Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist by Yossi Klein Halevi

Author:Yossi Klein Halevi
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Crossing the Border

1.

THE EXODUS ended. In August 1972 the Kremlin imposed a “ransom tax”: Would-be émigrés had to reimburse the government for their state-sponsored education. Few Soviet citizens could afford the extortionist rates the Kremlin was demanding. Moscow Jews appeared at a press conference with price tags around their necks.

We needed to do something spectacular, unprecedented. But almost every conceivable tactic had already been tried. And the JDL was paralyzed. Moish had dropped out of “the business,” as he called it, and his group ceased functioning. The FBI pressure was relentless. Four JDLers were arrested for the Hurok attack and charged with murder; another seven were arrested for bombing a Soviet office in Manhattan two years earlier. The JDL became preoccupied with defending its own prisoners.

Then one day I read this polemic in a Jewish magazine:

JDL members strike like petty thieves in the night where there is no risk to their safety. Throwing rotten eggs and stink bombs in concert halls is cowardly mischief. I shall withdraw and apologize for referring to the Jewish Defense League as the League for Jewish Cowards if they were to transfer at least some of their activities to Russia.

Of course: A demonstration inside the Soviet Union. Force them to arrest American Jews. That would prove we were unstoppable, more committed to saving Soviet Jews than the Kremlin was to oppressing them.

And I would prove to myself my dedication and courage: If I couldn’t be a terrorist, I could at least take conventional protest to its farthest extreme.

By demonstrating in Moscow, I would join the frontline of the war for Jewish survival. In our family album was a photograph of my cousin Yossi as an Israeli soldier. I considered us soldiers in the same army, fighting the same enemy on different fronts. The Soviet Union armed Arab terrorists and crushed Judaism within its borders, trying to reverse Zionism and turn us back into victims. But the Holocaust, that excess of exile, had made Jewish vulnerability unbearable. Yossi and I, each in our own way, were fighting the post-Holocaust war against powerlessness.

ON YOM KIPPUR I SAT IN synagogue beside my father. He wore a kittel, the shroudlike white robe that is the Yom Kippur symbol of mortality, of emptying yourself of small needs and fears and accounting your life before God.

I confided the plan to him. “Russia is not like America,” he said quietly. I replied that in this era of superpower détente, our American passports would protect us; even Soviet Jews had demonstrated at the Kremlin and not been sent to Siberia. My heroic ambitions were tempered by a canny calculation of the risks.

“You never know with the Russian,” he said. “You could go to jail for many years. Are you prepared?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m behind you.”

He seemed so pale, so vulnerable. How could I do this to him? But he knew that I had no choice. I’d grown up in a secure Diaspora, with a Jewish state as backup should America become cursed. The vast disparity between my father’s reality and mine made me feel inauthentic.

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