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Bill Aron: Yuli Kosharovsky was a prominent refusenik in Moscow. He gave a—probably the most powerful statement I’ve ever heard about what it means to be a refusenik. “What does it mean being refused? This means being dismissed from your job to be without money, to worry about your children who are hounded in the schools and who won’t be accepted in any institution. To lose almost all your friends. To have trouble with the militia, with house janitors, with neighbors, and with the KGB. And this means that your time of life is passing without return. That the present has lost all sense and value. That you have been thrown out of the present and not given a future. That you are a shadow person.”
Ruth Ellenson: So you are photographing the shadow people?
Bill Aron: Yeah. I guess you could say that, yeah.
Host Ruth Ellenson: That’s Bill Aron, prolific photographer of Jewish life. I’m your host, writer Ruth Andrew Ellenson. I was fortunate to grow up being photographed by Bill, and welcomed the opportunity as an adult and a journalist to explore the legacy of his work, and the context in which it was created. Over the course of our series, we’ll travel with Bill across five decades, and hear his stories about documenting Jewish communities around the world.
From The American Jewish Historical Society, welcome to The World In Front of Me with Bill Aron. This is episode 3: The Soviet Union.
In 1981, Bill journeyed to the other side of the world to photograph and document the everyday lives of Jewish people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Decades into the Cold War, Soviet Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities lived oppressed lives. American Jewish organizations and activists took up the cause, and many advocates risked their lives and traveled to the USSR to meet with those deemed “refuseniks.”
Ruth Ellenson: You’d photographed a lot of American Jewish life at this point, especially in New York. And then in the fall of 1981, you make a trip to the Soviet Union. How did this trip come about? Like, what were the circumstances?
Bill Aron: A friend of ours, Ahavia Scheindlin, was then the director of the Jewish Federation’s Council on Soviet Jewry. And she and I were asked to come to the Israeli consulate to have a meeting to talk about Soviet Jewry. And I was asked to go to the Soviet Union to photograph the refuseniks and Jewish life, to which I readily agreed.
It was called going on a mission. It was given that word. In which people from the United States would go to the Soviet Union and visit refuseniks and leave with them valuables, either things they needed or things they could sell. A pair of jeans. A new pair of jeans could be sold on the black market for several months’ worth of salary.
When I—I left my cameras there when we left because I knew they would be well used. I had contacted Minolta, and they said they would replenish anything I left there. I brought prescription drugs that I got from my doctor to take there, things like penicillin.
Ruth Ellenson: Were there also Jewish items you brought them because they could not express their religion at that point?
Bill Aron: Correct yes, we also brought them prayer books. And Ahavia being the director of the Council on Soviet Jewry, she would bring messages from various people in the movement in the United States.
Shaul Kelner: Being Jewish was inescapable and discouraged at the same time.
Host Ruth Ellenson: That’s 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: Being Jewish was inescapable because it was stamped on your internal documents. If you were Jewish, Jewishness was considered a nationality in the Soviet Union. And on people’s identity cards, it would say what their nationality was. Are you Russian? Are you Ukrainian? Are you Lithuanian? Are you Georgian? Are you Jewish? So it was called the fifth line because it was the fifth line on the document. And being Jewish brought glass ceilings. There were limits on admission to universities. There were certain high level jobs that were out of reach. Jews could become very educated and they could achieve high positions, but it was usually not in the top levels. It was usually in smaller towns or smaller cities in secondary industries.
At the same time, even though they could not escape their Jewishness in that sense, they also were actively discouraged from embracing it. So the government had closed down the synagogues. They closed down most of the Jewish newspapers. So by 1981, there’s a breach in the continuity of Jewish cultural life. And Jews who want to engage Jewishly are gonna have to invent it for themselves. Most were choosing not to.
Ruth Ellenson: What were you thinking, at that point, about how you would photograph these people and what you would find?
Bill Aron: I had decided that what was needed were faces. To bring back images of the people that were being talked about, and people who were symbolic of the population in Russia that wants to leave, the Jewish population that wants to leave.
Ruth Ellenson: Did you have any expectations of what you’d encounter?
Bill Aron: I was so worried that I would not get all my cameras and all my film past customs at the airport that I really couldn’t think about anything else.
The first picture I took—we arrived on the day before Yom Kippur, so we went to services at the synagogue in Leningrad. I decided that I would like to go up to the balcony, where usually the women sat, but I just wanted to get an overview of the synagogue and what was there to photograph. And I made my way to the front row, and there was a seat next to this old woman reading her prayer book with a magnifying glass. And I thought, well, that’s a good way to start. And so I reached down—my camera bag was on the floor—to take out my camera, and I froze. I realized that I had been so worried about getting into Soviet Union with everything I needed that I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that I would be photographing on some of the holiest days of the Jewish year.
And I decided that I had to do it anyway. It would be a missed opportunity if I didn’t. And so I took the camera out, and I took that picture. And there was this hubbub of people whispering and speaking to each other. And I thought, oh, well.
Shaul Kelner: American Jews liked to believe that in the Soviet Union, it was essentially illegal to go to synagogue. That was not the case. For religiously devout Jews, and there were religiously devout Jews, they would go to synagogue. The devout were choosing religion over economic and social integration and success.
For the more secular Jews who had good jobs, whose kids were going to decent schools, going to synagogue was something that would be frowned on, and it could lead in the schools to kids getting, I’ll say getting teased, but really getting harassed by other kids, by teachers, by the youth movement there called the Komsomol.
…it was not a place that was advisable to be seen. There were people in the synagogues who were tracking who went and reporting back. So even if nothing happened to you, that threat of something might happen to you because the government knows that you went, was always there and it was always a problem.
Bill Aron: And after services, this one lovely woman came up to me and said, I noticed that there was some noise when you started photographing. I want you to know that you’re not to worry about that. If anybody asks you, you just say that you’re an American and you came here to photograph people and take them back to the United States so that our stories could be told. (sighs) Wonderful woman.
Host Ruth Ellenson: During Bill’s travels, he visited many synagogues, which in spite of the dangers, were active centers for Jewish life.
Bill Aron: The most moving experience that I had in the Soviet Union was in the Minsk synagogue. There was an old man leading the Halel prayers. And the photograph that I have of him holding the lulav up, and you see the congregation around him. And every eye is just riveted on this man. The silence was just something that I could only describe as deafening. And it really was difficult to raise my camera up to my face to frame the picture and take it.
And we found out later that this man used to sit in the synagogue, and he would teach Hebrew to anybody who came and wanted to learn. Because the height of the refusenik movement was to emigrate to Israel—or the main focus of the movement was to immigrate to Israel. And one day, in the early 1970s, the KGB showed up, and they took him down to the headquarters and detained him overnight. And when he came back to the synagogue, he did as—he didn’t change a thing, except he never taught another Hebrew lesson.
Ruth Ellenson: Can you describe your experience of surveillance in the Soviet Union? You were in Leningrad, Minsk, Moscow. This is all fall of 1981, so the height of the USSR. What encounters did you have with law enforcement, and what were the outcomes?
Bill Aron: I think there were two harrowing times. I was prepared. People who had gone on these missions before told stories of having their rooms ransacked and their film and notes taken. So I was kind of prepared for this, and I carried in a fanny pack all my film—not all of it, but everything I had shot so I wouldn’t lose that, plus the number of rolls that I thought I’d use.
In Minsk, we get back after visiting a refusenik, and the manager of the hotel comes running up to us, and he says, “An official wants to speak to you. Come with me.” So he takes us to a wing of the hotel which was apparently not used because it was deserted. And there’s a man sitting behind this huge desk. And he starts asking us what we were doing in the Soviet Union, in particular Minsk.
And Ahavia—Havi, we call her—was great. She said, “Well, we meet with people. We like to talk to people. We go to the synagogue to pray.” And he said, “Yes, you were seen in the synagogue.” And just like that, she says, “You mean we’re not allowed to pray in the Soviet Union?” (laughs) And he says, “Oh, no, no, we have freedom of religion here.”
I’m sweating profusely because I have all the film rolls in the fanny pack around my waist. And he says, Well, what would you like to do in Minsk? So we said, “Well, we had heard about the Belarus Film Institute”—which is actually pretty well known, make movies that are seen worldwide. “We’re from Hollywood. We’d like to see it.’
So, the next day—it ended, and the next day, we come down from our rooms, and the manager comes running over to us again. He says, “There’s a limousine waiting for you.” (laughs) And we go out, we get in, and they take us out to the Belarus Film Institute. We’re ushered into a room where all the chief engineers and officers of the institute are sitting around this long table.
And so it became clear that they were expecting us to bring to the film institute a proposal to do something together. (laughs) So we kind of just bluffed our way through it and sighed a relief when they took us back to the hotel.
But the worst experience was leaving Russia. When we went to the airport in Moscow, there was a team of people that were just waiting for us, and they took us and escorted us to this empty part of the airport.
Shaul Kelner: Thousands of Jews went to the Soviet Union to deliver help to refuseniks to bring information back, and about 10 to 20% of them were harassed at customs.Harassment was basically very, very intense searches, having things confiscated in some instances, strip searches. Sometimes they were not able to make the plane because the harassment lasted long enough.
People who were taking information out, and it could be documents with names of new Refuseniks, or photographs of Refusenik life, knew that had these documents or the film been seen at customs that there was a good chance that the customs agents would take them.
Bill Aron: And they began—you know, we put our suitcases up, and they started going through everything. And they looked—they took our underwear, and they took it and they felt along the seams of our underwear to see whether we had sewn anything in there.
And I had been prepared. So I took film that I had not used, and I rolled them inside the canister and labeled them provocative things—like guns, military bridges, everything we weren’t supposed to photograph—put them in a baggie, about ten rolls, and put it on top of my camera bag. The top row was actually new film. My stars aligned again. They did not look any deeper than that top row.
So they gave us back everything. It took about three hours. They clearly were holding up the plane. And I said—I started screaming. I said, “What about my film that you took?” (The baggie of decoy film) I said, “I want somebody from the American Embassy down here. You’ve got to give that back. That’s my property.” You know, stupid things like that. And they just laughed. And so, we’re walking through customs to the airplane. We get to that last door, and this tall guy—he must, six foot four or five, blond, curly hair—comes over, and he says, in pretty good English, he says, “Would you like your film back?” So I said, “Yes, you have no right to keep it.” And he says, “Well, just sign this paper that I gave it back to you. So, it was in Russian. So, I said, Well, get someone from the American Embassy to translate it.” He said, “Oh, no, I’ll translate it for you. You can trust me.” So I said, “No, no, I won’t sign anything.” He said, “Well, you can’t have the film.” And we finally got to the airport, and it was BOAC Airline. And this woman in this beautiful British accent says, “Please take your seat quickly. We want to get out of here. This happened to us last week when the plane was held up for somebody going through customs, and we got down to the end of the runway, and they called us back, so we want to get in the air quickly.” So we did so and got out.
Ruth Ellenson: See, now, when you went to the film institute and they wanted a Hollywood proposal, you could have given them this story. (laughs) That’s amazing.
What was one of the most memorable conversations that you had with someone in the Soviet Union?
Bill Aron: Well, one of the most pleasant ones was with Lev Blishtein. He had been the head of the meatpackers’ union before he applied to immigrate. Of course, he was fired, which happens. When a person is refused the visa, the reason is, “for reasons of state security.” I asked him, “What could be secret about meatpacking?” And he said, “Well, officially, it’s how much meat there is in the Soviet Union, but unofficially, it’s how little meat there is in the Soviet Union.”
Ruth Ellenson: While it’s easy to concentrate on the negative. It’s also important to celebrate and remember how people create and sustain joy, especially in an atmosphere of such hopelessness. What was the biggest expression of joy that you found in the Jewish communities of the USSR that you encountered?
Bill Aron: I was impressed that for the three weeks that we were there, wherever we were, there was a Shabbat meal, where the people in the vicinity of the host would all gather to celebrate together.
In Moscow, we were taken to a seminar being taught by a refusenik psychologist. And it was ostensibly about the book I’m Okay, You’re Okay had come out in the recent past. Yuli Kosharovsky was our host while we were in Moscow. We didn’t speak Russian, so we didn’t know what they were talking about. Except., I’m Okay, You’re Okay, we understood. Yuli leaned over, and he said, “He’s not really talking about the book.” He said, “Everywhere you are, someone’s listening, and you have to be prepared for that. What he’s really talking about is how we, as parents and refuseniks, how we can deal with our children’s anxieties. And the various lessons that we need—or not lessons, but what we need to keep in mind when our children come home crying. Or when our children are kicked out of the school they’re in. Or when they look at us askance because we’re sweeping the streets, even though we’re accomplished mathematicians, former college professors.” Yuli himself was a mathematician.
Ruth Ellenson: What happened to Yuli?
Bill Aron: Well, in the nineties, mid-nineties, they all got out, and they went—most went to Israel. A few came to the United States, but most of the people—in fact, I think all the people that I met and photographed went to Israel. And when I go, we sometimes get together.
Ruth Ellenson: Your work has taken you to many different countries, and daily life in these spaces is quite diverse. What similar themes and expressions of Judaism do you observe, and what do you find to be in the starkest contrast in the Jewish communities you’ve seen around the world?
Bill Aron: Well, what’s most different, especially with Russia and Cuba, and it awakens in me the idea that these people practice and identify with their religion, with Judaism, at great personal cost to them. And I live somewhere where I can be free to be Jewish any way I want—at various points in my life—hardly do anything. And that is, for me, a wake-up call. That, for me, that I feel I need to be consciously aware of so that I don’t throw it away.
Host Ruth Ellenson: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Ruth Andrew Ellenson. This episode was written by Rebeca Miller and produced by Sarah Hopley. Our executive producer is Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge and Studio Awesome.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to a selection of Bill’s photographs that inspired this episode, please visit ajhs.org/bill. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us, which helps others discover our series.
