Julie Salamon: Hi everyone. Welcome to this very special live series finale of The Wreckage. I’m Julie Salamon, your host for the episode. And I’m joined tonight by Gal Beckerman, senior editor for books at The Atlantic, Shaul Kelner, professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Vanderbilt University, and Gemma Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Before we begin, I wanna give special thanks to the Ford Foundation and Sid and Ruth Lapidus for their support of our series, and to our incredible host, Rebecca Naomi Jones, for being the voice of our series. So panelists, I’m gonna give you a jump ball for the first question. Talk a bit about the narrative of the movement, meaning the movement to excavate Soviet Jews from their misery. How did you approach telling this history and why this topic? Gemma, do you wanna start talking about the rugged season three?
Gemma Birnbaum: Sure. I can start. You know, I, I felt like I didn’t know anybody in my sort of peer group who actually knew this history, and it was shocking to me that this movement that had hundreds of thousands of people and it didn’t really know that it had happened.
They knew what a refusenik was or they knew a certain part, but there wasn’t really a lot of knowledge about what an American movement really looked like. Who had involved that? It was this like massive coming together of people who were brought together by Jews but didn’t. It wasn’t just made up of Jews, and I felt like there were a lot of lessons that we could take from it as we kind of navigate what I think at best can be called difficult times or contentious times, and looking at how a whole group of people, hundreds of thousands of people came together with some really powerful leaders to get something done was really compelling.
It’s ultimately a history of fear. Then a history of what happens when you don’t let that fear stop you from doing something. And I’d also, you know, just I’d, I’d read the books from the two gentlemen who were sitting next to me and I was like, oh, this is such a cool story. Now let’s just bring it to more people.
Julie Salamon: Great. Shaul, you wanna add something?
Shaul Kelner: Yeah. So over the decades that I’ve been immersed in researching this, one of the things that became clear to me is there are people who remember it. The people who remember it are the ones who had been involved with it and the most active. But the further out you go with the circles, the less people actually know.
And in my field of sociology, there’s a whole load of scholarship on in social movement studies that does not, does not even mention that this movement existed. It’s not that there are no articles about it, but if you look at the, at the academic journals and social movement studies, there’s not even a reference in 20 years of journal articles.
To the fact that this movement existed and this is a successful human rights campaign, that this is not just forgetting, there’s erasure and I think it’s important to understand that and then to work to correct it.
Julie Salamon: So following up on Gal, maybe you could talk about this, given the fact that Gemma is saying nobody she knew knew about this movement, you’re saying there no academic journal even acknowledged that it existed.
It seems to me as a storyteller, this might present. Some challenges or did it, so how do you even go back about starting to research something like this?
Gal Beckerman: I mean, the truth is it presented an enormous amount of opportunities because as somebody who’s trying to, who decides to write a book and wants to tell a story, and I think that we, I really want to emphasize, and you all are saying this, this is just an incredible story, just as a story that has, has an arc, you know, that begins with people wanting something, people working towards something, people achieving that thing. That is a classic storytelling arc. And you have that here. And I think I recognize that as a young writer in this story, even before anything else. But when you talk about the kind of the dearth of what was actually out there for me, it presented this, these many doors to open.
One of which was the American Jewish Historical Society’s incredible archive, which I walked into and felt like nobody had really, I mean, it was early days, you know, and, and so I felt like I was the first person like touching some of these files. So for the American side of the story. There was a real documentary history that I could draw on to tell that side and the Soviet side, ’cause my book really interweaves both the, what was happening in the Soviet Union among the di dissidents and the Refuseniks and the sort of institutional and grassroots history, uh, in the United States, but for the Soviet side, no such archive existed. I just sat in living rooms with people drinking lots of tea, and sometimes vodka, and sometimes eating, you know, pickled mushrooms and other things for hours and hours. And they said, nobody has ever done this before. Nobody’s ever come here and actually wanted to hear the story of the struggle.
You know, there was, there was a lot of, you know, interest in the, in what it meant to be to, to absorb, into Israeli society or into American society. But to actually talk to us about the 15 years we spent in refusal and what that meant and what it meant to work underground in the Soviet Union. So there was a lot of openness to, to sharing and, and for me that was the material from which I could really, I could really work.
Julie Salamon: That’s great. And Shaul, what about you?
Shaul Kelner: So when I started writing about this, I was focusing only on the American activism. The movement in the states, not what was going on in the Soviet Union. And there was some Jewish studies scholarship. It was all looking at the politics of it. The Jackson Vanik Amendment that linked US trade policy to Soviet immigration policy.
A debate over freedom of choice and dropout. That is to say once people were able to immigrate, did they have to go to Israel or could they go to the United States or, or wherever they wanted. And so there was a lot of focus on the politics. But I was growing up, you know, in, in the 1970s, 1980s as a kid in New Jersey, in in synagogue, Jewish summer camp and the like, and the movement was everywhere.
And I felt the, the culture is missing. This was not just something about Soviet Jews. This was a movement that really shaped my experience and a generational experience of Jewish Americans. So that’s where I was focusing. And then I discovered. Oh my. There’s this great journalist who’s writing a history of the movement, and at first I got nervous, oh, I’m gonna get scooped, which thank God I was scooped.
I realized, ah, you know what? I’m really not interested in writing the history of the movement. Let Gal Beckerman do that. He’s gonna do that much better than I would ever be able to. I just wanted to focus on the sociology of it and the movement tactics. What did activists do in the States to get American Jews aware that A, there is a problem B, we can do something about it.
You know, and so how did they do that? And so Gal free me up to write the book that I wanted to write.
Julie Salamon: Well, thank you. It’s interesting in both of your books and in the, in the podcast series, season three of the Wreckage, what was fascinating to me was, that this movement was both very grassroots and very kind of mom and pop, but it was also so incredibly well organized, and it began at a time where there was the history of the civil rights movement, and then there was the Cold War, which is actually kind of where the Wreckage series started out in season one.
But how do you see this? Fight to get the Soviet Jews out of the USSR. How does it fit into the larger narrative of the Cold War and into this larger narrative of human rights struggle of the 20th century, I should say?
Shaul Kelner: There are so many ways that you can situate this movement because it’s taking shape as an American movement in which the enemy is the Soviet Union. It’s oppression of a religious minority. So this is a way for American Jews to get involved in Jewish activism. That is also at the same time, very much American activism. But then you have domestic context. You have the civil rights movement, you have Jewish context.
This is post Holocaust, and you have a generation of baby boomers young who are pointing to their parents’ generation and saying, you didn’t do enough. To save the European Jewry. I don’t, it was not really a fair accusation, but it was part of the generational politics. So all this stuff was going on at the same time.
And for American Jews who were engaged in it, it really helped them to live at the, at the cusp of all these histories that, that came together. To me, looking back at it, it, it must have been a very exciting time to be alive and to be really on the front lines of so many different types of history as it’s playing out.
Gal Beckerman: I, I think one of the, when we talk about human rights, I always find that one of the interesting aspects of this movement is people assume that American Jews sort of built their kind of political power around Israel. And to some extent that’s obviously true lobbying on behalf of Israel, you know, as getting Congress to support Israel, getting the President to support Israel.
But this issue of Soviet Jews played a really central role in the 1970s in terms of. Allowing American Jews to finally exercise some kind of political power that built up from the grassroots that came down from the institutional world. And it was around an issue that was fundamentally a human rights issue, allowing Jews to leave the Soviet Union.
And we can talk about the Jackson Vanik amendment. It’s a little bit like. Technical, but basically it boils down to, to a linkage that was established, which said that if the Soviet Union wanted something from the United States, in this case, they wanted a, a different trade relationship with the us they would have to improve their, their human rights on this question of letting Jews to immigrate out of the Soviet Union.
And so it was sort of tit for tat, and this had never really been. Tried before to force a different country to change its internal human rights domestic policy. If they wanted to engage in foreign trade or in foreign policy with another country. That was a, a huge innovation and it was an elevation of human rights into a kind of a c.
To use against other countries. You know, we don’t really do that so much anymore. Certainly not right now, but in the 1970s, this just suddenly made of human rights. Something that had a real international force.
Julie Salamon: Can I ask you all something? You know what I found interesting in reading your books and listening to the podcast series that the political lines didn’t seem to divide up so much into right into conservative liberal. How did, how did that work in terms of who the activists were? Where did you know, how would you described them really in terms of their political affiliation?
Shaul Kelner: They came from all over the political spectrum. And they came from all over the Jewish religious spectrum as well. I teach about this to undergraduates. And so the undergrads, they’re born, what, after 2000, the notion that there was a political movement that United Democrats and Republicans across party lines, you’re getting civil rights leaders and you’re getting conservative churches together, they find that really hard to believe. There was a time in America where this was happening.
It was very much a consensus movement, but it’s a consensus movement in part because of the work that activists did. To frame it as a consensus movement. They did a lot of work to build alliances strategically with different groups in the states. There’s a notion that because this was fighting against the Soviets during the Cold War, it’s easy, but you also have to remember there was this moment of Deante and American Jews by raising the issue of Soviet human rights.
When the Nixon administration wants to do businesses better than usual, regardless of how the Soviets are treating their own citizens. That puts American Jews in the position of potentially being spoilers to detton, war mongers and, and the like, and that’s, it was a really difficult and delicate and dangerous position for American Jews to be in. So that was also something that was present.
Gal Beckerman: I would just add to this question of, you know, a movement that brought together the right and the left is that it’s really, it was so unique and special I think for this reason, is that it had this sort of the particularist concerns, you know, to use sort of abstract language to talk about it, but these particularist concerns of Jews wanting to help other Jews, these motivations that shul talked about, you know, people feeling this sense of inherited sort of Holocaust guilt or, so that’s kind of that impulse spawned.
In its most extreme form. People like Meir Kahane, you know, real extremists who were setting bombs outside the Soviet Embassy. But then it had its sort of universalist side, which you could see into the movement. You could project onto it. Just a very fundamental and very fundamentally American search for freedom and for the freedom to live wherever you wanted to.
And you could point to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that side of the movement spawned human rights watch and the whole sort of. Cottage industry of, of, of the human rights world sort of sprung directly out of this movement. So it’s remarkable that you have a movement that had like Meir Kahane, like extremist tribalist Jewish identity on one side and the most sort of universalist human rights impulses on the other.
And I think that that really was a, a big feature, uh, that feature sort of allowed for its success in a big way.
Shaul Kelner: Yeah. Talk about a big tent.
Julie Salamon: Yeah. So, you know, one thing I was thinking about listening to this, we have the HIAS archive at the American Jewish Historical Society and for HIAS, which was helping facilitate this big movement, and resettlement of Jews from the Soviet Union. But once the Jews from the Soviet Union arrived here. That was pretty much it in terms of Jewish refugees and HIAS changed mission to help refugees from around the world. I’m wondering how you see the Soviet Jewish immigration movement, was that the last great stand of unity for, for the Jewish world in terms of really working together from all different parts of the political spectrum? Have we had, you know, Israel was the previous where, how do you look at it to today’s Jewish world where it’s a little more fragmented, to put a mildly.
Gemma Birnbaum: Every panelist is looking at each other to answer, kind of answers the question, which you can’t see on the audio, but we’re all pointing at the other one.
Gal Beckerman: I think that it’s a little, it’s very fragmented and, and, and that’s why like I look back with some nostalgia, the idea of a movement that could bring together.
That sort of, you know, particular and universal impulses, because Israel right now is definitely not that. In fact, it seems to be tearing apart the community in major ways over, over that particular division. I mean, I, I don’t know. I can’t think of another, of another movement certainly since then. I mean, Israel did have that quality for certainly through the sixties.
You know, probably till the six day war and maybe even a little bit after. Right.
Shaul Kelner: Yeah, certainly in addition to unifying American Jews at this moment, and, and it was not just a matter of American Jews were unified. The, it was a different political environment in the United States. When you think about how Jackson Vock played out and the debates and the congressional fight over it.
You had conservative Cold War Hawk Democrats going against liberal, betan oriented Republicans. You know, these notions, uh, of, uh, ideologically homogenous parties. That was not the case at the time, and that also helped to create some unity more, more broadly. So that was a, it was just a different context than American Jews were playing in.
Julie Salamon: So, I know this may be hard to do, but we’ve mentioned the Jackson Vanik amendments a couple of times. Could you give us the, a primer short for our audience who might not have it at the top of their memory bank, what it was and who the sponsors were and what it meant?
Shaul Kelner: Yeah. But we’ll do, we’ll do this one together.
The Soviets in the early 1970s began letting some Jews immigrate, and the numbers went up from a few hundred in the 1960s to a few thousand, and then tens of thousands in the 1970s. But as they did that, they also began taxing Jews. We paid for your education. You’re now gonna have to pay us back before we let you leave.
And in response to that, it was called the, in the states we called it the diploma tax in. In response to that senator. Henry Scoop Jackson, Democrat from Washington State, who was a Cold War hawk and was aiming for a 1976 presidential run. He really led this charge to say this is a human rights issue and Nixon wants to do better relation trade relations with the Soviet Union.
Okay, but not on the backs of Soviet Jews. And before we allow the the detante legislation to go forward with a new trade agreement, we’re going to use this as an opportunity to say you want better trade relations, you’re gonna have to do better on immigration. So remove the diploma tax, let more people out.
Gal Beckerman: I was gonna say the other sort of complicating or interesting factor here is it’s not just Nixon who wants detante, it’s Kissinger, who’s the Jew who’s risen to the highest ranks in the American government. And his whole notion of detante is that, you know, you want stability in the world. And so stability means creating these sort of interconnect webs, you know, with other countries, even countries that you don’t agree with their internal policies. From Kissinger’s perspective, the fact that Jews aren’t being treated well in the Soviet Union doesn’t really matter. He wants to avoid an a nuclear bomb and what’s come out in recent years, I dunno if I can mention the Nixon , the Kissinger tapes. But the most shocking things that Kissinger said on this was in the, in an Oval Office conversation with with Nixon that was caught on tape, in which he said that even if Jews were put into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it’s still not America’s concern what happens there.
So that was the extent to which he really believed in this policy of put. The Soviet jury issue aside, let’s deal with our relationship with the Soviet Union, making them trust us. We trust them because we’re giving them what they want. So into all of this has thrown this sort of like bomb of the Jackson Vanik Amendment, which is saying.
If detante is gonna move forward, then you need to deal with your human right issue. You need to deal with immigration, you want your carrot, you know, you have to accept the stick. So the Soviets actually in the end decide we don’t want your carrot and we don’t want your stick. They, they reject the whole trade agreement.
And so in the short term you can say that this was really could be perceived as a failure. Like there was this high stakes attempt to get the Soviets to do something. They didn’t do it in the end. But I think, and I don’t know if shul agrees or disagrees or generally, but like in the long run, it created this idea of linkage that anytime the Soviets wanted something from the United States and they would want something from the United States, they knew that the one thing they had to do was turn on the spigot and let Jews out.
So in 1979, for example, when Carter is engaged with Brezhnev in in arms limitation talks, and also there’s a grain situation in the Soviet Union. They need to to import grain. The first thing they do is they suddenly start letting out tens of thousands of Jews. It’s the biggest immigration since Jews started to be let out.
So 50,000, I think Jews. Yeah, 50,000 were let out in 1979. But then in 1980, Reagan comes into office. The Cold War gets very cold, and the Soviets in invade Afghanistan
Shaul Kelner: dies.
Gal Beckerman: Brezhnev dies, it gets difficult and there’s something like, there’s a few hundred Jews let out in 1980. So this becomes this dynamic that then plays out ultimately when Gorbachev comes in in the late, in the mid eighties and says, you know, I want to warm relations with the West. I need to, for the sake of the survival of the Soviet Union. And the one thing that his advisors, I mean you can see this in their memoirs, is they go to him and they say, deal with the Jewish issue. ’cause that’s the thing that clearly. Is the stumbling block here to any sort of relationship with the West.
Shaul Kelner: Yeah. This was the key success of the activists, is that they got the American government on board as an ally, and they turned Jewish immigration into a symbol that if the Soviets wanted better relations with the West, they had to attend to the issue of Jewish immigration. Yeah. So when they didn’t want better relations, you know, that, that that’s, the gates would close, but they made this a symbol and before there was a movement in the states, the Soviets could care less about it.
Julie Salamon: So this is all really fascinating and this is giving us this sort of macro view and you know, the Jews as this sort of both ponds and beneficiaries of international intriguing diplomacy. But what I think makes it also such an interesting story is the more Hamish side of it, like you said, sitting in people’s living rooms and hearing their stories.
And a lot of these activists were suburban. Families. And I wonder if, uh, you could just talk a little bit about either things that didn’t make the podcast or just your favorite memory of either interviewing people directly or stories you heard that really brought home the idea that this was a really heartfelt grassroots movement.
Shaul Kelner: In the 1970s, there was what we call the fitness fad.
It was a fad because we knew it was gonna end and then Americans would stop taking care of their bodies. But at the time people started jogging and I think it was probably even, it was like a bigger seller. It was the, the, the most, it was the, the, the bestselling hardcover book ever except for the Bible and maybe Lord of the Rings was Jim Fix’s, uh, runner’s Bible.
So this is the 1970s and you have runners. Now. Among the runners are two of the leaders of the Union of Councils of Soviet Jews. Uh, this is Joel Sandberg, who is an ophthalmologist in, uh, south Florida and Bernie Disher, who is a dentist in, uh, Elkins Park right outside of Philly, and they are in Washington dc They’re at the annual conference of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.
This is the main national umbrella group for the grassroots movement, and they go out on a jog in the morning before the formal conference starts, and they’re talking. And among the things we’re talking about are their friends. The activists in the Soviet Union, one of whom a guy named Yuli Kosofsky also liked to run, and who knew that running was also a thing in the Soviet Union at the time.
Kosofsky was arrested right after he came back from a jog and they threw him into the prison cell, and he was, he held there for hours. He couldn’t change after the run. Now these two runners knew that, oh, that, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re back from a long run. You know, you’re overheated, you need water, you’re tired, you know the last place you wanna be is in a jail cell.
And Kosofsky, this is where they throw him. So what can they do for him? And Bernie Disher says, well, you know, I’ve already done something for him. And Joel Sandberg says, well, what’d you do? There was a 10 k, uh, few months ago, and I entered into the race as Yuli Koski, and I wore a shirt. And the the t-shirt said, I am running for Yuli Koski.
You know, and I sent out a press release and the like, and Joel said, that’s a great idea. And Bernie Disher said, I’ll send you the T-shirt. So, uh, there’s a, a Hanukkah run, an eight K in Florida that year. And before the race itself, Sandberg goes to the local papers and says, I have entered you the Kosofsky in this race, and now it’s publicized.
Or the Soviet’s gonna let him out to come run the race. You know, and if he comes out to run the race, great. It’s a victory. And if he doesn’t come out to run the race, well then there’s the publicity for it, and there’s a picture of Joel Sandberg wearing Bernie ER’s t-shirt. I am running for Yli Yli Kovski.
Fast forward a year later, you get the first Freedom run for Soviet Jewry, which is held in Los Angeles, and it is a freedom run for you, Lee Kosky. The coverage of this is saying that Yuli was running in Moscow at the same time, so it’s like middle of the night or early, like, you know, pre-dawn hours when he’s running there and there’s coverage of that.
And then fast forward again, when Kosofsky finally gets out and I think it’s like 89 or something like that, he goes to Philadelphia. There is a, uh, 4th of July independence run in Philly. He runs with Bernie Disher, and Bernie changes his shirt. It says I am running with. Yuli Kosofsky and Yuli Church says, I am Yuli Kosofsky.
Julie Salamon: Wow. Great story. Good story. Thank you.
Gal Beckerman: There were a lot of sort of wonderful interactions sort of along the line that, that Shaul mentioned. And one of them that I always liked to tell was the. Story of the Leningrad Hijacking, which was a quite famous story in the movement of that took place in, in 1971 of a group of Jews from Riga, Latvia, who decided to, they were all refused to leave, and so they decided to steal a plane and fly it outta the Soviet Union.
And this is a very dramatic story. They were all young people in their twenties. They were caught on the tarmac. The KGB knew about it. From day one, pretty much they were caught on the tarmac, thrown into prison, put on trial. The two leaders were sentenced to death and there was such a world outcry from, and not just from Jewish communities, but really all over the world that the death sentence was, was commuted, but they still served long prison terms. So I, when I researched the book, I went and I tracked down, there was 15 of them, 15 of the hijackers, and I tracked them all down and living in Israel, this was a period where people who got out mostly went to, to Israel, and I learned all.
Stories. And then it turned out that that summer while I was there, was the 35th anniversary of the hijacking. Uh, and lo and behold, every, uh, anniversary, apparently they get together and have a barbecue. So I was invited. I was the only non hijacker at the barbecue. Um, you know, it was like, they was like, they had a cake that said 35 on it, and we’re just, you know, they were grilling like, you know, hot dogs and hamburgers.
And drinking a lot of vodka and, and you know, singing songs in their guitars. But the, the craziest thing was these people had become almost like superheroes to me by this point. I mean, some of these names for people who remember this era, the Zalmanson family, Sylva Sylva, Zalmonson, Mark Dymshits was the pilot.
Edward Kuznetsov was one of the leaders and I drove there with them, like stuffed into the back of a car. Sylva was trying to set me up with her daughter. I’m pretty sure it was a very funny experience of seeing people. As just a group of friends, which was actually quite insightful for the book because these were all kind of Jewish kids from good families in Riga, and it was always a little bit mystifying to me, sort of how they took this step, this very dangerous step to do what they did, which could have very well, got them killed.
In fact, they all, they wrote a collective suicide note. They knew. That this was a high probability, and then seeing them that night sort of hanging out together and just being friends together with that dynamic that only friends who’ve like known each other forever can have, and like teasing one another.
And there’s like person who’s clearly the jokester and the person who’s sort of sitting quietly in the corner. You know, you just saw the dynamic and it made sense. You, you could, I could understand it made sense to me. At least I could understand how this could have sort of led to them. Egging each other on to do this thing
Julie Salamon: Because how old were they when they did the hijacking?
Gal Beckerman: They were in their, in their twenties. Yeah. Or even like late teens. Some of them. Yeah. Yeah.
Gemma Birnbaum: I think the youngest was like 19 or something. Yeah. Mendel le I think was 19. Yeah.
Julie Salamon: Yeah. No, I love that story. It was very cinematic. Yeah. You know it, so I believe both of you had Bar Mitzvah twins. Is that, I mean, I have to admit, I didn’t.
Know about Bar Mitzvah twins at all, but apparently it was a big thing at the time. Could you tell us about, first of all, tell us about your Bar Mitzvah twins and tell the audience what that program was about.
Shaul Kelner: So this starts in late 1970s, early 1980. And you’re talking about how did, this was a story of individual people.
So in the 1960s, you’d ask, American Jews we’re aware of the Soviet Jewish problem name a Soviet Jew, and no one could do it. But in the 1970s, what happens all of a sudden is activists in the states. Begin networking with activists in the Soviet Union and they begin doing pen pal relationships and adopt a family and adopt a prisoner, and they start traveling over there to visit.
So they’re creating real person to person connections. At some point they realize, you know what? We’re doing this as adults. We all have kids and we have to connect the kids. So there are some, there are activists. A lot of us will start in Washington, DC. Irene Makovsky, who is the one of the leaders of the Washington Committee on Soviet jury, but also the Union of Councils, helps to create a curriculum to essentially get kids involved in the movement.
And it starts with a lot of pen paling. And as that evolves in later iterations, they decide, you know what? We’re going to pair the kids together when they are bar and bat mitzvah age. And so the idea was you’re, you in the states are gonna have a twin. It’ll be the child of a refusenik. You may think that it’s the, the twin is yours alone.
In fact, there are hundreds of American kids who have the same twin. You’ll write letters as a pen pal. They may or may not write back to you. If they don’t write back so much, the better because then you’re gonna learn something about Soviet censorship. And the ways in which, uh, the, the, the, the Jews and the Soviet Union are being oppressed.
And then you’ll go to the synagogue. You will get up there. We’ll call your name to the Torah and we’ll call the Bar Mitzvah twins name. And when they call the bar mitzvah twins name, silence, and they call it again and silence. And then finally they’ll, they’ll call up the American kid who will do this in on behalf of the Soviet twin.
And then they’ll give a sermon and, and say what they were doing. So my twin’s name was Leonard Baras. His dad was a journalist who for some reason got himself in trouble with the, with the government. And this is 1982 in Manal and New Jersey. It’s in the early stages of the twinning program. And I did the twinning.
I got up, I read a sermon that basically said Soviets, antisemites, anti-Semitism, antisemitism, Soviet, Soviet antisemite. That was basically Leonard Baras help. And I never heard back. I never, I wrote to him, never heard from him. I’m doing research in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society years later and I decide, well, lemme see what happened to this Bar Mitzvah twin.
And I’m flipping through the files and lo and behold, he already got out. He had, he was in Israel at the time, that’s why he wasn’t writing me back. And my response was, ah, man. Which I immediately knew, like that was not what my response should have been. My response should have been, oh, thank God he got out.
You know? But that’s one of the ways that I, that I really learned that this movement that’s ostensibly about freeing Soviet Jews was very much about American Jewish identity at at the time. Yeah. i’m glad he got out.
Gemma Birnbaum: I didn’t know you learned that in the archive.
Shaul Kelner: Yeah, it was in the archive. I had to stay very quiet. You know, if I could have screamed, I would’ve.
Gal Beckerman: Yeah, I had, I had a Soviet twin too, but it was later, a little bit later. It was more towards the end of the movement in 89 Maxim Young Kvi and I, I don’t know how much I actually learned about him, you know, at the time I remember getting like a piece of paper, but it, it really.
I mean, it clearly planted a seed because then I went, I wrote a whole book about it, but I think it was this sort of, this weird sort of disjunction of being reminded at that age that. I think what I knew of Jewish history was like the Holocaust, you know, which happened in my mind a long time ago. And then there was sort of, Israel is an ongoing story, but I don’t think that, I think I really had a notion of sort of a before and after, like for for Jews.
And I was living in the after, you know, we were all living in the after. And then to be reminded that there was this kid. Who was this sort in this sort of liminal gray space of, I mean, he wasn’t being killed, you know, he, but he was, he was also not being allowed to live a full life as a Jew to do something as.
You know, as sort of basic in my mind then is have a bar mitzvah. Like, I think it really stayed with me. It was really this kind of fly in the ointment, this sense of like, something is not the, this, this discordance. And I, I I, there’s a funny sort of coda to Maxie Cle, ’cause I mentioned him in the, the book I mentioned I to start the book, but I never really knew what happened to him.
And I, I started giving talks for the book and then at some talk I gave, somebody comes up to me afterwards and says, oh, I know Max. And I was like, what? He’s like, yeah, yeah, max. He’s like a computer scientist in New Jersey. And I was like, they can’t be the same person. And it, it, we kind of matched up details and it turned out it probably was the same person and I reached out to him.
And he’d have, I mean, this is sort of a different story than your show, but equally, sort of more complicated than you would think. He, he had a difficult leaving from the Soviet, his parents got divorced, he left only with his mom, and it was just like a part of his life that he didn’t wanna think about or talk about.
So I never, I never really got talked, talk, talked to him, but it was kind a genius move on the activist part because, I mean, look, we’re still talking about it today, you know, however many years later. And it, it really personalized this movement. So it wasn’t this abstraction of like. Tens of thousands, a hundred thousands of Soviet Jews.
It was these particular people.
Shaul Kelner: This was, this was your twin.
Gal Beckerman: Yeah.
Shaul Kelner: It’s shocking to me, Julie, that, that you made it through the 1980s without being at a service where a twin happened. ’cause I was running, I, I looked at the numbers, the files, the archives have long, long lists of twinnings and when they happened and where they happened and running through this and also knowing what the population figures were for Jewish community at the time.
Uh, my estimate is that there was not a Shabbat. In the US in the 1980s where a twinning was not happening somewhere.
Gal Beckerman: Yeah, no, I remember it as a standard thing. I don’t remember choosing to have a twin. It was just like, this is what happens.
Julie Salamon: You were forced to have, I’m just curious, ’cause you said you have two teenage daughters, gal, have you spoken, did you speak to them about this whole twinning process?
Gal Beckerman: Um, I’m not sure. I, I’m not sure I have, but Shaul.
Shaul Kelner: I, I did, I, my kids found my Bar mitzvah speech a few years ago. And you know, and, and they read it and they were laughing like, oh dad, Abba, you were obsessed anti-Semite this anti-Semite that I say, ah, aha, kids, the joke’s on you. Now.
Julie Salamon: I’m not sure that’s a happy ending. Well, maybe not the story. So do you, I mean, you sort of hinted at it, Gal, do you think that this experience from your ascendancy into manhood affected your desire to ultimately write this book? Do you think that did spark some interest or is that it’s making too big?
Gal Beckerman: No. I, I think it did. I mean, I don’t think I, I mean, I always say that there’s like the schmaltzy, uh, you know, explanation for why I wrote this book involves my Soviet twin, but that’s like the, in the movie version I’m sort of living out.
But that’s not, I, I think, as I said in the beginning, I think I, I, I discovered it to be just a fascinating story, but also it, it did scratch this other itch that I had, which was that, you know, I grew up with Holocaust survivor grandparents, but I knew them. As people who had sort of reconstructed their lives in many ways, who were living in that sort of gray liminal space of, you know, having survived, having raised families, having had careers, having.
And there was something about like that whole period of, of, of history, the sort of the wreckage. – Yes, I got it in -this, this sort of afterward that wasn’t really part of my Jewish education because we were so focused on the Holocaust or the ongoing story of, of Israel, and yet he right in front of me constantly were these grandparents who were, who were living proof of this sort of afterlife, you know, that like they had continued to live.
And so I think it, it forced me to ask sort of bigger questions about Jewish communities more generally in that after. And that after and that long after, you know, that I was sort of at the, felt like at I was the tail end of, and specifically about American Jews and Soviet Jews, which were the two biggest Jewish communities, you know, outside of Israel because they both seemed to need to overcome psychological scars in the American Jewish side of things.
And I was through, alluded to that a little bit this, this sort of sense of. This self-perception of passivity and of not having enough sort of political power or, or sort of agency in America and then the Soviet Jews who had to overcome, just like literally being stuck in the Soviet Union and sort of losing their sense of, of any positive sense of Jewish identity.
So, so that whole story, I thought, wow, well this is sort of, this weirdly unexplored for me, it was an unexplored piece of Jewish, recent Jewish history that felt. In some ways more I could wrap my hands around it in ways that I, you know, the Holocaust always felt so difficult ultimately to really understand in any kind of deep way, you know, besides the facts of it.
But this was an experience that felt like still alive and one that I could sort of try to try to understand. And the Soviet jury movement just felt like the perfect sort of fulcrum of all of these, you know, it’s allowed me to ask all of these questions.
Julie Salamon: How about for you, Shaul?
Shaul Kelner: After I wrote the book, I was going back and looking through some papers that I had from my college years, and I realized that I was much more engaged in the Soviet Jewish issue than I remembered being.
And a part of it was I had gone to Israel after, for a year of volunteer service after college. And I met with cousins, the long lost cousins, Soviet immigrants who, uh, you know, I was doing genealogy at the time. And I discovered like these, that there, there were people who, we were separated for generations.
And so I’m meeting someone who’s my age. I’m in Israel as a volunteer and he’s there as a new immigrant. So this was something that was always like, I was connected to, I was not really involved as an activist. I twin my bar mitzvah. I wrote some op-eds for the student newspaper and I met my cousin. I think that was it.
But when I was studying, uh, I was taking classes as a graduate student and anything I was doing in my sociology classes, I was tying back to something about American Jews and I decided, okay, I’ll do something on a Jewish social movement. This was the one that I knew the most about that was closest to my heart.
And then what I found was that the more I began studying it, the more I was stalling on my, the work that I was supposed to be doing and focusing on Soviet Jewry. So I was supposed to be writing other stuff about Birthright Israel, but I kept going back and I was going back to archives to look at what the students’ struggle for Soviet jury was doing, and then the National Conference for Soviet jury and the Union of Councils.
And I realized, you know what? If this is what I’m doing to procrastinate, I should put it on the front burner. And, and I did. Thank God.
Julie Salamon: So that, that’s great. So, um, we got, uh, this question from a listener of the, of the Wreckage, podcast series, and this person says, asks, it seems like the movement was ultimately a Zionist movement until it wasn’t.
Is that an accurate framing? And if so, when, when does that shift in philosophy start to happen?
Gemma Birnbaum: This question killed me. ’cause I was like, did I not, uh, make that clear in the eight episodes or whatever? But I think, you know, it’s really interesting because when the break does sort of happen. It’s really strong.
And so for so many decades when the movement is actually really small and it’s sort of fledgling, so much of it is about getting these, these Jews not just out of the Soviet Union, but into Israel. One thing that we touched on a bit in the series, but not too much, is this idea that there is really aggressive anti Zionist campaign out of the Soviet Union, and that that doesn’t just get contained to the Soviet Union, but goes much wider.
And so where the break starts to happen, I think is really interesting because. The way it’s kind of articulated is okay. If you are a Jewish person living in the Soviet Union, and let’s say you’re like 20 years old and it’s 1980, your entire life, you’ve heard nothing but really negative things about Israel and about Zionism, and now you’re being told.
Go to that place. Why on earth would you want to go to this place that you’ve been told is terrible your whole life? For many different reasons. And like, we’re not, don’t need to necessarily get into like what the propaganda is saying, but that it did exist. And so, and then there’s other people who are like, well, my family is in the United States.
Why would I go to this other country? And so it, it becomes this kind of shift of like, you must go and make atu. You’d want to leave and go wherever you want to go. And it’s really interesting to see how that impacts. American Jewish communities and American Jewish activists in the way that they had to kind of reckon with that.
Gal Beckerman: I think there was always sort of a two perceptions of the movement that like, you know, as long as. As long as the movement was sort of embattled and nobody was getting out, the two perceptions could sort of coexist, and one was American Jews. I think most American Jews, the American side of their American Jewish identity was very much about the freedom of movement that these people who you can’t tell people, you know, in their mind, the logic went, you can’t tell people who are leaving a dictatorship, authoritarian regime that they can’t go live where they want to live. That that would be fundamentally sort of un-American and would sort of undermine the motivation that a lot of these people had for even engaging in the movement. And from the Israeli or the Zionist side, it was. Well, they have a homeland.
And also there are considerations here. Like we could use, we could use a million or two Soviet Jews in Israel. So that’s what this is about. They’re not just leaving to go be wherever they wanna live. They’re leaving to go to, to move, to come to Israel. And so again, when nobody was getting out, this was not sort of an issue. Everyone could sort of see into the movement what they wanted to see into it. Now, once Jews started getting out and then deciding in extraordinarily high numbers, I think it was like 90% or something at its height to opt out or to drop out as they were called, kind of derisively, we know.
Because when they would get to Vienna, which was the transit point in Europe, they. Ultimately they were now in the free world. They could decide, you know, what they wanted to do. And so many, many, many of them decided to go Israel was not good place economically, uh, in the late seventies. Like it was, it was, it was not a, so a lot of them decided to go to the United States, and then that became a real crisis because, uh, Israel then put a lot of pressure on the American government to stop the flow and, and, and they did eventually.
Shaul Kelner: Eventually the Soviet stopped the flow first. Yeah.
Gal Beckerman: Yeah.
Shaul Kelner: And then when the gates reopen. Right. And the, and it’s clear that, that most of the emigres are going to choose the states if they have the option. The Soviet government, the American government, and the Israeli government all make the decision over the objection of the emigres and of American Jewish activists that they’re going to steer the, the immigration to Israel by establishing direct flights.
So you don’t have to go out to Vienna to then and then decide you’re just gonna go straight from Moscow. Yeah. To Tel Aviv. So it really depends on where you’re looking at it from. In the Soviet Union, the first activists were activists who were intending to go to Israel, right? It was a Zionist movement in its origins there, but they were essentially the nachos or the pioneers.
Who created the opportunity for other Soviet Jews who all of a sudden this fifth line on the passport that says, that says Jew, that was causing the glass ceilings and the persecution, well now this might be your ticket out. There were Jews who then realized, oh, this is how I can leave. They were not motivated to go to Israel in the first place, and but they had then the opportunity, right.
One of the really interesting things about it, I think, on the American side is that the American activists went up against the Soviet government. They went up against the American government and think back to what Gal was saying with Kissinger, uh, and, and what he had said. And they went up against the Israeli government ’cause the Israeli government had very clear ideas where, where the Emigres should go. And I cannot think of another time in American Jewish history when American Jews collectively operated as such an independent political force with its own sense of autonomy that we’re not beholden to any country or government.
And that, that we are just acting. As American Jews in what we see as American Jewish values and interests.
Gal Beckerman: Yeah. And I think it was very raw because they, I feel like they really felt like they couldn’t tell these Soviet Jews who were leaving tyranny, that they had to, they had to go to one place. You know?
It just felt wrong to them.
Julie Salamon: Yeah. So I guess the, the final question I have for the group really is, what’s the end of the story? How did the. I think different from the Holocaust, which where people were sold. Everybody’s traumatized. Maybe who Emigrates. But there, it was a different kind of trauma, I think for people who had been in concentration camps or had their entire families wiped out.
And there were, I think for a lot of people they carried those traumas here. But I have the impression that the Soviet Jews carried their own, like you said, with your Bar mitzvah trend. Mm-hmm. Set of baggage and talking to people for your books. What do you think is the legacy here of these Soviet Jews?
How do they, how do they look back on this piece of history, their history and, and maybe now a new generation is coming up?
Shaul Kelner: A lot of the people who left the Soviet Union were not aware that there was a global movement that was working for them. So just a lot of general ignorance, lack of knowledge that this had even happened.
And there in the States and in Israel as well, they’re dealing with basic issues of resettlement and building new lives. Immediately upon coming to the States and to Israel and to Germany and other places that they went, uh, there was a scholar named Larissa Remenik, who studied how the immigration, the resettlement was going.
And she said in all these places, she saw the same thing. It was a crisis of failed mutual expectations where the American Jews, Israelis had, they had their assumptions about who Soviet Jews should be. They should all be like the most passionate, refuses they were not. Mm-hmm. And the Soviet Jews who were immigrating had assumptions that they would be accepted for who they were and not have these imaginaries projected onto them. So there was a moment when there was a, there was a lot of communal inter intercommunal tension that shaped the experience of, of the migration move forward. And the larger story of the resettlement is basically one of success. Economic, cultural, educational, occupational, and the like.
And you want larger legacies. I mean, we have Google, that’s one of the legacies of this movement. Thank you Sergey Brin. You know, there’s a, a flourishing of. Uh, Jewish culture produced by Soviet. Mm-hmm. Jewish emigres in the 1.5 generation in the States. In Canada. It’s reshaped Israeli politics, so it’s a massive, massive demographic transformation of the Jewish world with cultural implications and economic, and the like.
Gal Beckerman: I’d say just one, just to underline one thing that Shaul said, which is a lot of the, a lot of the activists, the people who were really at the, you know, on the front line of this movement, they really did feel forgotten. You know? I mean, I, that was, I don’t know if that’s changed in, in Israel much. But when, I remember when I was going around interviewing people, and I mentioned that like, you know, I would show up at their doors and they would be like, oh, finally somebody’s coming to talk to me. And we’re talking on people who like did this, like, hi, carried out this hijacking or like, you know, organized massive underground, you know, projects, you know, and, and they, and they felt.
Like they were the ones who really kicked open the door and then were, were really abandoned and their stories were never told. And in a way they were, you know, they, they should be, that they should be thought of as like pioneers. So I think it’s, you know, it’s one of the gratifying aspects of. Writing about this movement is to have that sense that you’re telling stories that that have not necessarily gotten the kind of respect or attention that they, they should have, because history moves on.
And maybe there’s even something about being a successful movement that erases the struggle that comes before it, because that definitely seems to be an aspect of what happened in this case.
Shaul Kelner: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I feel like my book could have been a lot shorter, but the more I wrote, the more I felt like I had an obligation to.
Name the names of the people who were involved, and it’s very easy to collapse the movement into Shaki, Anatoli, naan Sharansky one person. You know, this movement happened because thousands of people really took up this issue with Soviets who put their own lives and on the line, and American Jews and others from around the world who, who made this a priority.
And so I felt the more I went on, the more I, I felt I had a responsibility. These people need to be remembered. And they were pioneers and they did kick the door open. And that story is, it’s important and it has to be told. I’m glad that it’s not only now being told in print, we have it in podcast. You had mentioned, uh, Sylva Zalmanson’s and Edward Kuznetsov’s daughter. Anat, who they tried to fix you up with. You know, she produced a great documentary about her parents called Operation Wedding that tells the story. So the story is being told more and more. I still think it’s not enough.
Julie Salamon: Well, really grateful to you both, to all three of you actually for producing this, this history, which I think is so valuable and really illuminating, I think for so many people.
Gemma, do you have a final word?
Gemma Birnbaum: I, I think, you know, the thing that always stuck with me and, and partly why I wanted to do this so badly was because I started really meeting with a lot of the activists when I started my job at the American Jewish Historical Society about four and a half years ago. And what I don’t think I fully grasped, even looking at some of the papers was the trauma, not just the pride that a lot of them felt.
And I didn’t want the danger that a lot of them. Subjected themselves to Andris to be forgotten. So some of that is similar to Shaul was saying, but I think there’s this almost sort of, maybe less so now with sort of current events, but sort of sanitizing of what was really happening in the Soviet Union and how dangerous it was to travel there.
And so there was, there was a moment in my office. Where Adele Sandberg, who had traveled there, uh, with her husband was telling me, I mean, and this is years and years, this is decades after, and she was telling me some of the things that she was too afraid to put into the papers and to put into the logs because at the time she was afraid that the KGB was going to see some of these things.
And so she described this story of being with, I can’t remember if it was a a a, a Refusenik or a fellow activist, but essentially they forced this woman to make a phone call. While she was on the phone, the KGB agent has their hands around her neck and if she goes off script, they’re gonna snap her neck.
And Adele was telling me like, but I don’t have proof of that. How do I prove it to you? All I can think is so much of this history is reliant on those first person testimonies. You don’t have to do anything to prove it. You just have to tell me it happened. And so taking a lot of that, you know, what is clearly still very personal all these years later and making it relatable to, to people who maybe have never heard of this movement or who have, but don’t realize how deep it was and allowing people like.
Adele and others to have their voices, literal voices from the oral history collection heard and maybe understood a little bit better, and to make those who listen to it really understand just how much of a sacrifice this activism really was. It takes a lot of courage. For me. It was just this incredibly emotional experience to have to go through some of these stories.
Now, imagine having to live it. And I think that’s kind of the power of the audio is being able to show people that kind of firsthand account, which we can’t really do any other way. you have to hear it sometimes.
Julie Salamon: Well, thank you so much, all three of you, all of our thanks to Gal, Shaul and Gemma for joining us tonight. For more about The Wreckage, including episode transcripts, links to the collection used in our series and more. Visit ajhs.org/podcasts and don’t forget to leave us a rating on your preferred podcast platform.
