Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union

How on earth did the prisoners of Zion and refuseniks have the courage to do what they did? Applying to leave for Israel, studying Hebrew and Judaism, and demonstrating for human rights while knowing full well that their actions could cause them to lose their livelihoods or end up in the cruel gulag or in years of hard labor camps—where did they get the strength, the fortitude, the dedication? 

Like many Jews of my generation, we thought we were somewhat aware of what was going on in Soviet Russia. We had read Elie Wiesel’s “The Jews of Silence.” We marched. We attended rallies. I wrote a song in honor of Natan Sharansky, interviewed former Prisoners of Zion and refuseniks who made aliyah, and directed a play on the kangaroo court trial of Ari Volvovsky, an underground Hebrew teacher whose family was adopted by our community of Efrat. Our daughter interviewed female refuseniks, now living in Israel, for her bat mitzva project; they included, among others, Volvovsky’s wife, Mila, and Tatiana (Tanya) Edelstein, of blessed memory, the wife of the former Speaker of the Knesset, Yuli Edelstein. 

So I thought I knew something.

Reading Pamela Braun Cohen’s book “Hidden Heroes” opened my eyes in a way that I didn’t think possible. Her stories are astonishing and spellbinding.

Reading Pamela Braun Cohen’s book “Hidden Heroes” opened my eyes in a way that I didn’t think possible. Her stories are astonishing and spellbinding.

She introduces us to the heartbreaking, horrific and inspirational stories of both the well-known Soviet Jewish personalities and of those whose names are less known to the public. But Cohen, who lived in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, also tells the story of those who fought from her side of the world. 

An August 31 book launch in Jerusalem was hosted by Gefen Publishing House, and by Yosef Abramowitz, who was recently nominated by 12 countries for a Nobel Prize for his work in solar energy and was an activist for Soviet Jewry. Sharansky recalled, from the podium, how his jailers had taunted him, “Look who is fighting for you! Just students and housewives.” But those students and housewives, along with others, helped shake the world and change history.

Cohen takes us from the Soviet Jewish awakening—encouraged by Israeli’s victory in the Six Day War—through the notorious Leningrad trials in 1970 of 11 people, mostly Jews, who had tried to hijack a plane “to marshal international attention,” including Sylva Zalmanson, her husband Edward Kuznetsov and Yosef Mendelevich. She concludes her book in the 1990s.

Of the Leningrad hijackers she writes, “[They were] Jewish moral giants who had pitted themselves against the Kremlin. But I wanted to know more … How had they come to make a decision that would result in years of imprisonment and hard labor in Siberia?”  Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits, the pilot who was to fly the captured plane, were sentenced to death, a sentence that was eventually commuted, due to international pressure. 

Cohen was a happy Jewish mother and wife who was involved in her synagogue, sent her kids to Jewish camps, car-pooled, and enjoyed family barbecues and weekends in Wisconsin. But her life changed forever when she learned about the Soviet Jewish struggle.

She began to read about the struggle in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent; eventually, she began to write for the publication. “Soon enough, my dining room table, spotted with coffee stains, was covered with newspaper clippings. I was part of a group of activist-oriented mothers … with babies on our laps and toddlers at our feet … who met regularly to discuss affairs of the nation and write to our congressional representatives.” They discussed civil rights, the Vietnam War and more. She began to rally the group “to protest the Kremlin’s denial of the right of Jews to emigrate.”

As she got more involved, she learned of the CASJ (Chicago Action for Soviet Jewry), the UCSJ (Union of Councils for Soviet Jews), and the SSSJ (Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry), all of whom pressed for the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. It was one of the initiatives for which the UCSJ worked closely with Congress to ensure that the Soviets were not granted most-favored-nation-status as long as Jews could not emigrate freely. 

In 1986 Cohen became national president of the UCSJ. She was joined in her efforts by Marillyn Tallman, who had been her Jewish history teacher. Another of Tallman’s students was Tom Lantos, who later became a congressman from California and the cochairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

Cohen says that people were astonished at what she and others were doing with such passion, and challenged her, “You think you can take on the Kremlin?” But at her first UCSJ annual meeting she discovered that she was in good company with self-educated Sovietologists, savvy activists, volunteers, doctors and business people and “strong, gutsy women” who were “capable of facing down any KGB goon, each running her own council … All were consumed with the right of Jews to emigrate in the face of anti-Jewish persecution.”

Cohen overcame a natural shyness to reach out to congressmen, senators, presidents and prime ministers. She flew across country as necessary, and made many trips to the Soviet Union. Her first trip was in 1978, with her husband, Lenny. They packed their suitcases, as did other Jewish tourists, with books, tallitot, tefillin, kosher mezuzah klafim, cameras, tape recorders and other items that could be sold on the black market so refuseniks who had been fired from their jobs, after applying for aliyah, would be able to subsist.

Her name became known. Even the KGB knew about Pamela and her colleagues. On her trips to the USSR, she knew she was being followed and listened to. 

Cohen and the Union of Council activists took a bi-partisan approach, and she tries to give credit to all those who helped. I asked which U.S. politicians were the most helpful. “President Reagan. His undiplomatic assertion that the USSR was an ‘evil empire’ gave him a diplomatic edge for negotiation on trade, arms control and human rights. And George Shultz. Senators Henry Jackson and Frank Lautenberg established a firm foundation for the movement, the former by tying emigration to trade and the latter by redefining Soviet Jewish emigrants as refugees … Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House were united on the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration, Soviet human rights abuse, and Soviet antisemitism!” In the fall of 1976, the wives of two refusenik-protestors who had been arrested, Boris Chernobilsky and Yosef Ahss, sent appeals to Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter. Three weeks later the men were released.

Cohen’s home phone would ring at all hours of the day and night. Calls from refuseniks were constantly being sabotaged by the KGB.

Cohen’s home phone would ring at all hours of the day and night. Calls from refuseniks were constantly being sabotaged by the KGB. Cohen trained the operators from the American side to push back and not take no for an answer from their Soviet counterparts.

She credits her husband Lenny and their children with supporting her every step of the way, even when evenings with friends morphed into Pamela’s lecturing. “What? You don’t know who Mendelevitch is?” She could not understand how there were some Jews who didn’t get it. The family’s life was saturated with the cause. Cohen recalls how when she and her husband were on a romantic weekend getaway, she said to him, upon awaking, “Lenny, did I tell you that Lev Blitshtein went to visit Ida Nudel in Siberia?” That same Lev Blitshtein was denied exit by the Kremlin on the excuse that he had knowledge of “state secrets,” even though he was the only sausage-maker in Russia.

The morning after the bat mitzva party of her daughter, Brooke, she writes, “Before she opened her gifts and we could relive the moment together, I allowed a limousine to carry me off to the airport for a fight to DC for our annual UCSJ meeting. Maybe that’s when I began asking the Almighty to take care of my children as I was trying to take care of His. 

 “It is written in Leviticus, ‘Do not stand by the blood of your brother’ [19:16]. We were impelled by an imperative to rescue … We were Jews. We were one people. They were ours.” She and others were fervently committed that never again would Jews on the other side of the world be silent. 

Even when the doors of the USSR started to open a bit in the ’70s and ’80s, it was a trickle compared to the hundreds of thousands of refuseniks still denied emigration visas. Families were torn apart; the Soviets would cruelly give permission for some members of a family to leave and not to others, placing them in an impossible dilemma.  

Resistance was taking place all over the USSR. There were thirteen young activists in Kiev, representing the “Second Generation in Refusal,” who wrote a heartfelt letter to the Communist Party Congress speaking of their desire to go to their “historic home.” They were all arrested. There were also large number of Jews living in Central Asia who were trying to get out. Cohen describes her first harrowing plane ride in horrific snowy, stormy weather to that area, when the flight attendant seated herself next to her, asking her questions that made it clear she was KGB. Cohen did not know if she and her cohorts on that trip would get out of it alive.

Cohen and her colleagues were always seeking creative solutions to help the refuseniks. On one occasion they got bear fat through the UCSJ’s council in Alaska for a Chinese homeopathic practitioner to treat Yaakov Mesh, to heal him from the brutal beating he had received in prison; they sent it with a tourist from Alaska going to Vladivostock. Mesh recovered.

The battle of the Kremlin against the Jewish refuseniks was also a psychological one, so the CASJ sent the refuseniks copies of the UCSJ’s statements, press releases, news articles, statements in the “Congressional Record,” and relevant op-eds. They would photograph the items, repack the negatives in their original packages so they looked like unused rolls of film, and then tourists would drop them off at the home of refusenik Yakov “Yasha” Goredetsky, who would then arrange for them to be developed, copied and distributed to the refusenik community. She learned that these photos “lifted the morale, brought hope,” and the refuseniks knew they were not alone. Subsequently they did the same things with Hebrew audio tapes.

Cohen writes, “Once they applied to leave, crossing the invisible line into defiance of the Soviet demand for submission … refuseniks’ actions lit up the night sky like flashing comets. Every act of defiance reflected their inner liberation, their desire to live in freedom, in Israel—to live as Jews … the only freedom in the USSR was among the dissidents and refuseniks. Both [Anatoly] Altman and Sharansky said they experienced that freedom to resist in rat-infested frigid prison cells.”

Hebrew teachers like Aleksander Kholmiansky and Yuli Edelstein were arrested; a gun had been planted in Kholmiansky’s apartment and narcotics in Edelstein’s. Ari Volvovsky was sentenced to three years for teaching Hebrew. I interviewed the Kholmianskys in Israel in 1988 and met them again at Cohen’s book launch.

There were interlocking threads. Cohen was called by a California congressman’s foreign affairs assistant who wanted to help a California woman who had been hit by a troika while visiting Moscow. The U.S. embassy was closed; Cohen found a Moscow refusenik, Leonid Stonov, to meet her husband at the airport. The assistant asked how to thank her. She asked for President Reagan to send a letter to Volvovsky at the labor camp. Ari was “invited” to the office of the camp commandant who asked if he was a friend of President Reagan’s. He said, “Well, if President Reagan wants to be my friend, I don’t mind.” He was released a few months later. 

Pamela told me that some of the people who she feels were the most central in her organization were “UCSJ’s national director, Micah Naftalin, and David Waksberg, Lynn Singer, Glenn Richter, Judy Balint, Bob Gordon, Morey Schapira, Ruth Newman, Helene Kedvin, Sandy Spinner, Babette Wampold.” They all had specialties in the battle plan.

The British 35s, also called “The Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry,” brought Mikhail Shirman, a young Soviet Jewish refugee living in Israel, to the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland in 1986, where Reagan and Gorbachev would be meeting.  Shirman was critically ill and needed a bone marrow transplant from his sister, still in the USSR, but the Kremlin would not let her leave. A Chicago Tribune reporter asked him why he was there, and he answered, “I’ve come to meet my murderer.” “The next morning,” writes Cohen, “Mikhail’s story was on the front pages of the world’s press … But by the time Gorbachev let his sister leave, it was too late.” Cohen attended Mikhail’s shloshim in Israel. 

Pamela drew closer to Judaism while working for Soviet Jewry. After her son had a fall that left him unconscious and needing surgery, when he pulled through, they koshered their home. She saw how Soviet Jews were endangering themselves to live as Jews, and was inspired to live more Jewishly herself. 

“It took many years to understand that Esses … Volvovsky, Mendelevich and others who hacked their way through the thick, secular Communist propaganda were not only creating a path for their own Jewish Soviet people, but also for me, far away in Deerfield. … Many of us in the West would later come to realize that in the process of rescuing Soviet Jews, we ourselves had been rescued.”

You may not be able to read this book in one sitting, and not just due to its length. The horrors endured by the Prisoners of Zion and the refuseniks and their families are incomprehensible, as is their courage, as is the perseverance of their champions thousands of miles away. “Hidden Heroes” will both haunt and inspire you for a long time to come.

Toby Klein Greenwald is an award-winning journalist, theater director and editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com