As I write this in June, 2017, I can still remember clearly an incident from August, 1959. I was then a member of a delegation of “American youth” sponsored by Lisle Fellowship which was visiting the Soviet Union under the terms of a Cultural Exchange agreement signed by the two countries in 1958. We were nearing the end of our two month journey at a small town on the Crimea named Gurzuf which was near Yalta. At that time, it was noted as the place where the best Pioneers (boy scouts) were invited to a camp in the summer. We were put up at an International Youth Camp nearby which was intended to house Communist youth from other countries. We were the only “capitalist” youth in the camp at that time.
Gurzuf was then and now also a popular vacation place for Muscovites and others from up north. It had a rocky beach on the shores of the Black Sea, and on one of our days there, a few of my friends and I from the American group went to sunbathe on this beach. Suddenly, a tall Russian man who looked about 30 and dressed as all of us were in swim suits, came up to me, and asked in very good English: “Are you Jewish?” I answered “Yes.” and he became visibly eager to talk. It turned out that his father was a prominent professor at Moscow University who had been rounded up in 1952-53 as one of the prominent Jews accused of seeking to assassinate Stalin–the so-called “Doctors’ Plot.” Luckily for them, Stalin died in March 1953 and his successors dropped the case and they all were freed. The young man, whose name I have to confess I do not remember, told me he was a professor also and was doing research in the cancer of the eye. He added that as far as he knew, only one other researcher was into this subject, and he was a professor at Columbia University.
He explained that in the current climate he could not send a letter to this professor unless the professor wrote him first. So he wanted me to hand deliver a letter from him to the Columbia professor. Over the next couple of nights I met this professor and he took me around to the local “nightspots” in Gurzuf, and on my last night he gave me the letter for the Columbia professor. I dutifully smuggled it out of the country in my luggage and when I was back in New Rochelle, N.Y., my home town, I hand delivered the letter. Unfortunately, I do not know what happened next.
I was always acutely aware of the precarious situation of Jews in the Soviet Union at that time. When I was a correspondent in Moscow, I made a point of going to the only working synagogue in Moscow for the high holy days, and then chatting outside with the members of the congregation. What I found in the Soviet Union at that time was that when I identified myself as Jewish, I heard all sorts of stories about the hardships of life for Jews in Russia. If I simply said I was an American, I did not get the same reaction. In an article I wrote for The Washington Star in 1965. after a trip to Russia, I said that the Soviet leadership had decided to do nothing for the Jews–neither to let them assimilate freely into Soviet society by abolishing the need to carry a nationality designation of “Jewish” in their internal passports, nor to provide them with the facilities for letting the Jewish culture flourish. In 1969, as Moscow correspondent for The Times, I reported on Rabbi Arthur Schneier’s visit to a Moscow synagogue to delver a Torah. There was continual tension in Soviet-American relations over Soviet Jewry, heightened by Senator Henry Jackson’s persistent efforts to link trade between the two countries to free emigration for Jews to Israel.
Since the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s was Egypt’s main supplier of arms, the idea of free emigration to Israel was rejected, In 1971, in fact, the Soviet media launched a very strong anti-Zionism campaign. It reached its conclusion in March 1971 when foreign correspondents were invited to the ornate House of Friendship for a most unusual press conference. Under glaring lights, forty prominent Soviet Jews, including Deputy Premier Vladimir Dymshits, the highest ranking New in government, wee sitting on a raised platform in front of us. One by one, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, many of them pledged their loyalty to the Soviet Union and asserted their hatred for Israel, Zionism and the United States. By 1973, after the so-called Yom Kippur War, the United States and Russia worked together to end the fighting and set up a peace conference in Geneva in December 1973. That paved the way for Henry Kissinger’s peace-making efforts in 1973-75.
Throughout the Nixon administration, the issue of Jewish emigration was a major issue. But once Mikhail Gorbachev came to prominence in the 1980s, this disappeared as an issue. Jews were permitted to emigrate to Israel—and many came to the United States, Nearly 200,000 Jews emigrated to Israel in 1990 alone.
