Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation.
Additional funding is provided through the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
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Archival Audio – Russia Reports with Jerry Goodman:
Welcome to Russia Reports, which brings you news about Jews in the Soviet Union. This is your host, Jerry Goodman, executive director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Today I’d like to discuss the question of travel to the Soviet Union, especially as it concerns Soviet Jews and Jews from the West.
You might wish to visit with Soviet Jews at home. If you receive such an invitation, and I suggest you wait to see if a Jew invites you rather than the reverse, don’t be reluctant to accept such an invitation.
You will be treated as an honored guest and give the family a sense of pride and pleasure. Your hosts will know whether it is wise for you to come or not. And follow the same procedure you would in the synagogue and in fact, your own hotel room.
Be careful about what you say, don’t be harshly critical of the Soviet system, if that’s your inclination or of its leaders, and in general try to listen more than you talk. Soviet Jews wish to convey their feelings, their knowledge to the West. You are a channel.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Throughout the 1970s and 80s, ordinary Jewish Americans embarked on bold journeys to the Soviet Union. They called it tourism, but these trips were missions: risky, deliberate, and deeply important. These Jews crossed the Iron Curtain with prayer books and purpose, meeting with refuseniks in their homes and synagogues while under the watchful eye of the KGB. Travelers smuggled in crucial means of moral and material support, carrying gifts that ranged from mezuzahs to blue jeans to medicine.
More satisfying than the usual souvenirs, each visitor brought back human stories that helped fuel the movement for freedom, and they left behind hope, solidarity, and the promise that Soviet Jews would not be forgotten.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: Open Up the Gates. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. This week, we meet The Travelers. Our story begins with words of advice intended for Jewish travelers headed straight into the lion’s den.
Archival Audio – Russia Reports with Jerry Goodman:
Individuals who go to the Soviet Union who are concerned with Jewish life, who are involved with Jewish life in this country, who are knowledgeable about Jewish affairs throughout the world including United States and Israel, and are willing to make some kind of effort to establish contact on any level with Soviet Jews – those people should be encouraged. Those people, in fact, should go. They serve as a very vital bridge between this community and between Jews in the Soviet Union.
However, and I cannot stress this too carefully, such people must be well briefed. They must know what to expect. They must know, what in fact, their role can be in regard to Soviet Jews whom they might meet.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Shaul Kelner, professor of Jewish Studies and sociology at Vanderbilt University and author of A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews.
Shaul Kelner: Travel was a crucial part of the movement, and it was crucial to the movement’s ability to sustain itself. It was crucial to the movement’s success in a lot of ways. And we can begin to count them.
First, travel was crucial for maintaining a conduit of information flow. It was crucial for enabling Americans to know what was actually happening to Jews in the Soviet Union.
Second, travel was crucial for bringing in actual support that made a difference, that helped people—it made a difference both in terms of morale, but it also made a difference in terms of actual legal advice and actual medical support and actual financial support. So it mattered for Soviet Jews in that way.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: While Soviet Jews received both spiritual and practical assistance, American travelers came back invigorated and eager to continue their activism. Meeting face-to-face allowed these two communities to form intimate bonds that would heighten American Jewry’s commitment to the movement. Travelers may have left the United States as curious volunteers, but they returned as informed and enthusiastic leaders.
Shaul Kelner: They were regular American Jews who wanted to do something to help and wanted to put themselves on the line and put their bodies on the line by going over to the Soviet Union to help.
So, about 40 percent, at least, were married couples. Men and women went. Ages ranged. Most of the people were between their thirties and their sixties, but you had kids as young as ten years old going, and you had elderly as old as eighty-five going. We know this, by the way, because the organizations kept records of who they sent and who filed reports with them. And so we’re able, through the records at the American Jewish Historical Society, to compile a statistical overview, a statistical profile of the people who went, of the travelers.
In terms of their professions: all types. There were business people. There were nonprofit workers. We had school teachers. We had students, attorneys, psychologists, doctors, homemakers, architects, academics, artists. You name it, people were going. And, of course, leaders of the Soviet Jewry movement organizations themselves were going. And a lot of rabbis went. A lot of Jewish communal professionals went. And the organizations also did specific outreach to encourage congressional representatives to go, local district attorneys, and other government officials, both at the local and state—local, state, and federal levels.
Archival Audio – Russia Reports with Jerry Goodman:
If you want to contact a Soviet Jew, or someone that you know, someone you’ve read about in the press, make certain that you have a phone number before you leave, since it is difficult to find a phonebook.
Shaul Kelner: When travelers were going to meet with refuseniks and Jewish activists in the Soviet Union, they would first try to make contact with them. They would first call them when they got to their hotels. They wouldn’t necessarily call from the hotel. They would call from a public phone because they were trying to be discreet. They would arrange meetings, and they would usually arrange to meet in the apartments, in the homes of refuseniks. And sometimes when they’re going to meet a refusenik at their home, other refuseniks would come and gather, so they would meet a whole bunch of people at the same time. And then in other cases, they were going from house to house.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Amidst an atmosphere of surveillance, travelers to the Soviet Union had to exercise caution. Some even walked to their destinations in subzero temperatures, avoiding subways and taxis where they could be easily followed. But in the experience of Myrtle Silverman, a Cleveland-based volunteer, the chilling effect of KGB scrutiny melted away once first contact was made with Soviet Jews.
Archival Audio – Myrtle Silverman:
I was much more apprehensive before I stepped on the plane in New York than I was when I got there, mainly because, there was such a warmth when you met these people, there was hugging and kissing and you sat down and there was what we called instant rapport, like it was our neighbor who came in for a Kaffeeklatsch. It was unbelievable, the rapport that existed the minute you knocked on that door and the door was opened.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Along with their presence, travelers brought many gifts. Judaica, religious texts, and ritual objects helped link refuseniks to the wider Jewish world.
Shaul Kelner: The assumption was that because of religious repression in the Soviet Union, Jews in the USSR did not have easy access to things like mezuzahs, or prayer books, or matzah, or kosher salami. Some of the visitors were connected with an organization that was basically bringing in a lot of kosher salami to help give kosher food to people there.
Sometimes there were books that were brought in of Jewish history. Leon Uris’s Exodus. Herman Wouk’s This is My God. Nonfiction and fiction. They brought in both. Cecil Roth’s History of the Jews. And there were—the Israeli government had an agency that was producing very, very small, paperbound, thin onionskin paperbound copies of these books with no book cover so that they could be essentially smuggled in, hidden very easily, and then delivered.
And so this was a way of helping Soviet Jews get access to Jewish information, Jewish knowledge. The reason that they brought in calendars was because you couldn’t get Jewish calendars in the USSR, and if you don’t know when the holidays are, how can you celebrate them?
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Soviet Jews treasured such items, but longed to know more about Jewish life elsewhere. Traveler Audrey Lookstein of Manhattan recalled the stream of questions she heard during her trip to Leningrad.
Archival Audio – Audrey Lookstein:
Are there synagogues in New York? How many Jews are there? Have you been to Israel? Is it a good place? Will our children be happy there if they go? Can they find jobs? Where did you learn to speak Hebrew? There are such a thing as a Hebrew school?
They really sort of look at you as though they’re really not sure that it’s true, you’re just saying it. It’s so foreign to them.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Travelers also gathered vital information from their refusenik hosts, including details about their daily struggles and individual needs.
Shaul Kelner: Being in the state of refusal was a really difficult position for people to be in. It could be years and years of stress, poverty, harassment by the police. And the more information that the Jewish organizations in the West had about what was going on with individual Soviet Jews, the better they were able to target support for them. So they could send in attorneys who could consult on their legal cases, or they could send in doctors who could, in some instances, even run medical clinics in refuseniks’ apartments to help them get extra medical care that they were not getting in the Soviet hospitals.
In some ways, the American Jewish groups ended up with a better scan of the broad field than any individual refusenik was able to have because the American Jewish groups were sending in a lot of people, basically a constant flow of tourists speaking with a lot of refuseniks all over the country, primarily in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv, but also in other cities as well.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: This steady flow of American Jewish tourism represented a powerful show of international support, but lurking behind their every move was the ominous shadow of the KGB.
Archival Audio – Russia Reports with Jerry Goodman:
One of the things you can do, is to be careful when you talk with Soviet Jews. That is, remembering Stalin’s era, and in fact, recalling recent incidents of harassment by police even at the synagogue and arrests of young activists. They are naturally reticent about what they are going to say. And they know that not everyone in the synagogue can be trusted. In fact, on many occasions, non-Jewish agents working for the KGB – the security police – have been placed in synagogues, either to listen, or to frighten visitors.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Upon arrival, Jewish travelers entered a society rife with surveillance. Some travelers experienced harassment at customs checkpoints, where they were subjected to invasive strip searches and had items confiscated. Others encountered intensive, suspicious questioning.
American activists Joel and Adele Sandberg, who traveled to the USSR in May 1975, were among those who endured uncomfortable run-ins with the KGB.
Archival Audio – Joel and Adele Sandberg:
We were stopped by KGB and taken to an office. They took our passports away, they told us we were going to Siberia for five years, and they wanted to know who was going to take care of our children. We had three children at that time, who were 1, 3, and 5 years old, and they wanted to know who was going to take care of our children for the next five years?
Shaul Kelner: Joel and Adele Sandberg were leaders of the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry. It was a grassroots group. Miami was one of the places where the grassroots and the establishment local organizations actually overlapped, and so there was some degree of cooperation. Joel and Adele were leaders in the grassroots Union of Councils.
Joel and Adele Sandberg traveled on behalf of Nativ—that was the Israeli agency—in May of 1975. Nativ may not have known that the Sandbergs were also leaders of the grassroots Union of Councils. It’s likely that the KGB knew because if you look at the records of who was being arrested and expelled and denounced, it seemed like it was a disproportionate number of Union of Councils activists that the KGB was targeting.
So, they’re there in 1975, and the Soviet government knows that they are leaders of the American Jewish movement for Soviet Jews. And they decide that in this case, they are going to make an example of them. So they arrest them. They detain them. They interrogate them.
Archival Audio – Joel and Adele Sandberg:
At a certain point, they started doing a strip search of Joel. At which point, I realized that I had all the information in my underwear of all these families from Kharkov and Kyiv and Moscow, and everyone that was in there was in jeopardy if they found this on me. I managed to get permission to go to the ladies room. I sat on the toilet trying furiously to memorize everything as I was tearing these pieces of paper up and flushing them down the toilet. And it was really, really very dangerous, I felt, for the people that we were trying to help.
Shaul Kelner: And then they expel them. And after they expel the Sandbergs, the Sandbergs file a report with the State Department that’s detailing their treatment, and they’re protesting the way that they were treated.
The Soviet government does not end the harassment there. Once they’re back in the States, there are press articles that they publish that name them and that denounce them by name. So Joel and Adele Sandberg were then denounced by name in the Soviet press, and they were held up as examples of Zionist infiltrators who were coming in to undermine the country, to promote subversive activities among the otherwise loyal Jewish population.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Sandbergs were not the only travelers whose activities attracted prying eyes, and on rare occasions, violent retaliation.
Shaul Kelner: Most of the people experienced harassment of the type where the phone rings in the middle of the night. It’s 3 a.m., and you pick up the phone, and there’s only heavy breathing on the other end. Or they leave their hotel for the day, and they come back and they discover that someone has rummaged through their suitcases. They’re being followed on the street, they’re being tailed on the street, and the tails are not trying to hide that fact. They want the people to see that they’re being watched.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: While some confrontations with the KGB were highly distressing, others found that cat-and-mouse games with Soviet agents were empowering.
Shaul Kelner: Most Americans were watching James Bond movies or reading John le Carré books. And so the KGB and the Cold War were far away and sort of fictional. But you have tens of thousands of Jews—from the US, from around the world—who were actually going to the Soviet Union and were actually getting harassed by the KGB and were trying to fight back.
So there’s a difference between going out and demonstrating in the streets for Soviet Jewry in New York or in Washington and going directly to Moscow or to Leningrad and avoiding a KGB tail who’s trying to follow you to the refusenik apartment that you’re going to, or managing to hide some tape recorder or some tape or some document that you managed to smuggle out and to get that through customs. You’ve taken on the Soviet Union, and you’ve won.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Following their clashes with the KGB, Joel and Adele Sandberg remained active community organizers, and continue this work today. They spearheaded initiatives like Adopt-a-Family, which connected American and refusenik families, and the Medical Mobilization for Soviet Jewry program that sent American doctors to treat Soviet Jews.
Archival Audio – NBC News:
From New York, this is NBC Nightly News with Jessica Savitch, and Dick Schaap in Los Angeles.
Good evening. President Carter has set a date for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, that is unless the Russians withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.
I’ve sent a message to the United States Olympic Committee, spelling out my own position, that unless the Soviets withdraw their troops within a month from Afghanistan, that the Olympic Games be moved from Moscow to an alternate site or multiple sites, or postponed, or cancelled.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: By the tail end of the 1970s, the fragile thawing of Cold War tensions between the USSR and the United States collapsed. Once again, relations deteriorated, bringing the two superpowers back to the brink. Differing interpretations of détente, combined with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, escalated animosities.
In response to the invasion, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared a boycott of the Summer Olympics, which were to be held in Moscow. The gauntlet was thrown, and cold war tensions between the United States and the USSR were once again heating up.
The end of détente and an aging Leonid Bhrezhnev generated pressing challenges for the Refusenik movement, as Soviet authorities cracked down on those labelled dissidents. Travel to the USSR became increasingly risky.
Shaul Kelner: At certain times, and particularly in the early 1980s when the gates closed and things got pretty bad for Soviet Jews, the government also did more to crack down on tourism, and that included sometimes beating the tourists. And the way that it was done is that some thugs would come and beat the tourists. They were, of course, agents, but it was made to look like it was crime rather than a government beating.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Fewer exit visas and vitriolic propaganda were just some of the obstacles that refuseniks faced after the end of détente, but travelers and activists vowed to sustain their campaigns. American activists like Pamela Braun Cohen responded to increasingly brutal antisemitic repression in the 1980s.
Archival Audio – Pamela Braun Cohen:
Because of the enormous effect of cultural genocide perpetrated by post-Stalinist leaders, and forced Russification of the majority of Soviet Jews, it is critical that we address new policies and formulate new policies and new means to be able to provide services and information to Soviet Jews who do not have access to Western contact.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Cohen emerged as a passionate leader of Chicago Action for Soviet Jewry, a grassroots organization. She served as president of the nationwide Union of Councils from 1986 until 1997, and during her tenure, testified before Congress and briefed President Ronald Reagan on the status of refuseniks.
Like other activists, she also took her advocacy overseas and traveled to the Soviet Union to meet with various Jews seeking their freedom.
Archival Audio – Pamela Braun Cohen:
We met with the Jewish cultural activists, we met with the scientists, we met with the women’s movement, the Hebrew teachers, the Talmud teachers, the religious people – religious Jews in the Soviet Union; second-generation refuseniks who have been denied permission because they have quote-unquote “inherited the refusals” received by their parents. We met with refuseniks whose children are being threatened with the draft, forcible conscription, which can provide the Soviets another excuse to delay their departure. We met with the former prisoners of conscience, we met with separated families…
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Cohen’s observations of mounting hardships among Soviet Jews reverberated across the U.S., fueling a chorus of voices demanding action.
Her continuous efforts earned her the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of Chicago Humanitarian Award in 1981. She chronicled her advocacy work in her 2021 memoir, Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union.
Archival Audio – Cantor Bruce Benson:
♪♪We won’t let go, we won’t let go
We won’t let go til Pharaoh sets them free
We won’t let go, we won’t let go
We won’t let go til Pharaoh sets them free
There is something we help bring to freedom
And for that alone we can be proud
But still it is our future obligation
To stand firm and sing out loud
We won’t let go, we won’t let go
We won’t let go til Pharaoh sets them free♪♪
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written and produced by Andrew Sperling, Shaul Kelner, and Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society and its Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement, and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive & the NBC News Archive. For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
