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Friday December 7, 2007

The Jews who stayed behind — and the reasons they did

by matt siegel
jta

When the Soviet government began issuing exit visas for Jews in 1987, hundreds of thousands of people trapped for decades reacted with understandable exuberance.

A tidal wave of aliyah came next, the largest since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

But for many Soviet Jews active in the struggle to throw off the yoke of Bolshevism, the question of emigration was more complicated. Some had elderly relatives who couldn’t make the trip or younger children they feared to uproot. Some simply couldn’t abandon their community.

While most of the emphasis this year — the 40th anniversary of their struggle — is being placed on the plight of the refuseniks and the worldwide movement to free them, it was the Jews who stayed behind who became responsible for the transformation of Jewish life in the world’s third largest diaspora community.

“I found myself in the position where most of my friends left,” says Mikhail Chlenov, a major player in the emigration movement who ultimately chose not to leave.

Chlenov stayed, he says, “because I was really deeply involved in the building of this new community here, which I actually predicted in 1976.”

He had three young children at the time and was too involved in community activity to uproot them all.

His son Motya, now 37 and head of the Moscow office of the World Congress of Russian Jewry, was raised in the refusenik movement. Motya even attended what was referred to as a refusenik kindergarten at a country house outside of Moscow.

A community leader and activist, Motya Chlenov’s heavy involvement in community building was clearly shaped by his childhood experiences.

“One of my first memories from my life was a large table with lots of Jewish kids sitting around,” he recalls. “The adult people were shmoozing about things, about people who got arrested, people who got refused, who got a visa.”

Naomi Zubkova, a journalist and translator who had longed to immigrate to Israel along with her brother but stayed to take care of her parents, describes her experience as very common.

“I wanted to go. I had friends in Israel from summers. I wanted to go then, and I thought I’d find my place there,” she says. “But I couldn’t go.”

While Zubkova seems satisfied with the development of Jewish life, she laments the current state of Russian politics. She describes the lack of press freedoms and increasing state control of the media with barely contained disgust.

Many of those who stayed behind to build the secular organs of communal life fit a similar description: strong-willed intellectuals with Zionist proclivities.

Josef Zissels, 61, a native of Chernovtsy, Ukraine, fits that bill as well as anyone.

“I’m a traditional Masorti Jew and Zionist in a wider meaning of the word,” he says. “The optimal formula is strong Israel and strong diaspora.”

He was a member of the human rights movement in Ukraine and the Soviet-era Jewish resistance. Imprisoned twice for his work, Zissels spent six years as a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag. But when the time came to leave, Zissels, who spent decades fighting for the rights of Jews to emigrate from his native Ukraine, chose to stay.

His father has wanted to immigrate to Israel, and Zissels now has many relatives there. Still, he says, he is fully satisfied with his life and activities in Ukraine in spite of the spike in xenophobia and anti-Semitic attacks, and he has no plans to leave.

Zissels leads the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, a nationwide umbrella group based in Kiev, and serves on the board of the European Jewish Congress.

Aware of his vital role within the community, Zissels sees his mission as developing the Jewish community of Ukraine, which he says “will become stable in a generation.”

“We have to restructure ourselves because what we were doing more than 20 years ago is no longer suitable today,” he says.

For many who remained behind, who were raised in an environment of resistance and stayed to revive an indigenous Jewish culture decimated by 80 years of Soviet communism, the period brings back bittersweet memories.

Motya Chlenov recalls fondly the cramped apartments full of friends on holidays and the annual street parties outside Moscow’s Choral Synagogue on Simchat Torah, where thousands once gathered in defiance of the general ban on Jewish meetings.

“They all got their exit visas, and they all left,” he says with a touch of bitterness. “In 1992 I went to the Choral Synagogue for Simchat Torah, and there was nobody there because they had all gone.”

His father, Mikhail, who described himself as a very secular Jew, seems ambivalent about developments since the fall of communism.

Mikhail is clearly overjoyed at the outpouring of Jewish cultural life, but when the talk turns to the predominance of Orthodox Judaism in Russia today, much of which is imported from abroad, he grows slightly agitated.

“I am a bit disappointed that the dominant religious pattern which is imposed on the Russian Jews and Russia is obscurantist,” he says, “but I can certainly find positive traits in this development too.”

Zubkova’s family has been directly affected by the ubiquity of the Orthodox. Despite coming from an extremely secular background, one of her sons, whom she described as a “deep and thoughtful person,” has become fervently Orthodox.

“I see he’s happy,” she says pensively and deliberately. “I know he had very difficult times when he was discovering all those things for himself.”

Her other son, a doctor in New York, remains fiercely secular. She calls his success a “present from the last 17 years.”

They let my people go!

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