in which there was a clear “right answer,” the students explored a number of approaches to the challenges facing Jews who sought to live in Israel —or anyplace else — where they would be free of the constraints on Jewish practice that they experienced in the pre-glasnost USSR. The students worked through some of these problems in chevruta, then brought their conclusions to a discussion by the class as a whole.

Before the class discussion went very far, one young student, who spoke only once or twice a semester, raised her hand. “Is that young fellow in ‘Refusenik’ the same person who spoke to our AP Government class? The name is the same.”

I assured her it was the same person. Older, thinner (thanks to his running habit), grayer, but the same person.

“That young guy had some serious cojones,” she said. Nineteen heads nodded in agreement. Including mine.

Normally I would not have been eager to have a student make a reference of that sort — though I suspect the Spanish teacher may have taken some comfort from it. But the consensus ruled the moment. That’s the story that wasn’t told to the thousand friends of Yaroslavsky at Disney Hall. Happily, some of our children know it and can be uplifted by the example of that young man’s efforts on behalf of our people and his lifelong dedication to tikkun olam.


Neil Kramer is dean of faculty emeritus at New Community Jewish High School in West Hills.

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