The “Jews of silence”—the “Jews of hope”—the “Jews of triumph”: revisiting methodological approaches to the study of the Jewish movement in the USSR

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted under the auspices of the Leonid Nevzlin Center for the Russian and East European Jewry, and the Bernard Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel.

Notes

1. Resolution: 19/12/2001, International Convention “The Jews of Silence—the Jews of Triumph. Soviet Jewry Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” (in Russian), unpublished.

2. “Istoricheskaia missiia russkogo evreistva” (Historical mission of Russian Jewry) was the title of the presentation made at the convention.

3. The Jews of Silence was a book by Elie Wiesel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, 1966)

4. The Jews of Hope was a book by Martin Gilbert (New York: Penguin Books, 1985),

5. Anatoly (Nathan) Shcharansky, a prominent activist of the Jewish and human rights movements, was charged with “betrayal of the motherland” and sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment. In 1986, after serving nine years in prison and labor camp, he was exchanged for a Soviet spy and reunited with his wife in Israel. Later he organized a party for new immigrants from the former USSR and in 1996 became a minister in the Israeli government.

6. This image has inspired at least two authors in choosing the title for their books: M. Decter, ed., Hero of Our Time: The Trial and Fate of Boris Kochubiyevsky (New York: Academic Committee for the Soviet Jewry, 1970); M. Gilbert, Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time (London: Macmillan Press, 1986).

7. Leonard Schroeter, The Last Exodus (New York: Universe Books, 1974).

8. Rebecca Rass, From Moscow to Jerusalem (New York: Shengold, 1976).

9. Colin Shindler, Exit Visa (London: Bachman & Turner, 1978).

10. Robert Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy (London and Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Press, 1983).

11. Ya'akov Ro'i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration 1948–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

12. Binyamin Pinkus, Tekhi'a vetequma le'umit (National Rebirth and Reestablishment) (Sede Boker, Israel: Ben-Gurion University of Negev Press, 1993_.

13. _Yoram Hazoni, popular Israeli publicist, gives an account of Zionist narrative model with reference to Israel's school curriculum of Jewish history: “The curriculum itself was designed by Ben-Gurion's tireless education minister, Benzion Dinur. A towering figure … Dinur viewed Jewish history as the story of a distinct and unique people who, despite centuries of exile and persecution, remained united in the belief that they would one day be restored to their homeland. Zionism and the restoration of the Jewish State were thus understood as the just conclusion of the Jews' millennial struggle. Dinur's ‘Zionist narrative’ played a crucial role in the effort to establish a Jewish state … It was the Zionist historical narrative, as explicated by intellectuals and political leaders, that all Jews held in common and that permitted Israeli schoolchildren from a host of different cultural and religious backgrounds to recognize themselves as part of a single people with a common and just cause” (Y. Hazony, “Who Removed Zionism from Israel's textbooks? Antisocial Texts,”<http://www.zoa.org/pubs/edu2000.pdf >, p. 1.

14. N. Baron indicated some basic traits of this model: “From the early 1950′s until the early 1970′s, during the height of the first Cold War, Soviet studies in the West was dominated by the so-called ‘totalitarian’ model, which focused attention on the primary importance of central politics and the personalities of the party-state leadership. In part, this was a consequence of the espousal by historians of ‘ideographic’ methodology, which is premised on a coincidence of the ‘real’ and the ‘actual’, the uniqueness of historical phenomena, an emphasis on voluntarism and indeterminacy, and a consequent rejection of generalizing theory or the conceptual excavation of unobservable structures and forces … In part, the ‘totalitarian’ model was … a mirror-image of the Soviet regime's self-presentation as monolithic and efficient, an expression of the primacy of politics which corresponded to the dominating structural-functional paradigm in western political science, which assumed a high degree of congruence between institutional form and performance” (“History, Politics, and Political Culture: Thoughts on the Role of Historiography in Contemporary Russia,” Cromohs, Vol. 5, 2000,<http://www.cromohs.unifi.it >.

15. Brym, op. cit., p. 43.

16. R. Brym, The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk: Identity, Antisemitism, Emigration (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 15.

17. See “Kosygin on Reunion Families and National Equality (1966),” in B. Pinkus, ed., The Soviet Government and the Jews: 1948–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 78.

18. These data and those following are from M. Goldman, “US Policy and Jewish Emigration,” in Ya. Ro'i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (London: Franc Cass, 1995), p. 359.

19. Zaslavsky and Brym, op. cit., p. 4.

20. Baron, op. cit.

21. See B. Morozov, Documents on Soviet Jewish Emigration (Portland: Frank Cass, 1999).

22. Pinkus, op. cit., p. 572.

23. Ro'i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, p. 3.

24. Pinkus, op. cit., p. 255.

25. For a detailed survey of this concept see G. Shimoni, “The Centrality of Israel: The Current Debate,” Moment, Vol. 16, 1991, pp. 19–21.

26. Y. Salmon, “The Historical Imagination of Jacob Katz: On the Origins of Jewish Nationalism,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1999, p. 167.

27. Pinkus, op. cit., p. 573.

28. G. Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona: politicheskie presledovaniia evreev v SSSR v poslednee stalinskoe desiatiletie: dokumental'noe issledovanie (Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyie otnosheniia, 1994), p. 112.

29. Ro'i, op cit., p. 3.

30. On this issue see Kostyrchenko, op. cit., pp. 110–116.

31. M. Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 12–13.

32. C. Tilly, “Social Movements and National Politics,” in C. Bright and S. Friend Harding, eds, Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 315. See also M. Spencer's definition of a social movement: “A collective effort to bring about a new order of life, to do something about the issue for which people have considerable concern” (Foundations of Modern Sociology [Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall, 1985], pp. 567–568).

33. J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 11.

34. On this issue see D. Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union: Samizdat, Deprivation and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

35. Later, from the mid-1970s, many Zionist activists, partly seeking a more effective strategy, partly under Israeli pressure, insisted that the only interest of the Jewish movement was emigration to Israel. Though the Jewish activists repeatedly stressed that they had no intention to change the Soviet system, their political demands could be implemented only as a part of a systemic change.

36. Ro'i, op. cit., p. 4.

37. Interestingly, in 1948 Colonel David Dragunsky, twice a Hero of the Soviet Union, proposed to form a special Jewish division to be sent to Palestine (see Kostyrchenko, op. cit., p. 112). In 1983 General David Dragunsky became chairman of the Anti-Zionist Committee of Soviet Public.

38. In his article “Nationalities Policy, the Soviet Government, the Jews, and Emigration,” T. Friedgut cites “the letter of 1948 sent in the name of all the Jews of Zhmerinka, Ukraine … asking that they be allowed to emigrate ‘to our homeland’” as “the most dramatic demonstration of earlier emigration pressures” (in Z. Gitelman with M. Glants and M. Goldman, eds, Jewish life after the USSR [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003], p. 37). The letter, allegedly signed by nine representatives, was purportedly received by Pravda in May 1948. From the newspaper a typewritten copy of the letter was transferred to the presidium of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (names of the signatories were omitted from the copy). The letter's copy obtained from the MGB (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti—State Security Ministry) archives is presently kept at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). The authenticity of this letter (published in 1996) is seriously questioned. Thus, Efraim Volf, a member of Einikait, a Zhmerinka-based Zionist youth group, testifies, “There was no any meeting in May 1948. It merely could not take place in the small Ukrainian town of Zhmerinka … At that time, as a resident of Zhmerinka and member of Einikait, the Jewish youth organization … I was well informed of all developments occurred in the ‘Jewish street’ of our town. I have never heard of the so-called ‘letter of the Jews of Zhmerinka’ before the 1990s. Similarly, other members of our organization (nine of them including me were arrested in 1949) and dozens of other Jews, all of them residents of Zhmerinka in 1948, said they knew nothing about this letter … After reviewing its typewritten copy we have reached the unequivocal conclusion that the letter is nothing but a forgery” (<http://www.berkovich-zametki.com/Nomer19/Volf1.htm >).

39. As cited in Rass, op. cit., p. 9.

40. In his article devoted to qualitative methodology in social research J. Van Maanen pointed to the “‘presentational data’ which concern those appearances that informants strive to maintain (or enhance) in the eyes of the fieldworker, outsiders and strangers in general, work colleagues, close and intimate associates, and to varying degrees, themselves.” He emphasized that “data in this category are often ideological, normative and abstract, dealing far more with a manufactured image of idealized doing than with the routinized practical activities actually engaged in by members of the studied organization” (“The Fact of Fiction in Organizational Ethnography,” in J. Van Maanen, ed., Qualitative Methodology [Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983], p. 42). On this issue see also H. R. Bernard, P. Killworth, D. Kronenfeld, and L. Sailer, “The Problem of Informant Accuracy: The Validity of Retrospective Data,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13, 1984, pp. 495–517.

41. G. Saunders, ed., Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (New York: Monad Press, 1974), p. 7.

42. Isai Averbukh, “Jewish Samizdat at the End of Forties: Fragment from Margarita Aliger's Poem Your Victory,” in Ya. Ro'i and A. Beker, eds, Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1991), pp. 73–87.

43. See Krostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona, op. cit., pp. 117–121.

44. See Ro'i, op. cit., p. 20; Pinkus, op. cit., p. 409.

45. For example, Ro'i devoted a detailed description to the 1966 performance in the USSR of Israeli singer Ge'ula Gil, calling it “the high point of all the performances by Israelis” (op. cit., p. 323).

46. Hroch, op. cit., p. 13.

47. Ibid., p. xiv.

48. Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy, pp. 36–37.

49. Ibid., pp. 41–42.

50. As cited in Zaslavsky and Brym, op. cit., p. 39.

51. Rass, op. cit., p.85.

52. Sobraniie dokumentov samizdata, Radio Svoboda—Arkhiv samizdata (AS), No. 110.

53. Rass, op. cit., p. 87.

54. According to the studies of W. Runciman, S. Guimond and L. Dube-Simard, etc., fraternal deprivation rather than personal (egoistic) deprivation tends to provoke protest behavior. W. Runciman was the first to propose a distinction between egoistic and fraternal relative deprivation. “Egoistic RD is a type of personal discontent that occurs when an individual compares his or her own situation to that of others (in-group or out-group members), whereas fraternal RD is a more social discontent that occurs when an individual compares the situation of his group as a whole to that of an out-group” (S. Guimond and L. Dube-Simard, “Relative Deprivation Theory and the Quebec Nationalist Movement: The Cognition–Emotion Distinction and the Personal–Group Deprivation Issue,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 44, No. 3, 1983, p. 526).

55. Thus, five Georgian dissidents (Z. Gamsakhurdia, M. Kostava, and others) sent a letter to the Israeli President, Z. Katzir, on the occasion of Israeli Independence Day, pointing out that Israel was an inspiring example for “all enslaved people on the planet” (AS No. 2896). Ukrainian dissident I. Terelia wrote in his statement addressed to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR that he had decided to apply for Israeli citizenship in order to become “a citizen of the free State of Israel, which you so ferociously hate” (AS No. 5373).

56. Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy, p. 152.

57. The authors apply this term to the Jews of Russia, eastern Ukraine and eastern Belorussia.

58. Zaslavsky and Brym, op. cit., p. 41.

59. J. Coakley, “Nationalist Movements and Society in Contemporary Western Europe,” in J. Coakley, ed., The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (London: Sage, 1992), p. 48.

60. Thus, all 155 respondents who have been randomly chosen for interview in Rome from the Soviet Jewish émigrés going to countries other than Israel are collectively referred to in Zaslavsky and Brym's book as a part of the Jewish emigration movement.

61. Ro'i, op cit., p. 2.

62. Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy, p. 41.

63. Ibid.

64. A colleague of mine told me that one of the students in his seminar on Zionism, a newcomer from Australia, admitted that he found out that he was a Jew when he was 18 years old. His parents decided to make special mention of this fact because they were afraid that he could become an anti-Semite. In this respect Soviet citizens, who had to answer a question about their nationality from the first grade of elementary school, never had a problem with their ethnic consciousness.

65. A similar conclusion was reached by J. Kellas in his study of Scottish nationalism. See his “The Social Origins of Nationalism in Great Britain: The Case of Scotland,” in J. Coakley, ed., The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (London: Sage, 1992).

66. Rass, op. cit., p. 78.

67. Ibid.

68. Zaslavsky and Brym, op. cit., p. 52.

69. Zisserman-Brodsky, op. cit., pp. 144–145.

70. Rass, op. cit., p. 95.

71. “Did Israel Play the Major Role in the Fight for Soviet Jewry?” Jews in Eastern Europe, Winter 1993, p. 92.

72. R. Rass referred to Meir Yaari, the Secretary General of the Israeli Mapam party, who wrote in his book that in 1943 Ben Gurion reached a secret agreement with the Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain. According to this agreement the Israeli side allegedly pledged to keep silent on the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration in exchange for Soviet support of a future Jewish state (see Rass, op. cit., p. 9). However, the promise given to Stalin's bureaucrat can hardly be accepted as a satisfactory explanation. In 1977 Shaul Avigur, one of the major architects of Israel's policy on Soviet Jewry, in an interview given to the Israeli newspaper Davar, defended the Israeli position: “Our approach to this issue was realistic and cautious, and we have no reason to be ashamed of our prudence” (quoted in Pinkus, op. cit., p. 499).

73. See petitions by the Soviet Jewish activists demanding that economic sanctions against the Soviet regime be stiffened (AS Nos 3177, 3489). On the disputes between the Jewish activists and the Israeli officialdom see Rass, op. cit.; Schroeter, op. cit. B. Pinkus fairly defines these accounts as “one-sided” (Pinkus, op. cit., p. 657), but in this capacity they bear particular importance because they convey the Soviet Jewish movement's viewpoint.

74. See, for example, chapters and fragments discussing the Jewish movement in L. Salitan, Politics and Nationality in Contemporary Soviet-Jewish Emigration, 1968–1989 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992); Z. Gitelman with M. Glants and M. Goldman, eds., Jewish life after the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).