Jewish Lives under Communism: New Perspectives 9781978830820

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JEWISH LIVES ­U NDER COM MUNISM

JEWISH LIVES ­U NDER COM MUNISM New Perspectives

Edited by

K ateřin a Č a pková a nd K a mil Ki jek

Rutger s Uni v er sit y P r ess

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Čapková, Kateřina, editor. | Kijek, Kamil, editor. Title: Jewish lives ­under communism: new perspectives / edited by Kateřina Čapková, and Kamil Kijek. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021045869 | ISBN 9781978830790 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978830806 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978830813 (epub) | ISBN 9781978830820 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—­Communist countries—­Social conditions. | Jews—­ Communist countries—­Social life and customs. | Communist countries—­ Ethnic relations. | Jews—­Identity. Classification: LCC DS135.E83 J54 2022 | DDC 947/.004924—­dc23/eng/20211013 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021045869 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2022 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­rutgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 This volume is dedicated to the late David Shneer (1972–2020), whose premature death comes as a shock to historians and Jewish Studies scholars all over the world. David was not only the author of perhaps the most brilliant contribution to this volume but he was above all our mentor and friend who, generously and with ­great intellectual enthusiasm, supported the proj­ect from the beginning. He not only participated in the international conference “New Approaches to the History of the Jews ­under Communism,” which was held in Prague in May 2017 and inspired this volume, but was also the scholar we consulted throughout its preparation—­from the first tentative t­ able of contents, through subsequent versions of the introduction, to almost the end of our work on it. The content and structure of the volume, stressing transnational ties between vari­ous Jewish communities both in the Eastern Bloc and beyond the Iron Curtain and considering the history of the Jews ­under Communist regimes in connection with previous historical periods, follow David Shneer’s innovative and revolutionary vision of how to approach twentieth-­century Jewish history in Central and Eastern Eu­rope.

CONTENTS



Introduction kateřina čapková, kamil kijek, and stephan stach

1

part i: periphery and center 1

A New Life? The Pre-­Holocaust Past and Post-­Holocaust Pre­sent in the Life of the Jewish Community of Dzierżoniów, Lower Silesia, 1945–1950 15 kamil kijek

2

Erased from History: Jewish Mi­grants in Postwar Czecho­slo­va­kia kateřina čapková

3

On the Borders of Legality: Connections between Traditional Culture and the Informal Economy in Jewish Life in the Soviet Provinces Valery Dymshits

35

54

part ii: perceptions of jewishness 4

From Friends to Enemies? The Soviet State and Its Jews in the Aftermath of the Holocaust diana dumitru

71

5

“I Was Not Like Every­body Else”: Soviet Jewish Doctors Remember the Doctors’ Plot anna shternshis

91

6

“­After Auschwitz You Must Take Your Origins Seriously”: Perceptions of Jewishness among Communists of Jewish Origin in the Early German Demo­cratic Republic anna koch

7 Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan: Between Stigma and Cynicism agata maksimowska

111

131

vii

viii

Contents

part iii: transnationalism 8

An Alternative World: Jews in the German Demo­cratic Republic, Their Transnational Networks, and a Global Jewish Communist Community 153 david shneer

9

Soviet Yiddish Cultural Diplomacy in the Post-­Stalinist 1950s gennady estraikh

10 ­Family Discourse, Migration, and Nation-­Building in Poland and Israel in the Late 1950s marcos silber

174

195

part iv: dissidents 11 Three Jewish Social Networks: A (Non-) Encounter in Malakhovka galina zelenina 12

The Opposition of the Opposition: New Jewish Identities in the Illegal Under­ground Public Sphere in Late Communist Hungary kata bohus

215

236

Acknowl­edgments 253 Notes on Contributors 255 Index 259

JEWISH LIVES ­U NDER COM MUNISM

INTRODUCTION K AT E Ř I N A Č A P KO VÁ , K A M I L K I J E K , A N D S T E P H A N S TA C H

Thirty years have passed since the end of the Cold War, which makes it all the more surprising that the bulk of the historiography on Jews ­under Communism continues to use the rhe­toric of the Cold War. State Communism was hegemonic, and therefore scholarship has focused on po­liti­cal elites and their relationship with the Jews, as well as on t­ hose Jews who held (mostly temporarily) impor­tant positions in the Communist po­liti­cal system. Only in the last de­cade can we observe a clear turn ­toward a more complex view of the Jewish experience ­under Communism. Research on Jews in dif­fer­ent parts of the former Soviet Union has provided the most inspiring and groundbreaking studies to date. In contrast, research on the history of the Jews in other Eu­ro­pean states u­ nder Soviet influence awaits such new approaches. The goal of this volume is to outline promising new research directions that, for the first time, bring together innovative scholarship on vari­ous aspects of Jewish life in the post-1945 period, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Poland, Czecho­slo­va­kia, the German Demo­cratic Republic, and Hungary. It also aims to foster the integration of Soviet and East Central Eu­ro­pean Jewish Studies into the broader history of socie­ties u­ nder Communism. Jeffrey Veidlinger, Elissa Bemporad, Anna Shternshis, Gennady Estraikh, David Shneer, and Arkady Zeltzer portray vari­ous groups within Soviet society not only as victims of the Communist system but also as agents who used the ­limited ­legal framework in a very creative way to achieve their own ideals and aims.1 Moreover, they demonstrate how, although pre-1917 Jewish traditions had been shaken by the new po­liti­cal system, they continued to shape daily lives of Jews during the Communist era and affected such purely Communist historical pro­cesses as patterns of enrollment of Jews in Communist organ­izations, the daily functioning of the party, and Soviet Jewish identities.2 All of ­these studies of Jews ­under Communism focus on territories within the Soviet Union, and most only deal with the first two to three de­cades of the Soviet regime, as if the potential to interpret Soviet Jewish experience beyond the narrative 1

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of discrimination stops with the fatal final years of Stalin’s rule. And even though the first complex studies of pro-­Soviet regimes and their socie­ties outside the Soviet Union are available,3 a narrow po­liti­cal history still dominates the historiography of Jewish experience in East Central Eu­ro­pean countries. Jews are studied mainly as passive objects of policies issued by Communist regimes and as victims of popu­lar or state antisemitism, on the one hand, or as members of a group allegedly overrepresented or uniquely engaged in the Communist power apparatus, on the other. Their history is dominated ­either by a teleology of waves of persecution and by subsequent waves of emigration or by narratives of Jewish engagement with Communism. A perfect example of this characteristic approach and its overtly po­liti­cal, ideological, and teleological discourse is the Polish case. Arguably, in no other country in East Central Eu­rope has Jewish postwar history been investigated so intensively as in Poland. Precisely for this reason, it serves as the best exemplar of the ­earlier mentioned limitations. Since 1989 the dominant line of historiography on Poland ­under Communism has emphasized the crimes of the Communist regime and the suffering it inflicted on the Polish nation.4 Consciously or not, this scholarship has embraced an overtly nationalistic narrative. In a dichotomizing discourse, authors pre­sent the Polish nation in opposition and re­sis­tance to Communism, which in turn is depicted as an alien ideology implemented from the outside. Such studies count Jews among the outsiders, serving as proof of the alleged truth of the myth of Judeo-­Bolshevism or, short of that, as a way to underscore an ostensibly unique Jewish preference for Far Left po­liti­cal movements.5 This narrow nationalistic perspective also largely defines the writings of liberal Polish historians, who reject ­these kinds of ste­reo­types, unfounded accusations, and simplifications but are also fascinated by the supposedly high number of Jews in the upper ranks of the Polish Communist Party and state apparatus, treating this topic as the most crucial prob­lem of Jewish history in Communist Poland.6 American, Israeli, and the new wave of Polish scholarship mostly focus on anti-­ Jewish vio­lence in postwar Poland, the anti-­Jewish policies of the Communist regime, the organ­ization of the remnants of Polish Jewry directly ­after the Holocaust, and subsequent waves of Jewish emigration.7 All ­these facets of Jewish history in Poland and in the rest of East Central Eu­rope are indeed very impor­tant, but t­hese works generally fail to address issues of Jewish agency (individual and communal) ­under Communism, as expressed by vari­ous forms of Jewish re­sis­tance, accommodation, or adjustment to the Communist real­ity and the spaces in between. Exceptions to this pattern are the few notable works on the history of the Jewish community in the first years of postwar Poland, which concentrate on institutional history.8

Dif­fer­ent Methodology and Sources The need to investigate the Jewish experience ­under Communism with a focus on social and cultural history is therefore all the more urgent. This change of perspec-

Introduction 3

tive informs Jewish Lives ­under Communism, which joins not only the e­ arlier mentioned new scholarship on Soviet Jewish history but also the first innovative studies on Jews in other Communist countries.9 This new perspective brings with it the adoption of other methodological approaches, principally a turn from po­liti­cal history to research based on interviews, anthropological fieldwork, and on local archives where our authors find rich data about Jewish social history u­ nder state Communism. This research focuses on ­people at the bottom, rather than on po­liti­ cal elites at the top. Such studies enable us to analyze the negotiations between heterogenous local Jewish communities and Jewish individuals and dif­fer­ent levels of state and local administrations. For instance, as Diana Dumitru and Anna Shternshis show in their chapters on the postwar years up to the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953, such analyses reveal not only the social impact of discriminatory policies of the Communist regime but also the agency and dif­fer­ent approaches of a diverse Jewish community to the new ­legal and po­liti­cal framework. Instead of relying on official state documents and the Communist Party’s bureaucrats’ attitude to the Jewish population or their monitoring of activities of Jews, the contributors in Jewish Lives ­under Communism analyze documents produced by Jewish individuals, communities, or dif­fer­ent organ­izations and also ­those in private hands, including photo a­lbums, correspondence, diaries, and objects of memory. Oral history also plays a large role in the chapters by Valery Dymshits, Anna Shternshis, Galina Zelenina, Agata Maksimowska, and Kateřina Čapková. It allows them to show new forms of Jewish self-­consciousness within the official Communist framework and a perspective enriched by a focus on ­family issues, choice of occupation, social networks, and leisure time. For instance, in her so­cio­log­i­cal microstudy, Zelenina analyzes the overlapping social networks of refuseniks, dacha ­owners, and religious Jews of Malakhovka in the suburbs of Moscow. An essential part of the “Malakhovka experience” is the location of the settlement on the periphery, on the outskirts of the capital’s center. Dymshits, Čapková, Kamil Kijek, and Diana Dumitru also focus on regions at the periphery of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czecho­slo­va­kia. Such research in many ways challenges the other­wise dominant interest in Jews in the capital cities and larger settlements in the center, where the central offices of Jewish organ­izations acted ­under the direct control of the state administration and where—as is often claimed—­Jews underwent the pro­cess of assimilation.10 A new, more sophisticated understanding of Jewish life in Eu­rope during Communism, combined with new methodological approaches, can be achieved by a “transnationalism of sources”; that is, by integrating archival and other documents produced not only by the Jewish communities of Eastern Eu­rope and Communist governments and deposited in local archives but also by Jews and Jewish institutions outside t­ hese territories and stored in Israeli, American. and West Eu­ro­pean archives or libraries. Juxtaposing and carefully triangulating sources produced in vari­ous countries in dif­fer­ent discursive, ideological, and institutional contexts can help overcome their respective biases; for example, the impact of Communist

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ideology and censorship, the self-­censorship of Jewish individuals and institutions in Eastern Eu­rope, and Western convictions regarding the impossibility of Jewish life u­ nder Communism, which contributed to the denial of the very real­ity of Jewish life in Eastern Eu­rope.

Local Contexts and Continuities Our volume persuasively shows that a variety of differences in po­liti­cal, social, cultural, and economic life existed across vari­ous states and regions. Thus, it deconstructs the idea of a single “Soviet model” ­adopted in countries of East Central Eu­rope. In the ­legal framework alone, we find substantial differences between Hungary, Czecho­slo­va­kia, Bulgaria, and East Germany in comparison with Poland, Romania, and Yugo­slavia. In the first group of countries, Jews ­were acknowledged as a religious community only, whereas the latter group allowed not only religious communities but also state-­funded nonreligious leftist Jewish organ­izations. When around 1950 Zionism became an alien ideology in the eyes of Communist governments, secular Jewish institutions strug­gled to sustain government recognition of the Jews as a nationality or ethnic minority. ­Because they w ­ ere not religious, ­these institutions based their existence on a sort of secular Jewish ethnic identity combined mostly with interest in Yiddish culture and inspired by ideas of prewar Bundists and Folkists—­even Left Zionist ideas of doyikeit (hereness). ­These dif­fer­ent institutional settings are not only a testament to the wide variety of Jewish experiences and identities ­under Communism but also suggest a greater level of continuity between the period before and ­after Communism than the historiography has been willing to admit. By the interwar period, the Polish and Romanian Jewish communities ­were especially known for their pronounced interest in Jewish nationalism of vari­ous kinds, not only the pro-­Zionist variety. The per­sis­tence of nonreligious semi-­national Jewish organ­izations in Communist Poland and Romania is therefore proof that Communist dictatorships understood the internal dynamics of the local Jewish communities and to some extent respected their local ideological and institutional framework (as was the case with other groups of p­ eople in society). It is also proof that, especially for leftist Jewish pre-­Holocaust organ­izations, the arrival of state Communism in the postwar period was not always seen as a disaster but rather as a hope, a chance to achieve their own aims—­a hope that soon faded with the rise of Stalinism. To achieve its aim of instituting an overarching revolution in e­ very corner of Eu­rope, Communism had relied on established po­liti­cal, social, and cultural structures: it re-­treaded older po­liti­cal strategies and many older cultural symbols. For example, the Communist strug­gle for the “productivization” of East Eu­ro­pean Jewry was a continuation of a much older discourse that had its roots in the ideology of the Enlightenment. Likewise, the idea of ­limited “Jewish autonomy” in postwar Poland, supported by the Central Committee of Polish Jews (1944–1950), would have been unimaginable without the decades-­long strug­gle for Jewish

Introduction 5

autonomy in East Central Eu­rope before 1939 or even 1917.11 Interwar Jewish experiences of discrimination and vio­lence, on the one hand, and leftist Jewish and non-­Jewish cooperation and visions of change, on the other, ­shaped Jewish responses to vari­ous programs of the Communists or Communist-­dominated co­ali­tions in many East Central Eu­ro­pean countries a­ fter 1945. This is also what Kijek shows in chapter 1 in his micro-­historical case study of Lower Silesia. The new Communist system did not completely eradicate older local traditions: they continued to influence social networks, rituals, popu­lar and high culture, the way leisure time was spent, and vari­ous other aspects of daily life. This approach, which does not look at the year 1945 as the beginning of every­ thing but which is sensible also to continuities from before the Holocaust, has so far been most productively a­ dopted in biographies of individual Communist or Communist-­sympathizing Jewish intellectuals.12

The Per­sis­tence and Transformation of Jewish Identities The transition to Communist regimes in the countries outside the Soviet Union ­after 1945 did not cause a ­wholesale restructuring of law and society, as occurred in Soviet Union ­after 1917. For instance, in no country outside the Soviet Union ­were Jewish religious communities abolished. This had an unintended paradoxical effect in ­those countries where all Jewish organ­izations but religious ones ­were closed. Even though all pro-­Soviet governments ­were officially opposed to religion and introduced repressive policies ­toward churches and synagogues, ironically, in countries where Jews ­were acknowledged only as a religious community, this restriction brought more Jews ­under the roof of the Jewish religious community. This is what Čapková shows in her study of Czecho­slo­va­kia (chapter  2), where all Jews who consciously wanted to raise their ­children Jewishly, even if they ­were not religious, had no option but to join the kehila ( Jewish Community). In the pre-­war period, Čapková argues that t­hese secular Jews maintained their Jewish identity by participating in sports and cultural associations that had no religious dimension.13 Likewise, based on his unique ethnographic research in a Ukrainian province, Dymshits argues in chapter  3 that interconnected religious and social traditions continued to survive in formerly Jewish small towns or shtetls. Th ­ ese traditions s­ haped crucial and long-­lasting patterns of stratification and social prestige among Jews and alternative forms of social and cultural identifications to ­those enforced by the state. In Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Union’s Far East, which was established to showcase a Communist Jewish homeland in the late 1920s, Agata Maksimowska’s research shows that religious practice persisted even among ­those Jews who had taken part in this explic­itly secular proj­ect (chapter 7). Yet an enhanced religious identification was experienced not only among members of Birobidzhan tiny religious community, the only religious Jewish Community officially registered in the Far East part of

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the Soviet Union (in 1946), which faced enormous hostility from the authorities. Many more Jews who never attended synagogue secretly held onto their religious traditions. Such studies challenge the reigning myth of Jewish assimilation ­under Communism. The historiography of Jews ­under Communism tends also to consider Jewish institutions ­under Communism as artificial. According to such views, Jewish life in Communist countries ­after 1945 was no more than an echo of the past, which soon was silenced by state repression and emigration. Indeed, t­ hese communal “ends” or points of termination are usually connected to impor­tant caesuras in postwar Jewish history of a given country: e­ ither waves of emigration (whose representatives usually considered themselves the “last Jews” leaving their country of origin) or events connected to the suppression of layers of Jewish life, such as religion, a separate Jewish or Yiddish culture, and (real or ­imagined) Zionist activities.14 In contrast to a perspective that divides postwar Jewish history into brief segments based on po­liti­cal events, our volume focuses on Jewish lives that ­were certainly influenced by state policies while emphasizing continuities and the many dif­fer­ent layers of a given life. F ­ amily and gender perspectives have mostly been neglected in the historiography of postwar Jewish history, and their omission results in a fundamentally distorted picture.15 Starting a new f­ amily life and finding even distant relatives and living with them ­were essential parts of Jewish postwar life. In most East Central Eu­ro­pean countries, only a small number of Jewish ­children survived the war. Most survivors of working age therefore sought to establish new families. In contrast to the surrounding non-­Jewish society, in which the birth of ­children during the war was nothing exceptional, the demographic structure of the Jewish population was markedly dif­fer­ent: most Jewish ­children ­were born between 1945 and 1950.16 As Čapková shows in chapter 2, this baby boom challenges the dominant assumption that the early 1950s w ­ ere only dark years of po­liti­cal oppression. They w ­ ere also years when most Jewish survivors (most of whom ­were young or middle-­aged) ­were busy raising their c­ hildren. Given the typical division of work among ­women and men at the time, it was Jewish w ­ omen who w ­ ere involved with, and often overwhelmed by, care for small ­children, especially b­ ecause they could not rely on any assistance from relatives, most of whom had been killed during the war. This is why w ­ omen in par­tic­u­lar saw the postwar years primarily through the lens of ­family life. The perspective of private life also reveals the crucial impact of the Holocaust on Jewish communities. The historiography tends to treat the Holocaust and the Jewish experience ­under Communism as if they w ­ ere two separate experiences. Given the recent tendency to include the immediate postwar years in Holocaust research, the overlapping experiences and the beginning of Communist dictatorships have gained new attention. Despite survivors’ differing relations to religion, tradition, and the idea of a separate Jewish culture, the memory of the Holocaust united Jews. ­Every Jew had lost at least some f­ amily members and friends, and the Holocaust reminded Jews of their Jewishness, even ­those who had rejected it or

Introduction 7

had been indifferent to it. In her case study of East Germany, Anna Koch in chapter 6 points out that even Jewish Communists redefined their relationship to Jewishness in response to the Holocaust. As a shared Jewish experience, it became a crucial and undeniable part of their identity. By the same token, the Holocaust separated the Jewish (and Romani) experience of World War II from the experience of non-­Jews, who had also suffered from the war and German terror but w ­ ere often unable or unwilling to acknowledge the extent of Jewish (and Romani) suffering. Places like Theresienstadt or the Auschwitz memorial museums privileged the memory of non-­Jewish victims of ­these camps over that of Jewish victims.17 Jews thus had to find strategies to integrate their memory of the war into the collective memory of their home country and to carve out spaces for Holocaust memory within its framework. In chapter  8 on the Yiddish singer Lin Jaldati, David Shneer points to her successful attempt to integrate the Holocaust experience into highly ideologized state commemorations of the antifascist strug­gle.18 Jewish efforts to integrate Holocaust memory into national memories, however, did not only address Communist governments but also, from the late 1970s onward, the emerging opposition movements.19 In chapter 12 on the Hungarian Jewish samizdat journal Magyar Zsidó, the Salom group, and their role in the dissidents’ debate, Kata Bohus pre­sents a case that sheds light on both Jewish agency and the emergence of a self-­conscious Jewish identity.

Transnationalism The networks between Jews in East Central Eu­rope and their distant relatives and friends in dif­fer­ent parts of the world bring us to the impor­tant topic of transnationalism. In contrast to the dominant image of Jews in Communist countries as living in isolation u­ nder the pressure of national assimilation, the perspective informed by social history and private sources offers a completely dif­fer­ent picture. Jews—­individuals and their organ­izations—­and the new governments of the Communist countries w ­ ere aware that the centers of Jewish settlement had changed ­because of the Holocaust and that the State of Israel and that U.S. Jews had become the major representatives and advocates of Jewish rights. Especially in the case of Poland, Romania, and Czecho­slo­va­kia, the number of Jews who ­were born in t­hose countries and l­ater emigrated (mostly to the United States, Israel, or Western Eu­rope) was several times higher than the number of ­those living ­under Communism. Dense networks between f­amily members, friends, and colleagues across the Iron Curtain might have been restricted, especially at the beginning of the 1950s, but Jews ­under Communism ­were never totally isolated. They and their relatives or friends from abroad used any opportunity to maintain contact and to visit each other, although visits from abroad occurred more frequently than possibilities to leave Communist countries. As underscored by Marcos Silber’s chapter 10, Jewish emigration from ­these countries had much more

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complex motivations than s­ imple politics; in some cases, emigres wanted to return ­after they left. Moreover, contact with Jewish organ­izations b­ ehind the Iron Curtain was maintained through Israeli embassies (up to 1967, except for Romania, which never cut diplomatic relations with Israel) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC), which renewed its activities in many East Central Eu­ro­pean countries a­ fter Stalinism. Not only was the Iron Curtain permeable but also of key importance ­were Jewish activities among and between Communist states in several fields of common interest. Cooperation between the Jewish communities of East Central and Southeastern Eu­rope existed b­ ecause of needs for ritual objects—­the distribution of kosher meat (or visits by a shochet (kosher butcher) from a neighboring country), matzah, or prayer books. In times of relaxed po­liti­cal restrictions like the 1960s and the 1980s, Jewish youth w ­ ere allowed to take part in international Jewish summer camps financed by the JDC and or­ga­nized mostly in Hungary and Yugo­slavia. Moreover, at ceremonies commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, which mostly employed antifascist rhe­toric, representatives of Jewish communities and Jewish leaders of antifascist organ­izations across East Central and Southeastern Eu­rope could meet. Using the example of Lin Jaldati, Shneer argues persuasively that Jewish artists with an antifascist message ­were f­ ree to tour countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Gennady Estraikh in chapter 9 also shows attempts of the post-­Stalin era Soviet government to promote itself by means of “Yiddish cultural diplomacy”; that is, allowing for some ­limited Yiddish and Jewish cultural production aimed primarily at Western but not Soviet Jewish audiences. Despite t­ hese kinds of instrumental motives of the Soviet government and the continued discrimination against Jews and their needs in the social, economic, and po­liti­cal life of the country, “Yiddish cultural diplomacy” gave rise to new opportunities for some Soviet Jewish intellectuals to develop contacts with their counter­parts on both sides of the Iron Curtain (mainly in the United States, Israel, and Poland) and to advocate for the reappearance of Yiddish and Jewish culture in the official framework of the Soviet state. This volume brings many new insights on vari­ous aspects and dimensions of transnationalism in the lives of Jews in East Eu­ro­pean Communist states—­ through the activities of vari­ous Jewish Western welfare institutions and agencies and contacts between friends and families across the Iron Curtain or between Jewish elites from dif­fer­ent countries in the Eastern Bloc. Still, more research on this topic is needed. We know only ­little about contacts between Jewish citizens of vari­ous Communist states, especially ­family visits. Another impor­tant contribution to this topic would be an analy­sis of private correspondence between Soviet Jews and members of their families who, most often b­ ecause of the ­great turmoil caused by the Holocaust, World War II, and changes in borders, w ­ ere living in Poland, Czecho­slo­va­kia, and Romania. Also awaiting further research are the contacts, inspirations, and influences between Jewish anti-­Communist dissidents in vari­ous countries of the Soviet Bloc.

Introduction 9

The destruction of Eu­ro­pean Jewry during World War II was most drastic in East Central Eu­rope. It therefore needs to be accounted for in ­every Jewish history of the region ­after 1945. Nevertheless, the totalizing focus on the Holocaust as an alleged end of Jewish history in East Central Europe—­combined with the unfounded assumption that Jewish life ­under Communism was completely dif­fer­ ent from every­thing that took place ­after 1945  in Western Eu­rope, the United States, Israel, and other parts of the Western world—­has resulted in the marginalization and exoticization of Jewish history in the post-1945 Soviet Union, and even more so in Poland, Czecho­slo­va­kia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugo­slavia.20 Universal and global processes—­such as metropolitization, professionalization, the evolution from nationalism to peoplehood, pluralism and the uncertainty of ethnic identities, ongoing globalization, the evolution from modernist ideological politics to postmodern or post-­politics, the evolution from large to atomic families, and changing patterns of professionalization and education—­ also s­ haped Jewish history and the lives of East Central Eu­ro­pean Jewry. The editors hope that this volume is a first step in reintegrating the East Central Eu­ro­pean Jewish experience into a global Jewish history and impor­tant con­temporary global historiographical discussions.

Acknowl­edgments Research and editorial work of Kateřina Čapková and Kamil Kijek for this volume and their chapters and Stephan Stach’s work on the introduction ­were financed by grant no. 16-01775Y of the Czech Science Foundation, “The Inclusion of the Jewish Population into the Postwar Czechoslovak and Polish Socie­ties,” carried out at the Institute of Con­temporary History, Czech Acad­emy of Sciences. Research of Kamil Kijek for part of the introduction and chapter  1 was financed by grant no.  2018/31/B/HS3/00228 of the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki-­NCN), “The Last Polish Shtetl? the Dzierżoniów Jewish Community, Jewish World, the Cold War and Communism, 1945–1950”.

notes 1. ​Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-­Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, 1919–1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popu­lar Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War (London: Legenda, 2008); David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), and Arkadii Zel’tser, Yevrei sovetskoy provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki. 1917–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006). 2. ​This trend in historiography is not specific to the history of Jews. ­There are several key publications on Soviet history whose focus shifted from po­liti­cal history to vari­ous aspects of social, cultural, and economic life ­under Communism. See, especially, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Rus­sia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 2000); Stephan Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Alexei Yurchak, Every­thing Was Forever, u­ ntil It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005); see also the valuable book series Istorija stalinisma published by ROSSPEN in Moscow. 3. ​Sándor Horváth, Stalinism Reloaded: Everyday Life in Stalin-­City, Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1944–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Malgorzata Fidelis, ­Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism a­ fter the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). In the last two de­cades, several German studies have approached Communist rule in the German Demo­cratic Republic through an actor-­centered perspective, mostly based on the concept of Eigen-­Sinn (stubbornness). For an overview, see Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigen-­Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 1999). 4. ​See, for example, the contributions of Andrzej Paczkowski and Karel Bartošek in Stéphane Courtois et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Włodzimierz Biernacki et al., eds., Komunizm w Polsce: Zdrada, zbrodnia, zakłamanie, zniewolenie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Kluszczyński, 2005). For the best brief discussion on the limitations of this perspective, see Agata Zysiak, Punkty za pochodzenie: Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście (Kraków: Universitas, 2006), 19–26. 5. ​See, for example, Mirosław Szumiło, “Żydokomuna’ w aparacie władzy “Polski Ludowej”: Mit czy rzeczywistość?” Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość 2, no. 32 (2018): 27–60; and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, ­After the Holocaust: Polish-­Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II (Boulder: East Eu­ro­pean Monographs, 2003). In contrast to such studies, see the excellent analy­sis of the myth of Judeo-­Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Eu­rope: The Myth of Judeo-­ Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). For a broader evaluation of Jewish engagement in leftist politics, see Jack Jacobs, ed., Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 6. ​Paweł Śpiewak, Żydokomuna: interpretacje historyczne (Warsaw: Czerwone i Czarne, 2012); Andrzej Paczkowski, “Żydzi w UB—­próba weryfikacji stereotypu,” in Komunizm. Ideologia, system, ludzie, ed. Tomasz Szarota (Warsaw: Neriton, Instytut Historii PAN, 2001), 192–204. 7. ​See, for example, Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Rec­ords, 1944–1947 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); David Engel, Bein Shichrur le Bricha: Nitzolei ha Shoah be Polin ve ha Maavak al Hanhagtam, 1944–1946 (Tel-­Aviv: Am Oved, 1996) and “Patterns of Anti-­Jewish Vio­lence in Poland, 1944–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 43–85; Anna Cichopek-­Gajraj, Beyond Vio­lence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Hana Shlomi, Osefet Mehkarim le Toldot Shearit ha Plita ha Yehudit be Polin (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001); and Arieh Levi Sarid, Be Mivhan ha Enut ve Hapadut: Ha Tnuot ha Halutziot be Polin be Shoah ve le Ahareya, 1939–1949, vol. II (Tel Aviv: Moreshet, 1997). For cases other than Poland see David Bankier, ed., The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries ­after WWII ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005); Dalia Ofer et  al., eds., Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-­Semitism in Poland a­ fter Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Joanna Tokarska-­Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe: Szkice z antropologii historycznej Polski lat 1939–1946 (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2012) and Pod klątwą: Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego, vol. I–­II (Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2018); Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Znak, 2012); and Łukasz Krzyżanowski, Dom, którego nie było: Powroty ocałacych do powojennego miasta (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2016).

Introduction 11 8. ​Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950) (Warsaw: Trio,

2002); Grzegorz Berendt, Życie żydowskie w Polsce w latach 1950–1956: Z dziejów Towarzystwa Społeczno-­Kulturalnego Żydów w Polsce (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2006); and August Grabski, Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (1944–1950): Historia polityczna (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2015). 9. ​Karen Auerbach, The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw ­after the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Hendrik Niether, Leipziger Juden und die DDR: Eine Existenzerfahrung im Kalten Krieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); Joanna Nalewajko-­Kulikov, A Citizen of Yiddishland: Dovid Sfard and the Jewish Communist Milieu in Poland, trans. Paul Glasser (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020); and Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 10. ​For criticism of this approach, see Kateřina Čapková, “Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland a­ fter the Second World War,” Studia Judaica 1 (2016): 129–155. 11. ​Jolanta Żyndul, Państwo w państwie? Autonomia narodowo-­ kulturalna w Europie środkowowschodniej w XX wieku (Warsaw: DiG, 2000). Żyndul’s study is exceptional for its placement of the subject in the context of national cultural autonomy in East Central Eu­rope in the twentieth ­century. 12. ​Nalewajko-­Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu; Piotr Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima (Warsaw: W. A. B., 2007); Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Katrin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 2000). 13. ​For the interwar period, see Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews in Bohemia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); and Tatjana Lichtenstein, Zionists in Interwar Czecho­slo­va­kia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2016). 14. ​A telling example of the difficulties of such an approach is Monika Adamczyk-­Garbowska and Feliks Tych, eds., Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland 1944–2010 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), which recounts more than sixty years of postwar Polish Jewish history as a mere “aftermath” of the Holocaust. 15. ​Some exceptions: Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt; Auerbach, The House at Ujazdowskie 16; Joanna Michlic, Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Memory (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017); Helena Datner, “­Children in the Polish-­Jewish Community from 1944 to 1968,” in Jewish Presence in Absence, 283–326; and Eliyana Adler and Kateřina Čapková, Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020). 16. ​Atina Grossmann has pointed to the baby boom in the Displaced Persons camps on the territory of postwar Germany, yet similar demographic growth could be found in all Eu­ro­pean countries that experienced the Nazi occupation. See Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007). 17. ​For early postwar Poland, see Zofia Wóycicka, Arrested Mourning: Memory of Nazi Camps in Poland, 1944–1950 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter, 2013); for Auschwitz, see Imke Hansen, “Nie wieder Auschwitz”: Die Entstehung eines Symbols und der Alltag einer Gedenkstätte 1945–1955 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015); for Theresienstadt/Terezín, see Peter Hallama, Nationale Helden und jüdische Opfer: Tschechische Repräsentationen des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). 18. ​For additional attempts to integrate the Holocaust experience into the postwar antifascist narrative in Czecho­slo­va­kia, see Lisa Peschel, “ ‘A Joyful Act of Worship’: Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezín Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 1945–48,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 209–228; and Kata Bohus, Peter ­Hallama,

12

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and Stephan Stach, eds., Growing out of Antifascism’s Shadow: Holocaust Memory in Socialist Eastern Eu­rope since the 1950s (Budapest: CEU Press, 2020). 19. ​Rachel Rothstein, “ ‘Am I Jewish?’ and ‘What Does it Mean?’: The Jewish Flying University and the Creation of a Polish-­Jewish Counterculture in Late 1970s Warsaw,” Journal of Jewish Identities 2, no. 8 ( July 2015): 85–111; and Peter Hallama and Stephan Stach, eds., Gegengeschichte: Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015). 20. ​The exoticization of postwar Jewish life in Eu­rope, especially in East Central Eu­rope, combined with the questioning of the authenticity of local Jewish communities, is an essential part of Ellen Gruber’s interpretation in her book, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Eu­rope (Oakland: University of California Press, 2002). For a dif­fer­ent approach to the revival of interest in the Jewish legacy, culture, and religion, see Erica Lehrer, “Jewish Heritage, Pluralism, and Milieux de Mémoire: The Case of Kraków’s Kazimierz,” in Jewish Space in Con­ temporary Poland, ed. Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 170–192; and Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

PERIPHERY AND CENTER

part 1

1 • A NEW LIFE? THE PRE-­H OLOC AUST PAST AND POST-­H OLOC AUST PRE­S ENT IN THE LIFE OF THE JEWISH COM MUNIT Y OF DZIERŻONIÓW, LOWER SILESIA, 1945–1950 KA MIL KI JEK

Reichenbach (Rychbach, in Polish and Yiddish), a German town in Lower Silesia, became part of the new western territories acquired by the Polish state ­after World War II. Dzierżoniów, as the town was called a­ fter 1946, was a new place to live for Polish Jews, all of whom w ­ ere e­ ither Holocaust survivors or refugees from the Soviet Union. ­Those who, soon ­after arriving, did not attempt to escape or legally emigrate from Poland tried to rebuild their lives in a new state, in a new po­liti­cal system, and fi­nally, in a new geopo­liti­cal order. It is no won­der, then, that the group of survivors, who at least for some time invested their hopes in postwar Poland, called this effort a “new life.” In this chapter I seek to answer this question: Did ­there remain something “old” in the “new”? This question also bears relevance to con­temporary historiography. Many historians, for obvious and well-­founded reasons, have adhered to the paradigm of war and the Holocaust as marking the end of the centuries-­long Polish center of Jewish civilization, framing the post-1945 prob­lems of Polish Jewish history as the “aftermath” of the Holocaust or the “surviving remnant” (in Hebrew, Sh’erit ha-­Pletah).1 Another approach to the history of Polish Jewry ­after 1945 emphasizes its taking place in a new Communist-­dominated state ­after the Holocaust had totally redefined the life of its Jews: this approach ignored questions of Jewish transnationalism, 15

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the prewar past, and the relevance of both to the “new life” in the “new Poland.” In effect, the Polish Jewish post-­Holocaust story became largely divorced from the broader context of Jewish history.2 From this perspective, Lower Silesia and its exceptional concentration of Polish Jews—100,000 at the beginning of the summer of 1946 (around half of Poland’s Jewish population at the time)—­may seem like a historical curiosity, a po­liti­cal artifact that was soon swept aside by the teleology of the Kielce pogrom of July  4 of that year, postwar antisemitism, and the Stalinist system, which caused the emigration of most Polish Jews. In confronting this dominant perspective of con­temporary historiography, I raise questions about certain ele­ments of the allegedly “dead past” and their meaning for individual and collective Jewish life in Communist Poland. Th ­ ese questions concern remnants and ele­ments of pre-­Holocaust social structures, as well as patterns of thinking and feeling—­ele­ments of symbolic systems of Polish Jews that ­were central from 1918 to 1939 (some w ­ ere much older) and that played an impor­tant role in the promulgation and implementation of policies of Jewish and state institutions in postwar Lower Silesia. What follows by no means negates the importance of the experience of the Holocaust: it was unquestionably the most impor­tant context for Jewish life in Poland in the immediate postwar years. Instead, my aims are to pre­sent other aspects of the recent Jewish past that functioned as impor­tant points of reference for Jewish responses to the post-1945 real­ity, embodying the continuation of Polish Jewish life ­after the Holocaust, and to open the way for a study of that life as part of a global Jewish history in the second half of the twentieth ­century, not merely a footnote to a pre-­Holocaust past.

Rychbach (Dzierżoniów) and the Yidishe Yishev in Nidershlezye Polish Jewish history in Lower Silesia during the Holocaust begins in the enormous concentration camp complex of Gross-­Rosen located in the region. In early May 1945, at the moment of liberation, Gross-­Rosen and its subcamps held 18,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, about 10,000 of whom ­were Polish citizens; of ­those citizens 7,000 de­cided to stay in the area. Many, having lost their homes and entire families, and afraid or unable to reclaim their property in central Poland (partly ­because of continuing anti-­Jewish vio­lence), saw no better place to go to, at least for the moment.3 A ­ fter the visit of a Warsaw del­e­ga­tion from the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, CKŻP), the Voivodship Committee of Polish Jews (Wojewódzki Komitet Żydów Polskich, WKŻP) was formed in Rychbach on June 17, 1945; its mandate was to or­ga­nize Jewish life and local committees throughout Lower Silesia. One of the Warsaw delegates, Yaacov Egit, was made its chairman.4 The number of Polish Jews in Lower Silesia grew rapidly. As of July 1, 1945, the WKŻP had registered 7,860 members in the local Jewish community. At the



A New Life? 17

beginning of 1946, the number r­ ose to 18,210, of whom 3,873 lived in Rychbach. The former inmates of the Gross-­Rosen complex ­were joined by Jews from central Poland, who e­ ither had survived the Holocaust in hiding, returned from camps in Germany, or arrived from former Polish territories recently annexed by the Soviet Union.5 As early as the summer of 1945 and in the next several months, local Jewish committees, in cooperation with state institutions, had succeeded in finding ­people jobs and apartments, established welfare systems, provided basic health care, and even or­ga­nized Jewish self-­defense. ­These efforts provided an impor­tant po­liti­cal, social, and institutional basis for further development of the community. From September  1945 onward, both CKŻP leaders and state authorities saw Lower Silesia as the primary site for taking in the Polish Jewish refugees who would eventually come from the Soviet Union in the first half of 1946.6 On February  23, 1946, a Yiddish broadcast on Polish radio announced the arrival of the first group of 2,000 Jewish repatriates from the Soviet interior, who ­were to be absorbed with the help of the Voivodship Committee of Polish Jews.7 A letter sent by the CKŻP to the American Federation of Polish Jews mentions Rychbach as one of the main destinations for trains carry­ing repatriates.8 By the summer of 1946, when repatriation ended, Lower Silesia had received 112 trains carry­ing 82,840 Jewish repatriates. Its main city, Wrocław, had received 16,037 refugees, with Rychbach (now renamed Dzierżoniów9) as the second major recipient, with 11,856 Jews. Together with the villages of Piotrolesie/Pieszyce (1,456), Niemcza (591), and the town of Bielawa (4,959), all close to Dzierżoniów, Dzierżoniów County (powiat) had received the largest number of Jewish repatriates. At the time, this area had the highest density of Jewish settlement and the highest percentage of Jews in Poland.10 This percentage remained largely unchanged even ­after the Kielce pogrom and the subsequent flight of tens of thousands of Jews from Poland. In June 1947, Dzierżoniów held 6,250 registered Jewish inhabitants (25 ­percent of the town’s population), and a total of 12,101 Jews resided in the county of Dzierżoniów.11 This demographic situation of Lower Silesian Jews did not change substantially ­until 1949–1950. What w ­ ere the ­factors that convinced thousands of Polish Jews to try to rebuild their lives in the foreign lands of Lower Silesia, despite the fresh and painful experience of the Holocaust, Soviet exile, and the rise of authoritarianism and violent antisemitism? The conventional wisdom is that the new po­liti­cal system established in Poland fi­nally promised real equality for Jews as citizens, declared a war against antisemitism, and offered help in rebuilding Jewish life in the country. This was the completely “new real­ity” that was to convince a part of Polish Jewry to stay in the country. I argue that many ele­ments of this allegedly “new life” represented in fact a continuation of the immediate interwar past, both the Polish and the Jewish one. Th ­ ese ele­ments ­were crucial to the beliefs of many Polish and foreign Jews and the prospect of rebuilding the Jewish community in Poland, and it was their suppression from 1948 to 1950 that was at the root of the community’s subsequent demise.

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Public and Po­liti­c al Culture: Old and New In the “totalitarian” paradigm of post-1945 East Central Eu­ro­pean historiography, the po­liti­cal system installed by the Communists and their Moscow patrons was almost entirely a foreign import, forcefully imposed on unwilling socie­ties.12 Thus, the public and po­liti­cal culture of the Polish state was also, supposedly, a novelty. Although brutal Soviet and local Communist coercion, intimidation, and the physical elimination of the po­liti­cal opposition, as well as the dominant feeling of enmity ­toward the Soviet presence in the country, cannot be denied, not every­thing that took place in the Polish public sphere was imported, and not every­thing that was new was rejected by the dominant part of Polish society. Many Poles, no less than Jews, entered the new era with a strong feeling of disappointment with the prewar real­ity, which was only intensified by the war, the collapse of the Polish state, and the tragedy that followed. Memories of massive unemployment, abject poverty, deep class and social stratification, and the impossibility of upward mobility w ­ ere still fresh. This led to a dynamic rise in the popularity of leftist movements and in socialist sympathies in Polish society during the German occupation and expectations that a new Poland would need to implement deep social and economic reforms.13 Although tens of thousands of Poles took part in the violent strug­gle against the new government or supported the ­legal po­liti­cal opposition (­until its suppression in 1947), many o­ thers—­and even some of the government opponents—­appreciated the reforms undertaken by the new regime, such as providing support for a cooperative sector of the economy, nationalizing big industry, offering ­free secondary and higher education, and the general push ­toward upward mobility of the lower classes. All ­these reforms both incorporated interwar ideas and represented a departure from the grim interwar real­ity.14 Consequently, in contrast to the prevalent con­temporary ste­reo­type, Poles and Jews w ­ ere not all that dif­fer­ent in their ambivalent attitudes ­toward the new Poland and its new po­liti­cal regime. Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust recalled the same social and economic ills as their fellow Poles. At the same time, their resentment at their ill treatment in the Second Polish Republic was strengthened by the ­bitter experience of being a minority and encountering discrimination in the job market (especially in the state and civil sector), in social welfare, and in education (the numerus clausus); antisemitism, and anti-­Jewish vio­lence.15 In ­these circumstances, the younger generations during the interwar period most often turned to Jewish po­liti­cal parties whose ideology could be defined as a form of “radical modernism,” offering a far-­reaching, revolutionary transformation of state and society.16 ­These interwar disillusionments and dreams continued to be of central importance to the history of the Jewish community in Poland a­ fter 1945. The post-­Holocaust “new” real­ity was permeated by the prewar “old”: old symbols, memories, and emotions. This heritage was the main point of reference to which all institutions and propaganda of the new state, as well as of the Jewish community, appealed. For Jews especially,



A New Life? 19

but also for ethnic Poles, Lower Silesia was the ideal place in which to make this “new–­old” fresh start. It promised new and better h­ ouses, infrastructure, factories (all taken over from dead or expelled local Germans), a higher standard of living, and fi­nally, true modernity, in which both individual emancipation of Jewish citizens and ­limited Jewish autonomy and national subjectivity would be pos­si­ble. The remarkable rebirth of Polish Jewish life in formerly German Lower Silesia received attention outside Poland in Western centers of the Jewish world. Yaacov ( Jacob) Pat, for instance, visited Poland in the late winter and early spring of 1946. What he had seen in Central Poland—­the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and in the killing fields of Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-­Birkenau—­was beyond his worst nightmares. His experience of the totality of the Holocaust in Poland made him even more surprised by that what he saw in Dzierżoniów (Rychbach): I have arrived in Rychbach in the eve­ning, right before Shabat. . . . ​The market square is large, clean, full of Jews who stand in groups, ­r unning around their businesses. . . . ​Is it a dream, or real­ity? . . . ​For the first time in Poland, I see a sign in Yiddish, written in large letters, lit by an electric lamp, “Cultural Center.” This is not pos­si­ble in Warsaw, Łódź, Białystok, Kraków, Częstochowa, or Katowice; this is pos­si­ble in Rychbach. “This w ­ ill be a Jewish town,” I am told by a Jewish actor of the famous Vilna Troupe, Simkhe Natan, who just arrived from the Soviet Union to perform in the Yiddish theater.17

What startled Pat in Rychbach (Dzierżoniów) was the richness of Jewish culture and social life and the centrality of the Jewish presence in the landscape of a Polish town ­after the Holocaust. Interwar symbolism and nostalgia played a major role in how Yaacov Pat perceived real­ity in this town.18 A specific mixture of prewar strivings and misfortunes and a new real­ity judged according to how much it fulfilled e­ arlier dreams and how much it had corrected the flaws of the past was a central ele­ment of another travelogue, written by Moshe Shulshteyn. According to him, the Lower Silesian Yishuv (settlement) “was modern and totally Jewish, maybe the most massive in Eu­rope.” Even though the local Jews all lived close to one another, the settlement was f­ ree of the shortcomings of the densely inhabited shtetls of the pre-­Holocaust period, whose inhabitants ­were mostly concerned for their economic survival. In this yishuv, Jews ­were no longer discriminated against by the state and could make their living from farming, coal mining, and a wide range of jobs that they had been barred from before the war. Shulshteyn heard all va­ri­e­ties of local Yiddish accents from Vilna, Lublin, and Eastern Galicia and ate traditional Jewish meals from all over the former Second Polish Republic. In his view, all that was good in the Jewish tradition mingled ­here with the “progressive character of the Lower Silesian Yishuv.”19 Joseph Tenenbaum, president of the World and American Federations of Polish Jews, and Shmuel Leyb (Samuel Leib) Schneiderman, a Yiddish writer and journalist of the American Yiddish daily Der Morgen Zshurnal, had very similar positive impressions.20

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It seems that what impressed Jewish visitors from the West about Dzierżoniów was the mixture of the pre-­Holocaust social intimacy of the shtetl and the post1945 modernity provided by the new sociopo­liti­cal system, which offered Polish Jews unpre­ce­dented possibilities. Certainly, economic development was hugely impor­tant, as was the richness of the formerly German land compared to that in central and eastern Poland. Yet it was the combination of Jewish demographic density, orga­nizational strength, po­liti­cal mobilization, and cultural development with the high degree of social and cultural visibility of reborn Polish Jewry manifested in the Lower Silesian Yishuv that so impressed foreign visitors. This new Jewish sense of belonging in Poland was not intended to lead to national assimilation but instead to the harmonious development of Jewish national culture in Poland, based on the Yiddish language. The first phase of the (re)construction of new–­old Yiddish culture in Lower Silesia culminated in the First Conference of Jewish Culture, which was held in Wrocław in December 1946. It was preceded by 130 public gatherings for 22,000 Lower Silesian Jews. The conference was staged around power­ful modernist symbols, drawing deeply on the radical modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. It also provided the opportunity for participating representatives of the ruling regime to reaffirm their commitment to the Jewish “fulfillment of national aspirations.”21 At the beginning of 1947, Yaacov Egit, chairman of the Lower Silesian Jewish Committee, could boast that the region had ten cultural centers, sixty-­four drama clubs, thirty-­three libraries, a ­People’s University, a Yiddish newspaper, and, most impor­tant, the Lower Silesian Yiddish Theater, which was the most spectacular proof of Polish Jewish cultural recovery ­after the Holocaust. Established in Rychbach in the last months of 1945, the theater was staffed by stars of the interwar Yiddish stage, such as Itzhak Turkow-­Grunberg, Chayele Rozental-­Brasz, and Simkhe Natan.22 ­These diverse cultural and educational activities helped bolster the general view that the Yiddish culture of Lower Silesia was a continuation of the most positive ele­ments of the pre-­Holocaust past. The culture of the Jewish youth movements in Lower Silesia also seemed to reflect some of the traditions of the pre-­Holocaust past, as reflected in description in the Bundist youth movement newspaper, Yugent Veker, of the Tzukunft summer camp in the village of Piotrolesie (­later renamed Pieszyce), near Dzierżoniów. The article, “­Under the Blue Sky,” paints a joyful picture of Jewish ­children from all over Poland coming to the Lower Silesian Yishuv where “the sun is shining, announcing [the arrival] of the new tomorrow.” It suggests that this “new tomorrow” replicates the interwar ­children’s educational programs of the “socialist ­children’s republic”; that is, ­those sponsored by the prewar Bund. The Bundist summer camp in Piotrolesie reproduced all the impor­tant ele­ments of interwar modernist po­liti­cal culture: the pompous speeches of se­nior Bundists, morning bugle calls, marches, uniforms, and even a c­ hildren’s court presiding over a case of colleagues accused of lacking socialist comradeship.23



A New Life? 21

If this was the vision of doyikeit (hereness)-­oriented Bundists, representing the continuation of pre-­Holocaust faith in the possibility of Jewish national life in Eastern Eu­rope, what then was the perspective of Zionists, who ­were also very active in Lower Silesia? In stark contrast, the Zionist leadership, both in Palestine and in Poland, saw no Jewish ­future in East Central Eu­rope and initially did every­ thing they could to increase emigration. Interestingly, the situation became more complicated ­after the g­ reat emigration wave from Poland began in the summer of 1946. In July 1947, the Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, held a countrywide congress in Dzierżoniów. This marked a new stage in the Zionist movement in post-­Holocaust Poland: Zionists still saw maximizing aliyah as a priority but recognized they had to work together with more established members of the Jewish community and to focus more on educational activities and building Zionist culture locally.24 In the early years of socialist Poland, all the ele­ments of Jewish life, including both Yiddish and secular Zionist culture, ­were labeled “progressive” by the ruling authorities and thus w ­ ere allowed to develop. In post-­Holocaust and Communist-­ dominated Poland, however, Judaism (as all other religions) was regarded with much greater suspicion than secular expressions of Jewish communal life and public culture. Nevertheless, in the first three years a­ fter the Holocaust (before the situation changed for the worse from 1948 onward), religious life also experienced a considerable rebirth, partly along dimensions stretching back to interwar developments. From 1945 to 1947, Łódź served as the center of Jewish religious life in Poland.25 Lower Silesia initially attracted much fewer Orthodox Jews, other than ­those who used it as a transit stop for emigration. In the summer of 1945, even though only a few religious Jews ­were to be found among the pioneers in Dzierżoniów, they ­were given the synagogue building and ­were permitted to look ­after the old German Jewish cemetery. The ­great repatriation from the Soviet Union in the winter and spring of 1946 brought scores of young religious Jews to Lower Silesia. Some ­were recruited by the Religious Zionist Mizrachi movement and other organ­izations associated with it. The Torah Va’Avodah (Torah [Study] and ­Labor) movement, with its center in Dzierżoniów, opened more than a dozen religious kibbutzim in Lower Silesia. Their residents w ­ ere taught how to work the land and live as collective, studied Hebrew and Judaism, and prepared for their f­ uture life in the Land of Israel. According to a Torah Va’Avodah activist, the first religious ­kibbutz in Lower Silesia—­Kibbutz “Melah Arbaa” in Rychbach—­reinvigorated religious fervor among local Jews. In his report, he states, “Jews feel much freer ­here than in central Poland and b­ ecause of that they are developing a much better and more complete social life than in the rest of the country.” In the summer of 1946, three Religious Zionist organ­izations—­Torah Va’Avodah, HaShomer HaDati, and Hapoel HaMizrachi—­had—in Dzierżoniów alone—­a separate youth kibbutz, a kibbutz for adults, and a ­children’s home. The local leader of the Mizrachi Party was at the same time the head of the town’s Jewish Religious Congregation (Żydowska Kongregacja Wyznaniowa), who operated parallelly to the secular

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Jewish Committee.26 The Religious Zionist goals for Lower Silesia ­were to recruit and or­ga­nize the greatest pos­si­ble number of religious or potentially religious Jews and prepare them for emigration. At the same time, other Jewish institutions ­were organ­izing the religious lives of ­those who intended to stay in Poland. In January 1947, ­there ­were 28 Jewish religious congregations in Lower Silesia; each was in charge of the synagogues, prayer ser­vices, funerals, weddings, circumcisions, dietary, and other halachic ­matters in its community.27 ­There was also unofficial or clandestine religious life. In Dzierżoniów, in 1946–1947, melameds ( Judaism teachers) ran their own chedarim (religious schools), while adult religious Jews, besides praying in the synagogue, had used a private building converted into a mikveh.28 In Dzierżoniów during the P ­ eople’s Referendum (also known as the Three Times Yes referendum) in late June 1946, the Aguda and Mizrachi Parties ­were even represented on the Jewish Inter-­Party Committee that together with Communists, Bundists, and secular Zionists campaigned among local Jews to support the government in voting “Three Times Yes.”29 In 1947 the Yiddish documentary, The Jewish Settlement in Lower Silesia, was screened across Poland, depicting the large Dzierżoniów synagogue full of praying Jews.30 Jewish religious life, even if suppressed and discouraged, experienced at least a partial rebirth and carried on traditions established before the Holocaust.

Productivization In the first few years ­after the Holocaust, Jewish programs of “restratification”—­ designed internally to bring about a radical change in Jewish social and economic structures—­were nothing new. They ­were initiated both from inside and outside of vari­ous Jewish communities all over Eu­rope since the Enlightenment.31 The government policy of productivization was also central to Jewish life in Poland at this time.32 As Yaacov Egit stated, “­There was no possibility that on this new land Menachem Mendl [famous protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s novels], a luftmensch [an impractical person] with his luft-­parnose [livelihood founded on air], would reappear.”33 From the very beginning, the Jewish program of restratification overlapped with productivization ­because of its key requirement: the nondiscriminatory ac­cep­tance of Jews into the professions, all government jobs, and state-­owned industries. Of crucial importance to ­every Jewish po­liti­cal party active in Poland was elimination of the prewar limits on Jewish employment in state-­owned industries, the professions, the ­legal system, the state security apparatus, and the central and local state government. Communists—­who in this m ­ atter ­were fully supported by the Bund—­were especially interested in having the largest pos­si­ble presence of Jewish workers in state-­owned industries.34 Jewish cooperatives ­were an impor­tant symbol of the productivization of the Jews of Lower Silesia and the modernization of Jewish arts and crafts. In this war-­ torn socialist economy, which lacked consumer goods in par­tic­ul­ar, cooperatives



A New Life? 23

­ ere indispensable in providing commodities for an insatiable market. One of the w Jewish flagship institutions of this kind was the “9th of May” tailors’ cooperative. Established in a two-­story building in the Dzierżoniów market square, the co-op employed seventy-­five Jewish tailors in 1947, many of whom knew each other from before 1939 when they lived in shtetls in the Kielce voivodship.35 S.  L. Schneiderman, the American journalist and Yiddish writer, pointed out that the Jewish social structure that he observed in Lower Silesia and in Dzierżoniów in par­tic­u­lar was a total inversion of what it had been during the Polish interwar period.36 Moshe Shulshteyn, another foreign observer, attributed the “progressive character of the Lower Silesian Yishuv” to the successes of Jewish productivization, likewise linking his evaluation directly to his interwar experience. As shown by the famous rug producers of Kołomyja and Kosov Huculski or the bristle makers of prewar Międzyrzec who had their own cooperatives in Lower Silesia, the good traditions of the past w ­ ere preserved u­ nder the improved institutional conditions of the post-1945 era.37 Another impor­tant ele­ment of Jewish Lower Silesian productivization was a dense network of vocational schools run by ORT (Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews), which reestablished its pre-1939 activities but adjusted them to the local postwar realities of employment and industry. Of special importance in Dzierżoniów w ­ ere radio construction classes that trained the first cadres of the Lower Silesian Radio Factory (Dolnośląskie Zakłady Wyrobów i Urządzeń Radiowych; DZWUR), which would eventually became Diora, the biggest radio factory in the country.38 In November 1947, 892 Lower Silesian Jews ­were working in state-­run heavy industry and metal industries, 785 in mining and metallurgy, 1,737 in the textile industry, 487 in other state-­run industries, 319 in agriculture, 2,855  in cooperatives, 2,171  in social institutions, 1,245  in state and local administration, 2,005 in crafts, 270 in the professions, and 338 in Zionist productivization centers—in contrast to only 1,013 employed in commerce.39 The changed occupational makeup of the Jewish community was generally regarded as correcting the prewar ills of the Jewish professional and occupational structure. Another impor­tant aspect of Jewish productivization and the new socioeconomic structure was agriculture. In November 1945, the WKŻP acquired five formerly German-­owned farms from the Red Army, establishing in Dzierżoniów the first Jewish agricultural training college in postwar Poland.40 In April 1946, forty-­ six of eighty-­five Jewish farms w ­ ere located in the Dzierżoniów area.41 In September  1947, the number of Jewish farms increased to 135 (8 collective farms, 124 individual farms, and 3 supporting institutions).42 Farms supervised by the local Jewish Committees (all part of WKŻP) ­were not the only agricultural institutions in Lower Silesia: ­there was also a network of kibbutzim (collective farms) established as early as the summer and autumn of 1945 and run by vari­ous Zionist parties, youth movements, and organ­izations.43 By the summer of 1946, one Zionist party, Poalei Zion Left, had twenty-­four active kibbutzim, and the total number of ­people in the vari­ous Zionist kibbutzim in Lower Silesia was 20,000.44 Even ­after

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the ­great wave of illegal Jewish emigration from Poland and the departure of many active Zionists in 1947, HaShomer HaTzair, Gordonia, and Ichud ­were r­ unning separate kibbutzim in Dzierżoniów, its surrounding villages, and the neighboring town of Bielawa.45 Jewish agriculture and productivization in the form of employment in state-­ owned factories, government, and local administration offices or cooperatives ­were seen by Jews as positive changes, particularly when compared to pre-1939 state discrimination in employment and an occupational structure dominated by small traders, artisans, or workers in the lowest-­paid branches of private industry. With all the hardships of the post-1945 period in Lower Silesia, productivization meant a new, better life that was appreciated b­ ecause of the still vividly recalled prewar past.

Transnationalism Another very impor­tant feature of interwar Polish Jewish life that continued into the first years a­ fter the Holocaust and became a central ele­ment of the reconstruction of Jewish life was modern transnationalism. It manifested in an awareness of what was happening in Jewish communities abroad (especially in Palestine, the United States, and Western Eu­rope), in contacts with f­ amily members and friends, in the activities of foreign and transnational Jewish organ­izations helping the community in Poland, and especially in the considerable financial assistance granted to the Polish Jewish community. In the first half of 1946 alone, the Dzierżoniów WKŻP invited and received official Jewish del­e­ga­tions from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden who visited vari­ous Jewish communities in the area.46 Lower Silesian Jews themselves w ­ ere or­ga­nized, based on their hometowns, into landsmanshaftn ( Jewish emigrant mutual aid socie­ties) that ­were connected to their affiliated organ­izations all over the world and received financial help from them. In May 1946, a del­e­ga­tion of the American landsmanshaft of Warsaw Jews visited Poland and donated US$35,000 (a considerable sum of money at the time, especially in postwar East Central Eu­rope), specifically earmarked for Jews living in prewar Warsaw who ­were then living in Lower Silesia. Two-­thirds of this amount ­were designated for Jews in the Dzierżoniów area.47 With ­people constantly on the move, Jewish committees that had been or­ga­ nized in areas where Jews lived a­ fter the war became the main points of contact with relatives abroad. It was through t­ hese committees that p­ eople from Poland and abroad searched for relatives with whom they had lost contact during the war. The committees ­were also conduits for aid and correspondence sent from relatives living abroad. In August 1946 alone, the Dzierżoniów Committee received 2,967 private letters and packages, primarily from the United States, for its members living in the area.48 This private Jewish transnationalism was no less impor­tant than the institutional form: it provided both a sense of being connected to ­family and



A New Life? 25

friends on the other side of the Iron Curtain and an alternative source of information on the international affairs and t­ hings happening in Poland or that mattered for Polish Jews, ­free of Communist censorship, thus offering at least some sense of security. A central ele­ment of Lower Silesian Jewish transnationalism was Zionism and all of its varied parties and movements. Zionist sympathies ­were manifested in Lower Silesian Jewish public culture, indicating that many members of the Jewish community beyond ­those who w ­ ere members of Zionist parties supported a Jewish homeland. On July 5, 1946, when Polish Jews w ­ ere protesting the British use of force against the Yishuv in Palestine, 40,000 Jews gathered in thirty-­five public rallies in Lower Silesia alone.49 In February and March 1947, during his visit to Poland, Yitzhak Grűnbaum—­the most impor­tant Zionist leader in interwar Poland and then a member of the Zionist Organ­ization executive—­was greeted by masses of Jews in Łódź, Wrocław, and Dzierżoniów.50 Massive demonstrations, both or­ga­nized and spontaneous, w ­ ere held a­ fter the UN ­adopted the partition plan on November 29, 1947 and the subsequent Israeli Declaration of In­de­pen­dence on May 14, 1948.51 In autumn 1948, when Zionism was already ­under attack in Poland, a speech by Adolf Berman in Dzierżoniów—­representing his party, Poalei Zion Left (he was also the head of the Central Jewish Committee at the time)—­drew one thousand listeners.52 Although ­ these activities did not have the aim of gegenwartsarbeit—­ strengthening Zionist identity and Jewish national autonomy in the Diaspora among ­those Jews who ­were unable or unwilling to emigrate to Palestine—as similar ones had during the interwar period, they did express national sentiment and sympathy for the Yishuv and attracted non-­Zionist Jews. In the winter of 1947–1948, hundreds (including some Communists) joined the Bolków training camp in Lower Silesia, where they received military training for the Haganah, paramilitary units in the Yishuv in Palestine and, ­after in­de­pen­dence, the Israeli Defense Forces (Tzahal).53 All ­these developments ­were to be part of the “third way” that socialist Poland would follow, a path fundamentally dif­fer­ent not only from its interwar past but also from t­ hose taken by the con­temporary West and the Soviet Union. In terms of the economy, the third way would combine state owner­ship and interventionism with room for cooperative and private sectors of economic activity. The productivization of the Jews signified the general politics of the new state, the industrialization and modernization of Poland, and the emancipation of its lower classes and the long discriminated-­against Jewish minority. At the same time, it enabled Jews to find work in state-­owned industries and the state administration, in­de­pen­dent cooperatives, and private businesses. In terms of Jewish life, the “third way” meant state support for a “demo­cratic” and “progressive” dimension of Jewish (Yiddish) culture and tolerance of sociopo­ liti­cal pluralism and transnational connections with Jews in the West. ­These proposed changes raised the hopes of both Polish and foreign Jews in the material

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and spiritual rebirth of Jewish life in the country. They epitomized a departure from the ills of interwar Poland yet also provided some continuation of ­those pre-­ Holocaust forms of Jewish life that w ­ ere perceived as positive.

Antisemitism, the Consolidation of Communist Power, and the Demise of the Lower Silesian Jewish Community All t­hese ­factors w ­ ere crucial in sustaining hope for prospects of rebuilding a ­viable Jewish community in Poland. But from the first days a­ fter the war, they ­were accompanied by other negative societal and po­liti­cal forces that Polish Jews faced with dread and caused well over 100,000 to leave Poland by 1947.54 Continuing antisemitism, manifested in the murder of hundreds of Jews committed ­after the war; the rising authoritarianism of the regime; the mistrust with which its representatives looked on Jews as a group with deep ties to relatives and institutions on the other side of the Iron Curtain; poverty and daily hardships; the Zionist sympathies of many Jews and fi­nally the psychological impossibility of living in a land where so many relatives and friends had perished—­these all caused Jews to lose hope in their ­future in Poland. Th ­ ese f­ actors w ­ ere also at play in Lower Silesia, where over time they became the major c­ auses of the demise of its Jewish community. Antisemitism, of course, was nothing new. A central ele­ment of modern Polish antisemitism (like that of many other nations) was the dream of a radically dif­fer­ ent Poland, with ethnically “pure” Polish cities fi­nally ­free of their major “alien” ele­ments, the Jews. Although the Polish right-­wing parties primarily transmitted ­these views, they w ­ ere expressed by p­ eople on all parts of the po­liti­cal spectrum. As early as June 1945, the Voivodship Jewish Committee in Dzierżoniów had to respond to new local governments in a few towns and villages that w ­ ere putting pressure on Jews to leave the places ­under their jurisdiction. At the end of July, when the Jews of Dzierżoniów ­were participating in the so-­called harvest campaign (local authorities’ initiative to harvest fields left by their former German ­owners fleeing Soviet forces), the local authorities refused to provide them with the food and drink that w ­ ere given to the non-­Jewish volunteers. At the same time, a Dzierżoniów foreman tried to block the acquisition of buildings by the Jewish Committee. In another case, local state militia illegally and without any explanation confiscated its property.55 When the Dzierżoniów Jewish Committee tried to establish the first Jewish schools in the area, the initiative was blocked by a local school inspector, who claimed that although he was “not in f­avor of murdering Jews he would expel all of them from ­here,” adding that “Jews ­were parasites” and fi­nally asking, “Why are t­here so many Jews ­here? I am surprised that the Germans did not murder all of them.”56 From the very beginning of the Polish presence in postwar Lower Silesia to the second half of 1947, representatives of the local government did what they could



A New Life? 27

not to register Jewish artisans and to create all pos­si­ble obstacles to the legalization of their workshops. The local tax office, for example, introduced mea­sures clearly discriminating against Jewish merchants.57 Quite bizarre, though very telling, is the case of a shochet ( Jewish ritual slaughterer) arrested by representatives of socialist Poland in Bielawa in November  1946. He was accused of allegedly breaking laws prohibiting Jewish ritual slaughter that had been introduced during the sanacja regime in 1936–1937.58 ­These examples of discrimination by local authorities and the longing of its representatives for Polish towns in the new ­territories to be ethnically homogeneous and “cleansed” of the Jews ­were part of the daily antisemitic practices of interwar Poland. This longing for a pure Poland was deeply ingrained in the mindset of many Poles, even t­hose who w ­ ere part of  the newly established Communist regime that preached the eradication of antisemitism. If such anti-­Jewish stances ­were so openly expressed so soon ­after the war by the new local po­liti­cal and administrative establishment, it is no won­der that they ­were also common among the Polish population of the region. According to Jonas Turkow, who had arrived in Dzierżoniów as a CKŻP envoy in early summer 1945, local Jewish hopes for a better life in Lower Silesia than in other parts of Poland ­were already diminishing by the end of 1945, with the arrival of Polish repatriates from the eastern territories annexed to the Soviet Union who held strong antisemitic feelings.59 Even though Lower Silesia did not experience pogroms like ­those that took place in Kielce or Kraków, it was not ­free of anti-­Jewish vio­lence. On September  26, 1946, Bezalel Moshe Zylberberg was shot to death by unknown perpetrators while on guard duty at the Ichud kibbutz in Dzierżoniów. The eve­ ning of October 3, 1946, saw simultaneous attacks by unidentified groups of ­people on party locals of the Bund, Ichud, and Poalei Zion Left in the same town. In Bielawa, Jews ­were accused of kidnapping Christian c­ hildren for their blood (the pretext for the pogrom in Kielce); this accusation was shouted by a man in the central market square on December 9, 1946.60 In the same town ten days ­later, Abram Ratman was killed by a neighbor with an ax.61 The alleged “unnaturalness” of the Jewish presence in the Polish environment—as had been preached by antisemites before and during the war and was deeply internalized by a segment of the Polish population—­did not end with the establishment of the Communist regime. On the contrary, it remained a continuing obstacle to the reconstruction of Jewish life in Lower Silesia in the early postwar period. No less impor­tant to the institutional and demographic demise of the Lower Silesian Jewish community was the po­liti­cal evolution of the Polish state and the gradual implementation of an increasingly authoritarian system. From the outset, the Jewish alliance or at least cooperation with the post-1945 Polish government was ambivalent. The growing ideologization of the state led to growing authoritarianism, which threatened the Jewish community. The logic of the authoritarian state led it to attack the l­imited “autonomy” that for vari­ous reasons, mainly tactical, it had granted to Polish Jews at the beginning of the post-­Holocaust era. Signs

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of this logic can be seen from the very beginning of Jewish settlement in Lower Silesia. Even though the Zionists ­were officially supportive of the policies of the state and had been granted the possibility of ­legal activity in Poland, they in actuality ­were ­under the constant threat of repression—­like all ­people and institutions whose loyalties went beyond the Polish Communist state and the Soviet Bloc. In Lower Silesia, they w ­ ere periodically harassed by Jewish Communists (who also continued to harbor the pre-­Holocaust opposition to Zionism as the reactionary movement leading the Jewish proletariat away from the fight for its real emancipation), the Communist Party (officially named Polish Workers Party–­Polska Partia Robotnicza [PPR]), and state institutions.62 Jewish Communists (and Bundists allied with them on this par­tic­ul­ar ­matter) carried out an especially harsh attack on Zionists ­after the ­great wave of Jewish emigration from Poland in summer 1946 was spurred by the Kielce pogrom.63 At the same time, the authoritarianism of the regime also influenced the functioning and structure of the Jewish Committees. The domination of Communists among their leadership was established not by demo­cratic elections but by the top-­down enforcement of state–­party parity.64 This parity system of organ­ization replicated the “co­ali­tion government” ruling Poland from 1945 to 1947 and, from the beginning, implied Communist domination and the use of undemo­cratic procedures. The PPR members of the Jewish Committees w ­ ere acting in accordance with the Leninist rules of “demo­cratic centralism,” and gradually forced this onto the “Jewish street.” They firmly implemented all the decisions taken by the leaders of their ­mother Communist Party, also t­ hose concerning the Jews, regardless of the views on ­these ­matters held by the members of Jewish community. Thus, from the start, constraints on Jewish po­liti­cal subjectivity, decision making, and the ability to carry out activities in­de­pen­dently of the state and party w ­ ere limiting and, over time, became even harsher. Jewish subjectivity from the outset was thwarted in Poland by the rules governing public po­liti­cal language, which ­were set and monitored by the Communists. This was clear in the June 1946 referendum campaign, when all the Jewish parties not only had to support the Communists but also had to express this support in Communist terms.65 The Communist push for the total subjugation of the Jewish community and total control over the CKŻP was noted by the U.S. ambassador to Poland in November  1947.66 It is also impor­tant to note that the Polish secret police ­were busy gathering intelligence against Yaakov Egit, chairman of the Lower Silesian Jewish Committee, accusing him of Jewish nationalism, Zionist sympathies, and connections to American and British intelligence—­thereby implicitly undermining the ­whole ideological and moral basis of l­egal and official Jewish activity in Lower Silesia as early as 1946.67 The year 1948 was crucial for the establishment of a so-­called Stalinist po­liti­cal system in Poland and the gradual elimination of the Jewish presence in Polish cultural and public spheres. In the summer, Lower Silesian Jewish activists w ­ ere



A New Life? 29

surprised by the authorities’ decision not to include the Jewish pavilion in the “Exhibition of Regained Lands.” This was the major international exhibition that opened in Wroclaw in July 1948, showcasing successful Polish reintegration and rebuilding of the territories taken over from Germany a­ fter the war. This exhibition was supposed to have its separate Jewish pavilion, which was ultimately not included, ­under accusations that it promoted Jewish nationalism.68 Although the Polish government still supported the newly established State of Israel throughout the summer of 1948, the public discourse in Poland became increasingly infected with “anti-­imperialist” and generally anti-­Western rhe­toric, which Jewish po­liti­cal parties also had to express.69 When in the autumn of that year Stalin changed his Soviet, and hence Eastern Bloc, policy t­oward Israel and the Cold War was gaining strength, not only Zionist activism but also any connections with Western Jewish institutions became dangerous. In September  1948, the Central Jewish Committee was ordered to attack its own del­e­ga­tion’s stance at the World Jewish Congress and subsequently withdraw from its ranks.70 In January 1949, the Bund was forced to dissolve and join the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR, founded in December  1948 when the Polish Workers’ Party merged with the Polish Socialist Party).71 From the beginning of 1949, Zionist and other non-­Communist activists ­were purged from the Wrocław WKŻP on charges of engaging in unpatriotic and anti-­Soviet be­hav­ior. Subsequently, Zionist and American Jewish institutions w ­ ere ordered to cease all their activities in Poland.72 The summer of 1949 saw additional attacks on the U.S. socialist and liberal Jewish press, Forverts (The Forward) and Morgen Zhurnal, whose editors ­were so crucial in organ­izing help for Polish Jewry in the first years ­after the Holocaust.73 Stalinist language had by then penetrated all spheres of Jewish public life.74 All t­hese developments, together with the Polish government’s agreement to let Polish Jews emigrate to Israel in September  1949, compelled about 28,000 (roughly 30 ­percent of the total Jewish population of the country) Jews to leave Poland within a year.75 Not only charges of blood libel but also visions of ousting Jews from the Polish economy and indeed altogether from Polish towns and cities ­were pre­sent in Poland de­cades before the Holocaust. The authoritarianism of the postwar Communist regime and its mistrust of ­those it called “cosmopolitan” Jews exacerbated ­these older forms of antisemitism. The authoritarian model of an ideologically driven state was an outgrowth of interwar modernism and modernist ambitions to create a new real­ity by removing all obstacles to it; this model was implemented in Poland ­after the war. Based on coercion enforced by the security apparatus, it gradually blurred the borders between the ruling party and the state and thwarted any grassroots democracy and pluralism. Particularly from 1948 to 1950, the same characteristics of Jewish life in Poland that had allowed for the reconstruction of that life—­political pluralism, l­imited socioeconomic and cultural autonomy, and transnationalism—­were now defined by the regime as obstacles on the Polish road to Communism.

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Instead of an Epilogue: ­A fter 1950 The period of so-­called Stalinism from 1948 to 1956 (continuing for some time ­after Stalin’s death in March 1953) undoubtedly marked the turning point in the post-­Holocaust history of the Polish Jews. It marked the break with their former institutional, po­liti­cal, and cultural pluralism; resulted in the considerable reduction of their demographic base with emigration (especially from 1949 to 1951 and in 1956–1957); and largely put an end to their autonomous public space and their transnational links with the outside world. Nevertheless, it did not destroy the Jewish presence in Poland, and it never succeeded in totally subjugating the Jews to the policies of the state. Dzierżoniów, to give but one example, had established in 1950 its Jewish Socio-­Cultural Association (Towarzystwo Społeczno Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce; TSKŻ), a religious organ­ization with its own synagogue, a state-­funded Jewish school, and cultural center; its inhabitants read Yiddish newspapers and bought books published by Yiddish Bukh. “Polish Stalinism” was ended in 1956 by a pro­cess of po­liti­cal liberalization, the “Thaw.” For the Jews of Lower Silesia even the Thaw had its nasty side in the form of frequent expressions of popu­lar antisemitism; individual acts of anti-­Jewish vio­lence ­were recorded in Dzierżoniów.76 This led to another wave of Jewish emigration from Poland: more than 50,000 Jews left the country from 1955 to 1960, mostly for Israel.77 Nevertheless, even in provincial Dzierżoniów, from which Jewish inhabitants not only emigrated abroad but also migrated to Warsaw or Wrocław, the local Jewish Socio-­Cultural Association registered 320 Jews in 1961 and 500 in 1966.78 The Jewish presence in Dzierżoniów did not end even with the well-­known state-­organized antisemitic campaign of 1968. Though most of the Jewish inhabitants of the town left for the State of Israel, Scandinavia, or the United States, a few dozen ­people—­who ­were mainly elderly—­remained and continued to meet on the premises of the Jewish Socio-­Cultural Association. Even in the period between 1968 and 1989, Dzierżoniów ­housed not only an official secular Jewish community but also a tiny group clandestinely practicing religious observance. One of the local Jews, the farmer Beniamin Turbiner, unofficially performed kosher ritual slaughtering in the town and, when asked, did so in other communities. U ­ ntil the 1990s, on e­ very Friday, the same person encouraged old, mainly non-­observant Jews to come to the Jewish Socio-­Cultural Association in the eve­ning, form a minyan (a prayer group of at least ten men), and at least passively take part in unofficial prayers. The biggest Jewish holidays still brought dozens of old Jews, many of  them still Yiddish-­speaking, to this association.79 Contrary to the current myth of the miraculous rebirth of the Jewish community in Poland ­after the Changes of 1989, in Dzierżoniów, it all came to an end in the two de­cades ­after the collapse of the Communist regime, when the last local Jews who remembered the interwar years and the Holocaust died. All of this, as well as the experience of the immediate post-­Holocaust period in the life of Polish Jewry, still



A New Life? 31

awaits extensive research that would include this era in the main currents of Jewish, Polish, and global historiography.

Acknowl­edgments The core ideas of this chapter w ­ ere discussed and presented at “Polish Jewish History Revisited: Conference in Honor of Gershon Bacon and Moshe Rosman,” held at Bar Ilan University on November 9, 2017. Part of the research for this chapter was financed by grant no. 2014/15/G/HS6/04836 of the Polish National Science Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki—­NCN). “Jews and Germans in Polish Collective Memory: Two Case Studies of Memory Formation in Local Communities ­after the Second World War,” and by grant no. 2018/31/B/HS3/00228 00228 of the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki—­NCN), “The Last Polish Shtetl? the Dzierżoniów Jewish Community, Jewish World, the Cold War and Communism, 1945–1950.”

notes 1. ​See, for example, David Engel, Bein Shichrur le Bricha: Nitzolei ha Shoah be Polin ve ha Maavak al Hanhagtam, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996); and Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichach, the Or­ga­nized Escape of the Jewish Survivors from Eastern Eu­rope, 1944–1948 (New York: Random House, 1970), 113–152, 206–240. 2. ​See Józef Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej ludową,” in Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce: w zarysie (do 1950 roku), ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), 387–477; and August Grabski, Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (1944–1950): Historia polityczna (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2015). 3. ​Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu (State Archives of Wrocław—­APWr), 415 Woje­ wódzki Komitet Żydów na Dolnym Śląsku (WKŻ DS), 5, pp. 10, 37; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 2, p. 13. 4. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 1, pp. 1, 20. 5. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, pp. 20, 39. 6. ​Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej ludową,” 390, 397. 7. ​Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (AŻIH), 303 Wydział Kultury i Propagandy Centralnego Komitetu Żydów Polskich (WKiP CKŻ), 1, p. 1. 8. ​YIVO Archives (YA), RG 116 Poland, Folder 16, n. pag. 9. ​The town was named ­after Jan Dzierżoń, a pioneering Polish apiarist and Roman Catholic priest active in Upper Silesia in the second half of the nineteenth ­century. During his life Dzierżoń had no connections to the town that bears his name ­today. 10. ​ Łódź and Wrocław, the two cities with the largest Jewish populations in Poland at the time, ­were large metropolises with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. 11. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 9, p. 118. 12. ​See, for example, Stéphane Courtois et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 361–456. 13. ​Krystyna Kersten, Narodziny systemu władzy: Polska 1943–1948 (Lublin: n.p., 1989), 26, 47–50; and Adam Leszczyński, Skok w nowoczesność: Polityka wzrostu w krajach peryferyjnych, 1943–1980 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013), 313–323. 14. ​See Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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15. ​Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Eu­rope (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1987), 11–84.

16. ​Kamil Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu: Świadomość, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży

żydowskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2017). 17. ​Yaacov Pat, Ash un Foyer: Uber di Hurves fun Poyln (New York: CYCO, 1946), 212. 18. ​Pat, Ash un Foyer, 213–219. 19. ​Moshe Shulshteyn, Tsvishn ruinen un rushtovanyes (fun rayze in Poyln) (Paris: Yidishe Folks-­ Bibliotek, 1949), 78–83. 20. ​Joseph Tenenbaum, In Search of a Lost ­People (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1948), 176–190; Samuel Leib Schneiderman, Between Fear and Hope (New York: Arco, 1947), 229–236. 21. ​YA, RG Poland 116, Folder 97, n. pag., pre-­conference appeal in Yiddish, final conference resolution in Yiddish; Yaacov Egit, Tsu a nay leben (Wrocław: Nidershlezye, 1947), 73–78. 22. ​Pat, Ash un Foyer, 212, 221–222; Egit, Tsu a nay leben, 72–73. 23. ​ Yugent Veker, no. 1 (1946): 8. 24. ​See Yaad Yari Archives in Givat Haviva (YYA), 1–2 Ha Shomer Ha Tzair be Polin achrei Milhmet ha dam ha shniya (haShHP), 55 (1), tele­grams of congratulation. 25. ​Pat, Ash un Foyer, 57–70; Schneiderman, Between Fear and Hope, 159–164. 26. ​YA, RG 116 Poland, Folder 96 (clipping from the Torah Va’Avodah movement newspaper, n. pag.). 27. ​Waszkiewicz, Kongregacja Wyznania Mojżeszowego, 91–92. 28. ​Interview with Szymon and Dora Tenenbaum (Bielawa, August  2009); interview with Samuel Ponczak (Baltimore, February 2009). 29. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, pp. 84–85. 30. ​ The Jewish Settlement in Lower Silesia, 1947, Yiddish film (original title, Der yidisher Yishuv in Nidershlezien), https://­www​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=­5q82LKt7Zi0&t​=3­ s (accessed June  10, 2018), (09:01–09:26). 31. ​Marcin Wodziński, “ ‘Civil Christians’: Debates on the Reform of the Jews in Poland, 1789–1830,” in Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Eu­rope, ed. Benjamin Nathans and Gabrielle Safran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 46–76. 32. ​Joseph Marcus, Social and Po­liti­cal History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin: Mouton, 1983), 233–240. 33. ​Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), 196 Ministerstwo Administracji Publicznej (MBP), 786, 22; Egit, Tsu a nay leben, 27–28, 42–43. The quotation is from p. 42. 34. ​Piotr Kendziorek, Program i praktyka produktywizacji Żydów Polskich w działalności CKŻP (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2016), 85, 90–94. 35. ​Interview with Frieda Pertman (Baltimore, February 2009); interview with Samuel Pon­ czak (Baltimore, February 2009); Egit, Tsu a nay leben, 48–50. 36. ​Schneiderman, Between Fear and Hope, 258. 37. ​Shulshteyn, Tsvishn ruinen, 83–84; AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 44, p. 8. 38. ​Egit, Tsu a nay leben, 53–54. In June 1948, during the Lower Silesian “Festival of Youth” in Wrocław, ORT showcased radio receivers produced in Dzierżoniów by young Jews trained in their classes, AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 8, p. 83. 39. ​Bożena Szaynok, Ludność żydowska na Dolnym Śląsku: 1945–1950 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2000), 116. 40. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 1, p. 33. 41. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, p. 40. 42. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, p. 139. Individual farms ­were run by about 350 Jewish farmers. See YIVO Archives, RG 116 Poland, Folder 20, p. 3. 43. ​YYA, 1–2 haShTP, 48 (1), letter sent from the HaShomer HaTzair kibbutz in Waldenburg (Wałbrzych), October 11, 1945; Ghetto Fighters House Archives (GFHA), Folder 12568, handwritten memoir of Zippora Toruk-­Haber.



A New Life? 33

44. ​ Przełom, no. 1 (1946): 1; Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950)

(Warsaw: Trio, 2002), 157–158.

45. ​YYA, 1–2 haShTP, 55 (1), letter from Dzierżoniów from the HaShomer HaTzair branch to

the Łódź headquarters, February 17, 1947, May 23, 1947; Arieh Levi Sarid, Be Mivhan ha Enut ve Hapadut: Ha Tnuot ha Halutziot be Polin be Shoah ve le Ahareya, 1939–1949, vol. II (Tel Aviv: Moreshet, Beit Edot Mordechai Anielewicz, 1997), 424; Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej, 178, 181, 194–95. 46. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, pp. 52, 81; AŻIH, WKŻ DS 145, 2, pp. 40–43. 47. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 2, p. 33; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 9, pp. 69–71. 48. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 9, p. 6. 49. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, p. 72. 50. ​AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 3, p. 3 51. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, p. 152; AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 6, p. 1; AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 11, pp. 59, 72; Szaynok, Ludność żydowska, p. 107. 52. ​Grabski, Centralny Komitet Żydów, 196. 53. ​USC Shoah Foundation History Archive, interview with Mojżesz Jakubowicz, interview code: 29827 (February 1997); Szaynok, Ludność żydowska, 164–166; and Helga Hirsch, Gehen oder bleiben? Juden in Schlesien und Pommern, 1945–1957 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 173–175. 54. ​Albert Stankowski, “Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczące emigracji Żydów z Polski po 1944 roku,” in Studia z historii Żydów w Polsce po 1945 roku, ed. Grzegorz Berendt, August Grabski, and Albert Stankowski (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2000), 109–111. 55. ​Diaspora Research Center Archive (DRCA), Abraham  A. Berman Bequest, Folder 141 (n. pag.), July 2, 1945, report of the Voivodship Jewish Committee in Dzierżoniów; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 1, pp. 5, 11, 17; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, pp. 1, 3; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 4, p. 3. 56. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, pp. 12–13. 57. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 1, p. 6; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, p. 91; APWr, 331/VI Urząd Wojewódzki we Wrocławiu, Wydział Społeczno-­Polityczny (UWW), 697, pp.  6–14, 37–38, 40, 74–77, 97; APWr, 331/VI UWW, 698, pp. 141, 149. 58. ​APWr, 331/VI UWW, 698, pp. 10–11. 59. ​Jonas Turkow, Noch der Bafrayung: Zichrones (Buenos Aires: Central-­Farband fun Poylisher Yidn in Argentine, 1959), 236. 60. ​Alina Cała, Ochrona bezpieczeństwa fizycznego Żydów w Polsce powojennej: Komisje Specjalne przy Centralnym Komitecie Żydów w Polsce (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny 2014), 299; AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 33, p. 3. 61. ​Cała, Ochrona bezpieczeństwa, 95, 281, 287. 62. ​YYA, 1–2 (HaShPl), 48 (1), letter from Rychbach (Dzierżoniow), July  6, 1945, n. pag.; GFHA, Folder 19197, notes on Hayka Grossman’s voice during a discussion in the CKŻP, August 21, 1945; Engel, Bein Shichrur le Bricha, 115–116. For other examples of persecution, see AŻIH, 145 WKŻ DS, 9, pp. 12–13. 63. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 4, pp. 17–19. 64. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 2, pp. 9, 50; Hersh Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung (Tel Aviv: Farlag I. L. Peretz, 1982), 40. 65. ​See APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 2, p. 36; APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 5, pp. 71–72. 66. ​National Archives, College Park, Mary­land, RG 59, Box 6553, US Embassy in Warsaw, cable to US Secretary of State, November 14, 1947; US Embassy in Warsaw cable to US Secretary of State, December 16, 1947. I am indebted to Kateřina Čapková for sharing this material with me. 67. ​Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), BU 01178/1299, pp.  81–83; IPN, BU 0192/433/15, pp. 17–21. I thank Marcos Silber for sharing this material with me. 68. ​Jacob Egit, ­Grand Illusion (Toronto: Lugus, 1991), 98; Smolar, Oyf di letzter, 152. 69. ​See the May  1, 1948, proclamation of Poalei Zion Left in Poland: YA, RG 116 Poland 3, Folder 46 (n. pag.); AŻIH, 145 WKŻ DS, 9, p. 118.

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70. ​AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 44, pp. 5–6, 47–48; Grabski, Centralny Komitet Żydów, 196–197. 71. ​YA, RG 116, Poland 3, Folder 14 (unpaginated); AŻIH, 303 WKiP CKŻP, 44, p.  69–70;

David Slucki, The International Jewish ­Labor Bund ­after 1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 70–72. 72. ​See APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 3, pp. 16–18. 73. ​APWr, 415 WKŻ DS, 3, pp. 92–93, 102. 74. ​See GFHA, Folder 3339, Bulletin of the Warsaw Jewish Press Agency regarding 119% of the production plan achieved by the “9th of May” Jewish tailors’ cooperative in Dzierżoniów, October 25, 1949. 75. ​Berendt et al., Studia z historii Żydów w Polsce, 117. 76. ​Paweł Wieczorek, “  ‘Sztuczny antysemityzm’—­antyżydowskie wystąpienia na Dolnym Śląsku w 1956 roku,” in Przemoc antyżydowska i konteksty akcji pogromowych na ziemiach polskich w XX wieku, ed. Kamil Kijek and Konrad Zieliński (Lublin: Wydawnitcwo UMCS, 2016), 211–247. 77. ​Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2010), 129–132. 78. ​Szyja Bronsztejn, Z dziejów ludności żydowskiej na Dolnym Śląsku po II wojnie światowej (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1993), 20; Helena Datner and Alina Cała, Dzieje Żydów w Polsce 1944–1968: Teksty źródłowe (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1997), 214. 79. ​Interview with Shlomo Turbiner (Rehovot, August  2008); interview with Szymon and Dora Tenenbaum (Bielawa, August 2009).

2 • ER ASED FROM HISTORY Jewish Mi­grants in Postwar Czecho­slo­va­kia K AT E Ř I N A Č A P KO VÁ

The historiography on the postwar history of the Jews in Czecho­slo­va­ kia has so far been stuck in the narrative that can be neatly summarized by the title of Bernard Wasserstein’s book, Vanis­hing Diaspora.1 The overall story is that of a local Jewish population devastated ­after the Shoah and further weakened by the postwar emigration or assimilation of ­those who de­cided to stay. Alena Heitlinger, the author of In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews ­after 1945, concludes her so­cio­log­i­cal study, which is based on more than 200 questionnaires completed by Czech and Slovak Jews born between 1940 and 1960, by stating that most of the postwar Czech Jews ­were secular and deeply rooted in the Czech language and Czech traditions, mostly became aware of their Jewish identity only ­because other ­people had identified them as Jews, and mostly perceived their Jewishness as a stigma in Communist society.2 Although it is perfectly compatible with the Czech nationalist narrative and fits in well with the self-­image of the Czech Jewish community, this image of Jews in the Bohemian Lands (Bohemia and Moravia-­Silesia) is badly distorted. ­There are three methodological reasons for this distortion: first, most historians writing on the topic neglect the impact of migration; second, they are concerned with the center (Prague) but not the periphery; and third, they often depend on po­liti­cal or national master narratives, which lead them to omit impor­tant parts of the mosaic. Based on my years of research on this topic, carried out in local district archives or using archival documents still in the possession of individual Jewish Communities (often tucked away in cabinets in the offices of Community leaders), privately owned documents and photo ­albums, archival documents related to the work of Jewish charitable institutions, as well as on dozens of interviews, the picture of Jewish life u­ nder Communism that I discovered differs considerably from the dominant narrative. Consider, for instance, the following three quotations from interviews I conducted: 35

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I remember g­ oing into the streets of Ústí nad Labem, it must have been in the 1950s, with a hen in a bag, and ­going to our shochet [kosher slaughterer]. ­Until ­today I remember how anxious I was that the hen would make a noise, so I squeezed her a ­little bit, but I was also afraid of suffocating her.3 Once a month my ­mother took a day off and went by bus to Prague in order to visit a mikveh [ritual bath]. Th ­ ere was no mikveh in our town. She was g­ oing regularly, even though it was a financial burden to our ­family to pay the bus fare e­ very month.4 Only 37 of us [of the about 1,500 Jews of prewar Liberec] returned home. But a­ fter the war a lot of ­people, mostly Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, moved in. ­Those ­were ­people of our Orthodox branch. So, they saw every­thing differently, had dif­ fer­ent customs. That’s why my m ­ other did not like it; she just ­couldn’t . . . ​sometimes she went for the High Holidays, but she would not regularly socialize with the Community.5

­ ese three examples suggest that something was g­ oing on in postwar Czecho­slo­ Th va­kia that does not fit in ­either with the widely held “vanis­hing diaspora” picture or with the self-­image of secular Czech Jews. The two aims of my chapter are, first, to challenge the dominant narrative and, second, to ask why it has been so per­sis­tent.

Migration and Periphery In reports about their activities in the Bohemian Lands from 1945 to 1949, the leadership of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC) in Czecho­slo­va­kia distinguished between three types of Communities: the Community in Prague, the Communities in the interior of Bohemia and Moravia-­Silesia (basically the territory of the former Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia outside Prague), and the Communities in the borderlands (especially north and west Bohemia, formerly called the Sudetenland). Prague, with about nine thousand Jews, had the largest Jewish population of local survivors and of mi­grants from Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. It was also the administrative center of Jewish affairs, not only for the Bohemian Lands but, to some extent, also for the ­whole republic. The Communities between Prague and the border regions and in Moravia ­were—­except for Brno and Moravská Ostrava—­small, mostly populated with local Jews and a high proportion of ­people married to non-­Jews. About eight thousand Jews lived in the borderlands, of whom more than 90 ­percent ­were Carpathian and Slovak mi­grants. The JDC was surprised to learn that almost no el­derly ­people lived in the borderlands and that the number of ­children ­there was growing rapidly in the second half of the 1940s. Most of ­those Jewish mi­grants had no university education and ­were very welcome in regions that faced a shortage of



Erased from History 37

factory workers and artisans ­after the expulsion of the local Germans, a situation comparable with Lower Silesia in Poland. Postwar Czechoslovak Jewish society was given a boost by at least 9,000 Jewish mi­grants who came from Carpathian Ruthenia, a territory that had been part of Czecho­slo­va­kia in the interwar period and was annexed to Soviet Union in 1945. The vast majority of ­these mi­grants de­cided to ­settle in the former Sudetenland, some de­cided to go to Prague, and about one thousand moved to eastern Slovakia.6 ­Those who preferred to be close to their previous homes chose to ­settle in Slovakia, and it is safe to assume that many also had relatives ­there b­ ecause of the dense ­family and religious networks that connected the east Slovak and Carpathian regions. Most of ­those who moved to the Bohemian Lands w ­ ere attracted by the opportunities to find jobs and accommodations ­because of the planned expulsion of the local German-­speaking population. In the last months of the war, soldiers in the Allied armies, as well as in the First Czechoslovak Army Corps formed in the Soviet Union, ­were promised property and jobs in the former Sudetenland ­after the Germans left. Mojžíš Adler was one such soldier. Born in 1913 in a shtetl near Khust, he escaped from a Hungarian l­ abor camp and made it to the Soviet interior, where he joined the Czechoslovak Army Corps in spring 1944. He was seriously wounded that autumn at the B ­ attle of the Dukla Pass, on the Polish–­Slovak border. In 1946, ­after being discharged from a hospital in Prague, he married Gertrude Ackermann, a Jewish mi­grant from Mukachevo, and together they moved to Ústí nad Labem in northwest Bohemia, ­because the District National Committee granted Mojžíš a tobacco shop ­there.7 He also became a founding member of the local Jewish Community.8 Many more Jewish survivors followed their relatives and neighbors. When in July  1945, just weeks a­ fter the liberation, Chaja and Emil Davidovič, a young ­couple who had lost their two small ­children in the Shoah, miraculously re­united in Sighet, a Romanian town on the border with Ukraine, they began searching for their relatives. ­Because Emil had lived in the territory of the Carpathian Ukraine, the ­family had Czechoslovak citizenship before the war. Alice Lutwak, their ­daughter, recalled that, while in Sighet, her f­ather learned that his eldest b­ rother had survived and was then living in the north Bohemian town of Varnsdorf: My ­father ­didn’t quite know where Varnsdorf was but he de­cided that they [he and his wife] had to go someplace—so they went to Varnsdorf. I was born in ­there in 1946, and my younger b­ rother, Robert, was born two and a half years l­ ater in Rumburk. My ­father was employed as the secretary of the Jewish Community in Varnsdorf.9

The stories of the Davidovič and Adler families ­were not exceptional. ­After the war more than 90 ­percent of the members of more than a dozen post–­World War II Jewish Communities in the border regions of Bohemia (the former Sudetenland) ­were from Carpathian Ruthenia. They introduced Hasidic-­style Orthodox rites into Communities that had been unequivocally Reform before the war.

38

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In Varnsdorf, where Alice was born, a totally new Jewish Community built only by mi­grants from Carpathian Ruthenia was established a­ fter the Shoah. The number of Carpathian Jews who passed through Prague or the border regions was actually much higher than eight thousand. Many soon left the country ­because of their uncertain ­legal status: according to the decree of the Czechoslovak government and the terms of the August  1945 Czechoslovak–­Soviet agreement on Carpathian Ruthenia, only citizens of Czech or Slovak nationality (národnost; that is, self-­declared ethnicity) could opt for Czechoslovak citizenship.10 Most Carpathian Jews had declared themselves to have a Jewish nationality when filling in the census forms in 1930, the last f­ ree census before the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the establishment of the Slovak State. This census was decisive for postwar citizenship legislation, which is why many Carpathian Jews in postwar Czecho­slo­va­kia feared expulsion (officially called “repatriation”) to the Soviet Union. The number of p­ eople who w ­ ere repatriated has yet to be properly studied, although we do know that among the repatriated ­were nearly two thousand Carpathian Ruthenians.11 Several hundred Carpathian Jews who w ­ ere struggling with the Czechoslovak bureaucracy to acquire Czechoslovak citizenship therefore de­cided to escape to DP camps in the American zone in Germany. Yet, b­ ecause they ­were desperately needed to work in the factories in the border regions, many more Jews ­were eventually granted Czechoslovak citizenship, sometimes even at the request of factory man­ag­ers, who insisted that ­those Jewish workers ­were irreplaceable. ­There ­were, however, many more Jewish mi­grants in the Bohemian Lands than just ­those from Carpathian Ruthenia: indeed, a larger number of Jews came from Slovakia, mostly from eastern Slovakia. In contrast to the Carpathian Jews, whose numbers ­were recorded in reports of the local Jewish institutions and by the JDC ­because of their difficulties with citizenship, no such estimates exist for Slovak Jewish mi­grants. The data in the registers of Jewish births, deaths, and marriages suggest, however, that at least several thousand Slovak Jews settled in the border regions or in Prague a­ fter the war.12 This number includes ­people who survived the Shoah, as well as ­those who had been in exile during the war and did not want to return to Slovakia ­after the Liberation. Moreover, according to the reports of the French social welfare organ­ization, OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants), which was working in Czecho­slo­va­kia immediately ­after the war, about two thousand Jews in the Bohemian Lands ­were Polish Jews who had been liberated from concentration camps in the former Sudetenland and de­cided to stay in Czecho­slo­ va­kia.13 Altogether ­there w ­ ere some 24,000 Jews in the postwar Bohemian Lands, at least half of whom ­were Jews who had moved ­there a­ fter the war. About two thousand Jews in the Bohemian Lands, living mostly in the border regions, ­were German-­speaking Jews who, even though they had lived in this territory before the war, lost their Czechoslovak citizenship in 1945 b­ ecause—­like almost all other Czechoslovak citizens of German or Hungarian nationality—­ they ­were collectively accused of having contributed to the dismantling of Czecho­



Erased from History 39

slo­va­kia in 1938–1939. Even though most German-­speaking Jews should have been accepted as being “antifascist,” this pro­cess of seeking exemption from this law lasted from six months to two years. During this period of uncertain l­egal status, German-­speaking Jews often faced the same discrimination as non-­ Jewish Czechoslovak Germans.14 The hardships of ­those Jews are briefly summarized in a memorandum sent by a newly established committee of German-­speaking Jews from Chomutov and Žatec to the repatriation department of the Czechoslovak Mission of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in April 1946: In the borderlands as well as in the interior of this State ­there are a few thousand Jews, Mischlinge, or of mixed marriages, whose m ­ other tongue is German. Even though they ­were harshly persecuted ­under the Hitler regime, suffered, and lost their property and livelihoods, they—­with few exceptions—­are now suffering again ­because they are largely considered “Germans” and are treated as such. Nobody acknowledges that nearly all of ­these Jews ­were in concentration camps or ­labor camps and that all ­those families lost most of their relatives in the gas chambers.15

The authors of the memorandum pleaded with the Czechoslovak UNRRA Mission to assist them in escaping Czecho­slo­va­kia in better conditions than the expelled Germans, who ­were allowed to bring with them only thirty kilos of property and faced vio­lence before their departure.16 The German-­speaking Jews generally characterized the first postwar years in the border regions as a disaster that sometimes seemed to be a continuation of the war. They saw their families, friendships, and cultural life destroyed; they ended up without citizenship, w ­ ere unable to speak their m ­ other tongue in places where they had grown up, and lived in poverty amid the fear of expulsion and vio­lence. It is truly fascinating to see how differently ­these German-­speaking Jews and the Carpathian Jews viewed the same region in the postwar years. All the Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia whom I interviewed claimed that they (or their parents) had left the graveyards of Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia, where large Jewish Communities had been destroyed and where they also feared vio­ lence ­after the war, for a region with almost no antisemitism, where they felt safe, and where, moreover, the standard of living of most would improve dramatically. This comports with what Katharina Schramm wrote based on her research on dif­ fer­ent regions in Eu­rope and in Africa: “Places and landscapes do not simply act as memory containers but rather profoundly shape, and are also s­ haped by, the ways in which vio­lence is experienced and performed as well as remembered.”17

Being Religious in a Secular Communist Setting The 1946 report by Israel Jacobson, head of the JDC in Czecho­slo­va­kia, reveals that ­there was an enormous demand for kosher food, Jewish ritual objects, and

40

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religious leaders—an infrastructure for religious life—in the Bohemian Lands. In response, the JDC arranged for the ser­vices of a shochet for larger Communities, “especially where ­there now reside Jews from Slovakia and Sub-­Carpathia” and to provide tallitot (prayer shawls), tefillin (phylacteries), mezuzot (small boxes on the doorpost of Jewish homes), and tzitziot (ritual fringes). The JDC aided the Jewish Communities in installing mikvot (plural of mikveh). The report noted, “It is hoped that by the end of this year mikvot ­will be established throughout the Czech Lands wherever Jews from Eastern countries now reside and wish to observe ‘taharat nashim’ [ritual purity laws for ­women].”18 This infrastructure for the practice of the Jewish religion had been almost totally absent from the Bohemian Lands since the second half of the nineteenth ­century. Especially in Bohemia but also in Moravia, the vast majority of Communities ­were Reform in the interwar period; t­ here w ­ ere no sizable Hasidic Communities in the Bohemian Lands.19 Given the pro-­Western and secular character of the Bohemian Lands, t­ here had been no rabbinical seminary in the region since the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth ­century. Small Communities required only that their rabbis gradu­ate from secondary school, and only larger and wealthier Communities—­especially Prague and ­those in the border regions—­could afford a “Doktorrabbiner,” a rabbi with a university degree; most such rabbis had a doctorate in philosophy.20 Jewish students from Carpathian Ruthenia, who came to study in Prague and found employment as teachers of religion, w ­ ere often shocked at how ignorant Jewish ­children in Bohemia w ­ ere even of the basics of religious education.21 The situation changed radically ­after World War II. Some of the larger Communities in the border regions even held separate worship services—­according to their lists of synagogue seats—­for “Neolog” Jews (most of the local Jews) and for “Orthodox” Jews.22 This practice was unknown in the Bohemian Lands before the war. In Prague, Jewish mi­grants ­were predominant in the Old-­New Synagogue, and “Czech Jews,” as they called themselves, tended to attend the Jubilee Synagogue on Jeruzalémská ulice ( Jerusalem Street). ­Because female members of Orthodox families only went to synagogue for Shabbat ser­vices on the High Holidays, most of the year the Old-­New Synagogue was attended only by men and boys. At the Jubilee Synagogue, by contrast, families with c­ hildren attended Shabbat ser­vices together. Evidence for this pattern of attendance at the Old-­New Synagogue is offered by a 1959 report written by John Dennis, the second secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Czecho­slo­va­kia. It starts with an expression of surprise at the discovery that hundreds of Jews attended High Holiday ser­vices in October 1959: according to Jewish leaders, “at least one thousand men had crowded the Old-­New Synagogue in Prague,” though the reporting officer, quoted by Dennis, reported ­there w ­ ere no more than 300 p­ eople. Dennis then states that he visited the Old-­New Synagogue on two other occasions: he observes that it was hard to make a minyan for ser­vices during the week and that only twenty to forty men attended Shabbat ser­vices, most of whom w ­ ere more than sixty years old. He concludes that ­there was a “fear



Erased from History 41

that within a de­cade or two Jewish religious life in Czecho­slo­va­kia may become extinct.”23 Dennis’s report illustrates how the American diplomat’s desire to emphasize the impossibility of Jewish religious life u­ nder the Communist regime led him to downplay the large number of p­ eople attending synagogue on the High Holidays. Moreover, it is symptomatic of the embassy’s perspective that he took only one Czechoslovak synagogue—­although, unquestionably, it was the most famous one—as the basis for his conclusion about the state of the Jewish religion in the ­whole country; he thus ignored not only the Jubilee Synagogue that was attended by mostly local Jews and was only a twenty-­minute walk from the Old-­New Synagogue but also the dozens of flourishing Communities elsewhere in the country, especially in Slovakia and the Bohemian border regions. If he had visited Communities in Děčín, Ústí nad Labem, Teplice, Liberec, or Carlsbad, Dennis would have been gotten quite a dif­fer­ent impression of Jewish life. ­Those Communities ­were mostly made up of young families of Jewish mi­grants, who had quickly found employment in the many local factories. In contrast to Prague, which suffered from a shortage of apartments, t­ here was no housing crisis in the border regions. At the same time, it is symptomatic of the position of Subcarpathian Jews ­under Communism that all the Jewish mi­grants I interviewed ­were living in apartment h­ ouses, b­ ecause the many single-­family villas ­were all occupied by the local Czech Communist elite. Carpathian and Slovak Jews, many of whom ­were craftsmen or ­were willing to take any job opportunity, ­were welcome in regions where ­there was a shortage of workers caused by the expulsion of the local Germans. When pos­si­ble, many tried to get work in companies that already employed Jewish workers. This was true, for instance, of the Teplice branch of Bonex, a major textile factory, at which several members of the Jewish Community in Teplice w ­ ere working,24 or the Chemodroga factory, which manufactured chemicals and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals in Ústí nad Labem.25 Carpathian and Slovak Jews found that working with other Jews made it easier for them to maintain at least some of their religious customs; ­because of their lack of fluency in Czech, they w ­ ere also able to communicate with fellow Jews who spoke Yiddish and Hungarian. Language was clearly a key issue in the early postwar years, when speaking German could have far-­reaching negative consequences. B ­ ecause Yiddish is so close to German, many parents tried to avoid speaking Yiddish with their ­children and used it (or Hungarian) only as a secret language or when speaking with other mi­grants of their generation, but only at home or in the Jewish Community center and never on the street or at work. Jews experienced severe discrimination during and a­fter the show trial of Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other high-­ranking Communists in November 1952, which was accompanied by an antisemitic campaign. The trial was followed by several more less known ­trials where again Jews made up an impor­tant percentage of ­those who w ­ ere accused. Members of Jewish social welfare organ­izations who ­were in contact with the Israeli Embassy w ­ ere particularly targeted by the regime.26

42

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Their contacts with the embassy had given them access to financial support from the JDC and the Claims Conference, which they distributed among the neediest in the Communities, usually el­derly Shoah survivors. Many of ­those survivors lived in poverty, unable to get back their prewar property, and in poor health; they had l­imited possibilities to work and went without sufficient social support and health care. The first arrests of ­these social welfare officials occurred in 1954. The last trial, which came as a surprise, ­because this was already ­after the famous Khrushchev speech at the XX Communist Party congress in the Soviet Union, was held in 1957 and targeted ­people born in Carpathian Ukraine, including Bernard Farkaš, one of the four rabbis of the Bohemian Lands. ­These defendants ­were charged and sentenced, however, not for their alleged pro-­Zionist activities, as had been the case in the accusations following the Slánský Trial, but for alleged black marketeering. This shows that ste­reo­types against the so-­called Eastern Jews persisted throughout the regimes and ideologies from the late nineteenth c­ entury well into the Communist regime. Despite the arrests of dozens of Jewish functionaries and the antisemitic campaign that followed the Slánský Trial, documents from the local Communities and interviews suggest that Jewish life in the 1950s entailed considerably more than discrimination. In this period and during the 1960s, Jewish Communities in Prague, the border regions, and Slovakia (especially in Bratislava and Košice) ­were impor­tant centers of religious life that held regular worship ser­vices and activities for adults and ­children. ­There ­were a large number of ­children due to the baby boom from 1946 to 1950, when the vast majority of Shoah survivors of working age w ­ ere trying to establish new families; in many cases ­these ­were second families for the men whose first wives and small c­ hildren had been murdered in the Shoah. Often t­here was a marked age difference between the spouses. This was the case for the well-­known cantor Samuel Landerer, active in Ústí nad Labem and in Prague ­after the war, whose first wife and two small ­children had been murdered in Auschwitz. A ­ fter the Liberation, he married a young w ­ oman who used to babysit his ­children in prewar Bratislava.27 The registers of Jewish births for local Communities confirm that in 1946 and 1947 it was not unusual for several Jewish ­children to be born in a single week. Photo­graphs (mostly in private possession) from the early 1950s provide evidence that dozens of c­ hildren took part in theater per­for­mances at Purim and Hanukkah. Moreover, social life in the Jewish Communities was appreciated not only by the Jewish mi­grants but also by many local Jews, even though few had any contact with the Jewish Community before the war. This was true of František R. Kraus (1903–1967), a writer and journalist who in the prewar period was contributing to prominent newspapers like the Prager Tagblatt and the Prager Presse; counted Karel Čapek, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, and Egon Erwin Kisch among his friends; and worked for the newly established Československý rozhlas (Czechoslovak Radio). According to his son, Tomáš Kraus, since 1991 the secretary of the



Erased from History 43

Federation of the Jewish Communities in the Bohemian Lands, the Prague Jewish Community was like a substitute ­family for his f­ ather: This is how it was a­ fter the war, a­ fter 1945. Logically, b­ ecause ­people ­were coming [to the Community] and ­were the only ones left from large families; they had no relatives anymore, so the Community was their substitute ­family. That was where they found their friends. Most of my parents’ friends w ­ ere from the Community, as ­were most of my friends at that time too. . . . ​My ­father, who had been totally secular before the war, went regularly to the [ Jubilee] synagogue e­ very Friday ­after the war.28

Kraus’s testimony also reminds us that the Jewish Community a­ fter 1949 was the only Jewish institution that enjoyed the state’s approval. E ­ very other Jewish association and organ­ization had to terminate its activities, as did many non-­Jewish organ­izations like the Scouts and Sokol, the physical training organ­ization. Even though Communist propaganda emphasized the need to eliminate all religious beliefs and practices, the Czechoslovak constitution still guaranteed religious freedom. Indeed, t­ hose deprived of that freedom raised this constitutional guarantee when contesting the state’s actions. For example, in 1954 the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party issued a ban on kosher ritual slaughtering. A del­e­ga­tion headed by Chief Rabbi Gustav Sicher demanded a meeting with officials of the State Office for Church Affairs (Státní úřad pro věci církevní), which oversaw all religious institutions, including Jewish ones, since October 1949. The Jewish leaders’ fierce and resolute protests seemed to surprise the state administration, and the ban—­which had been put in place for the Bohemian Lands and Slovakia—­was repealed soon afterward.29 Unlike the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugo­slavia, t­here was no Communist Jewish organ­ization in Czecho­slo­va­kia. In contrast to what we know from Anna Shternshis about Jewish life in the Soviet Union,30 the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia did not seek to reinterpret or reformulate Jewish songs and poems so that they would denigrate the Jewish religion and be pro-­Communist. Nor was ­there any Czech parallel to the Towarzystwo Spoleczno Kulturalne Żydow w Polsce (TSKŻ, Jewish Social and Cultural Society of Poland). All the interviewees shared the view that Communism was a ­matter for the non-­Jews; it seemed external to the Jewish community; connected with the outside world. Nor did the state impose any official divisions on the Jewish community, as in Poland, where the leadership of the TSKŻ, backed by the Communist regime, publicly and harshly criticized the Jewish religious Communities of Poland in the 1950s and denounced Israel as an aggressor in 1967. Despite the Czechoslovak government’s similar condemnation of the State of Israel for aggression against Arab states, the Council of the Jewish Communities in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia refused to accept the official interpretation of the Six-­Day War.

44

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The Czechoslovak state allowed Jews to meet in religious congregations only (as in Hungary) but denied them the right to establish any institutions other than religious ones. One byproduct of this l­ egal setting was that the Jewish community of Czecho­slo­va­kia was much more unified than t­ hose in Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania, and Yugo­slavia. Th ­ ere w ­ ere tensions between the more pro-­Communist officials in the leadership of the individual Jewish Communities in Czecho­slo­va­ kia and ­those who understood the Communities mainly as a place of religious ser­ vices: such conflicts increased in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But even if some leaders of the Jewish Communities ­were pro-­Communist, it was understood that the congregations w ­ ere not po­liti­cal organ­izations, and so ­people of all dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal persuasions could be active in them. The Jewish Community in Prague, made up mostly of local secular Jews, also became—­very much thanks to František R. Kraus and his contacts with leading artists—­a focal point of the social lives of Jews who never would have attended religious ser­vices. ­Toward the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, top young pop musicians like Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr, Waldemar Matuška, Hana Hegerová, and the rising star Karel Gott (none of whom, except perhaps Hegerová, w ­ ere Jewish) ­were special guests at Hanukkah parties or­ga­nized at the Jewish Town Hall on Maislova Street. In the 1960s t­hose parties w ­ ere occasionally also attended by young Jews who took buses from the border regions.31 Another meeting place in Prague was the kosher canteen, which was located in the same building and was popu­lar with Jewish youth from far and wide ­because of its very low prices for students. (Like the kosher canteen in Bratislava, its operating costs ­were subsidized by the JDC.) It was in ­these settings that the Jewish Community in Prague or­ga­nized lectures for Jewish youth on Jewish customs, history, and lit­er­a­ture. Most of ­these Jewish young ­people, who started to call themselves the “­children of Maislovka” ­because they met in the Jewish Town Hall on Maislova Street, ­were from families that ­were not active in the Community in the 1950s, and they ­were ­eager to learn about Judaism. Heitlinger’s book, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is based on so­cio­log­ic­ al research conducted among this group. Though several of my respondents from the border region had been studying in Prague in the late 1960s, they never mentioned ­these lectures for youth held at the Jewish Town Hall. It seems that they ­were part of dif­fer­ent social networks. “Coming out” about one’s Jewish roots was, moreover, perceived as totally strange for p­ eople whose daily lives ­were already structured by Jewish religious customs and rituals. The ­great majority of the men I interviewed had a bar mitzvah ceremony. My female respondents recall preparing Shabbat dinner while their husbands or ­brothers w ­ ere at shul (in most cases prayer rooms in a ­house, ­because most synagogues in the border regions had been destroyed during the November Pogrom [Kristallnacht] in 1938). In some families, no lights could be switched on or off, and the radio could not be listened to on Saturday.32 David Jakubovič recalled that his f­ ather, a cantor, was frequently angry at him b­ ecause he preferred



Erased from History 45

playing soccer with his schoolmates on Saturday instead of studying religious texts. His ­mother, although she had grown up in an Orthodox Polish ­family, was more tolerant.33 Another impor­tant difference between local and the mi­grant Jewish families was in the choice of marriage partners. Consider this conversation of Věra Studená, born Herškovič, and Malvína Hoffmann, born Adlerová, who w ­ ere both born to parents from Carpathian Ruthenia ­after the war and grew up in Ústí nad Labem: věra: Our parents had drummed into us since our childhood “no Pepík”—­Pepík, was a goy,34 and “no . . .” (she could not remember) malvína: “Mařenka.”35 věra: Yes, something like that. Ever since we w ­ ere l­ ittle kids. (Both w ­ omen laugh.)36

When Věra Herškovič de­cided to marry a non-­Jew, Vladimír (“the most handsome guy in Ústí,” according to Malvína), her parents refused to attend the wedding. The relationship between her parents and Vladimír ­later improved and Vladimír, although he was nonreligious, used to join Věra at the Jewish prayer hall on High Holidays in the 1970s and 1980s. The religious life of ­these Orthodox Communities took place in an environment hostile to religion. In contrast to Poland, where even among the Polish Communists ­there w ­ ere many who attended Roman Catholic ser­vices regularly, the Czech population had become increasingly atheist since the beginning of the twentieth c­ entury. This was especially true of the border regions, where the proportion of Communists among the new Czech settlers was high. Keeping religious traditions in such an environment therefore meant ­running the risk of being ostracized. The tension between private and community life and social situations involving contact with non-­Jews is especially pronounced in interviews with the generation of ­children born immediately a­ fter the war. This tension is surely also connected with school-­age ­children’s need to belong by conforming to their schoolmates. Malvína and Věra, who e­ arlier discussed their choice of marital partners, recalled how ashamed they w ­ ere when, at the beginning of the school year, ­children had to tell the entire class the names of their parents.37 B ­ ecause most of the Carpathian Jews did not change their names a­ fter the war (in contrast to many local Jews, who tried to get rid of their German-­sounding names), both the first and second names of parents made it clear that the c­ hildren w ­ ere from Jewish and mi­grant families. When parents wanted their ­children to attend synagogue on Jewish holidays and miss school, they had to fabricate doctor’s notes stating that the c­ hildren ­were ill. In Ústí nad Labem, Jewish families used the ser­vices of one Dr. Klein, an el­derly pediatrician from a German-­speaking Jewish ­family who had been born in Ústí before World War II. Though he did not attend any Jewish

46

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communal activities, he was willing to provide Jewish c­ hildren with notes to explain their absence from classes, especially during the High Holidays.38 Many adult Jewish mi­grants from Carpathian Ukraine saw the loosening of emigration restrictions in the second half of the 1960s as a blessing. Many families ­were trying to emigrate to join their relatives, even distant ones, in Israel or the United States. Several of the cantors, as well as Rabbi Bernard Farkaš, w ­ ere offered positions in Jewish Communities in West Germany. If, for vari­ous reasons, a ­family could not emigrate, the parents encouraged at least their ­children (most of whom had already started university by the late 1960s) to study abroad and to find a Jewish husband or wife elsewhere, b­ ecause the choice of suitable Jewish partners in Czecho­slo­va­kia was l­ imited. Most of the c­ hildren of Shoah survivors from Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia who left Czecho­slo­va­kia did indeed marry Jews, but they ­were usually not from Czecho­slo­va­kia. In sharp contrast, the second generation of Shoah survivors whose parents had been born in the Bohemian Lands frequently married non-­Jews. The mi­grant Jews differed from local ones in another way: unlike some local, mostly Czech-­speaking Jewish families (as described, for instance, by Heitlinger), the Shoah was not a taboo topic among most mi­grants. Indeed, it tended to be the dominant topic of conversations among members of the survivor generation, which fostered a sense of community. During their postwar migration, Carpathian Jews tended to join mi­grants from the same region. Consequently, their newly established Communities in the border regions included not only distant relatives but also former neighbors. In Ústí nad Labem, for instance, many of the Community members ­were from the region around Khust, and in Děčín they came from around Yasinya and Rakhiv.39 This shared past enabled them as a group to recall their murdered relatives, neighbors, and friends. Věra recalled, Communities came together; we visited each other a lot. At one place, in one ­family’s apartment, five or six families used to meet. The kids would nearly demolish the place. And the adults would talk about one t­ hing only—­the concentration camps. ­Really, that was what they mainly talked about. And we ­children would play and I listened to all of it, while playing. ­You’re not aware of it; you just soak it up.40

We also have visual evidence that some Carpathian Jewish survivors ­were unafraid to discuss their war­time experiences. One photo, for example, shows Gertrude Adler sitting on a chair holding her small son who was born a­ fter the war. It is an arranged photo­graph taken in a professional studio. The boy is holding a teddy bear, and Gertrude is posing with her left hand t­ oward the camera, so that her Auschwitz tattooed number is clearly seen.41 Carpathian and Slovak Jews also made up most of the participants in the Theresienstadt/Terezín remembrance ceremonies. At least two full buses from the north Bohemian Jewish Communities of Teplice, Liberec, Ústí nad Labem,



Erased from History 47

and Děčín used to travel regularly to Terezín, although the vast majority of ­those Community members had never been held in the ghetto. Most Carpathian Jews had survived in hiding (mostly in Budapest) or in ­labor camps a­ fter having been selected in Auschwitz. The presence of dozens of Jewish mi­grant families, including their c­ hildren, at t­ hose ceremonies is confirmation that they ­were ready to discuss their Shoah experience and to reveal their Jewish identity.

The Dominant Narrative about Secular Czech Jews Research based on interviews, private documents, and archival material of Jewish organ­izations and Communities has drawn a very dif­fer­ent picture from the one sketched by most historians. It has generally been assumed that, just as in the interwar period, a­ fter the war the Jews from the Bohemian Lands continued to be secular and fully integrated into Czech-­speaking, non-­Jewish society; indeed, they ­were even more completely integrated than before, ­because many of the local Jews survived the Shoah precisely ­because they ­were in a marriage with a non-­Jew or ­were ­children of such a marriage, and also ­because the few German-­speaking Jews who had survived the war had then left the country. Due to the migration, however, about half of all Jews in the Bohemian Lands ­were of Hasidic origin ­after the Shoah and u­ nder the Communist regime. They reintroduced traditions into the Jewish Communities that had not been known in this region for at least a ­century, and their native language was neither Czech nor German but Yiddish or Hungarian. Given that ­these newcomer Jews appear to have constituted such an impor­ tant part of postwar Jewish society in the Bohemian Lands, it is only natu­ral to ask why they have been omitted from historical accounts and collective memory for so long. One of the reasons is that they w ­ ere marginalized by the Czech-­ speaking Jews, especially t­ hose in Prague. The only Jewish journal published in Communist Czecho­slo­va­kia, the Věstník židovské náboženské obce v Praze (Bulletin of the Jewish Community in Prague, ­later renamed Bulletin of the Jewish Communities of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia), contains no reports on the reestablished Jewish Communities in the border regions. This neglect was due to a combination of prejudices against the “Eastern Jews” and Hasidim among the Czech-­speaking Jews and state pressure to achieve linguistic and cultural uniformity. But a close reading of the journal issues from the postwar years does reveal a few mentions. Though the Věstník is careful to avoid publishing anything about the Slánský Trial, in the November  1952 issue, the month when the death sentences given to Rudolf Slánský and another ten high-­ranking Communist officials (nine of whom ­were from Jewish families) ­were announced, one finds for the first time lists of exemplary workers. From the wording, it is obvious that the editors of the Věstník had hastily added ­those paragraphs without editing:

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The Jewish Community of Ústí nad Labem can boast several shock workers (úderníci), examples of good, honest laborers. . . . ​Heřman Heřkovič [sic Herškovič], a shock worker and the best worker in the chemical factory in Ústí nad Labem, survived the Nazi terror in several concentration camps. He lost his wife and eight ­children in Auschwitz. ­After returning to his homeland in 1945, he started working in the factory, where he works to this day. He is a shock worker and the best worker in the factory. For his exemplary work, he has already been given three awards. He has remarried, and has two ­children. His wife works in the nationalized Chemodroga factory.42

In the vast majority of cases, the praiseworthy Jewish workers listed in this and subsequent issues of the Věstník w ­ ere Jewish mi­grants from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Poland, or east Slovakia, who had settled in the border areas. Paradoxically, it was often the first time that a Věstník reader would come across information about such Jews, who w ­ ere other­wise neglected and marginalized by the Prague center, where most of the local Jews had university degrees but no experience of working in factories or on collective farms. When this pressure to show loyalty to the regime by praising ordinary workers let up at the end of the 1950s, the Carpathian Jews dis­appeared again from the journal, except for brief announcements about activities in the Jewish Communities at the back of each issue. The other exception is a longish article in two issues of Věstník in 1961 about Yiddish—­a taboo topic in the 1950s. The article is introduced by a sentence stating that this is a language of some Jews in the border regions.43 In the second half of the 1960s, when restrictions on emigration ­were relaxed, most Carpathian and Slovak Jews left the country. Still, Jewish religious life in the 1970s and 1980s was ensured nearly exclusively in the Bohemian Lands by the remaining families from Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia. For them, maintaining the religious traditions of their forebears was impor­tant regardless of the po­liti­cal situation. In Děčín, the Markovič f­amily was of key importance for the survival of the Community. In Ústí nad Labem, it was the Herškovič ­family (the head of which was the exemplary worker and also the leader of the Community). And, ­until the 1990s, the key figure in the religious life of the Prague Jewish Community was Cantor Victor Feuerlicht, who was born in Mukachevo in Carpathian Ruthenia. Yet, the Carpathian Jews never played an impor­tant role in the administration of the Jewish Communities in Prague—­those positions, including the editorial board of the Věstník, w ­ ere always occupied by local Jews. Despite their playing a key role in Jewish religious life ­under the Communist regime—­five of ­today’s ten Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, all of them in the border regions, have survived only thanks to Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia and eastern Slovakia—­Carpathian Jews never served in the Council or representative bodies of the Prague Jewish Community. This is a reflection of the desire of local Jews to



Erased from History 49

hold all the key positions of power—­which was not unique to Czecho­slo­va­kia but also happened in the postwar Jewish Communities of West Germany that had a sizable population of Jewish mi­grants from Eastern Eu­rope.44 It is also unclear ­whether Carpathian or Slovak Jews actually wanted such positions, ­because they knew that their situation in the Bohemian Lands was tenuous. Moreover, they had more impor­tant strug­gles to win, such as who would have the right to hold ser­ vices in the Old-­New Synagogue, where, in the sixteenth c­ entury, Jehuda Löw ben Becalel, the Maharal, had been the rabbi. And from this fight they ultimately emerged triumphant. Archival sources, history writing, and master narratives also play a role in why Jewish mi­grants ­were neglected in historical accounts of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands. The Jewish Communities in the border regions ­were generally perceived as Communities of German-­speaking Jews. The Leo Baeck Institute with branches in Berlin, London, and New York has several files related to ­these Communities, but information contained in them ­stopped in 1945. For the prewar members of ­these Communities, World War II brought the destruction of the Communities, and what happened afterward was no longer part of their story. The local Jews ­were e­ ither murdered or left ­after the war ­because of the anti-­German policies of Czecho­slo­va­kia. Similarly, as we have seen with Dennis’s report, American observers often interpreted Jewish life in Czecho­slo­va­ kia using woefully l­imited information and through the prism of Cold War ideology. Thus, Carpathian, Slovak and Polish Jews in the postwar Bohemian Lands ­were left out of historical accounts for a combination of reasons. They did not fit into several subsidiary narratives: the picture of a secular Czech Jewish community proud of having successfully integrated into Czech society, the picture presented by German-­speaking, usually non-­Jewish, expellees about nationalist Czechs who started ethnic cleansing in the border regions, and the Cold War narrative, which assumed that a Communist regime successfully eliminated all religious life in the country. ­Those ideological reasons for neglecting the Jewish mi­grants in Communist Czecho­slo­va­kia are reflected accurately in the sources. Ultimately, documents in private hands, ­family photo a­ lbums, interviews, and documents still in the possession of the Jewish Communities of the border region and in the archives of the JDC ­were of key importance to my research. Focusing on personal documents, rather than on the state perspective, and on the periphery rather than on center, ­were two effective ways to dispute interpretations that are stuck in nationalist or po­liti­cal clichés. The resulting picture is far from the lachrymose interpretation of Jewish history criticized by Salo Baron, an interpretation that has been ubiquitous in history writing about the Jews ­under the Communist regimes. Despite the discriminatory framework of the Communist regime, which tried to suppress religion and advance linguistic homogeneity, t­here was a diverse, active Jewish society in Czecho­slo­va­kia.

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The mosaic of dif­fer­ent sources also reveals that the relations between the local and the mi­grant Jews cannot be explained in any s­imple hierarchical way. The local Czech-­speaking Jews held the key positions in the Council of the Jewish Communities in the Bohemian Lands and in the Prague Jewish Community and frequently negotiated with Czechoslovak politicians as if they represented all the Jews of Czecho­slo­va­kia, even though ­there was an in­de­pen­dent Central Committee of the Jewish Communities in Slovakia. At the same time, it was ­these Czech-­ speaking Jews in Prague who ­were more likely to be accused of disloyalty to the Communist cause ­because of their “bourgeois” background, meaning their prewar (upper) middle-­class experience and their university degrees. From November  1952 onward, by contrast, many Slovak and Carpathian Jewish mi­grants in Bohemian border regions or eastern Slovakia ­were mentioned in Věstník, the bulletin of Czechoslovak Jews, to provide evidence of the high number of Jews being conferred the name of “exemplary worker.” Moreover, being employed as factory workers, in regions with ­labor shortages enabled the Carpathian and Slovak Jews to become part of the privileged strata of the population. To some extent, this could compensate for features the Communist administration saw as shortcomings of ­these newcomers: their lack of fluency in Czech and their religiosity. Even if they ­were not among the leaders of the Jewish institutions in the center of events, in Prague, they took control of some key religious positions and enabled the survival of many Bohemian Communities that would have ceased to exist without their leadership. The example of the pediatrician Klein in Ústí nad Labem shows, moreover, that the few remaining Jews from German families ­were well integrated into the complex set of relations between the dif­fer­ent Jewish networks in the country. It was precisely ­because of ­these linguistic, religious, and occupational differences among the Jews of Czecho­slo­va­kia, not despite them, that a remarkably rich Jewish community life was pos­si­ble ­under the repressive Communist regime.

Acknowl­edgments Research for this chapter was funded by grant no. 19-26638X of the Czech Science Foundation, carried out at the Institute of Con­temporary History, Czech Acad­ emy of Sciences.

notes 1. ​Bernard Wasserstein, Vanis­hing Diaspora: The Jews in Eu­rope since 1945 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1996).

2. ​Alena Heitlinger, In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews

since 1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006).

3. ​Interview with Malvina/Malke Hoffmann, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Prague,

October 2010.



Erased from History 51

4. ​ Interview with Pinchas/Pavel Landerer, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Tel Aviv,

May 2011.

5. ​Interview with Pavel Jelínek, conducted by Kateřina Čapková, in Liberec, January  2016.

Jelínek was one of the leaders of the Liberec Jewish community in 2016. His choice of words, “our Orthodox branch,” nicely illustrates how he understands the Jewish community as a ­whole. 6. ​AJJDC, Czecho­slo­va­kia, R 45/54-201, Report on Czecho­slo­va­kia for May and June  1946, date of report June 30, 1946. 7. ​Svobodník v záloze Adler Mojžíš—­žádost o přidělení obchodní místnosti. Dopis Vojenské invalidovny “Na Jenerálce” Okresnímu finančnímu ředitelství v Ústí nad Labem, April 26, 1946. Private collection of Malvina Hoffmann. 8. ​See the plaque in the prayer hall in Ústí nad Labem. 9. ​ Interview with Alice Lutwak, née Davidovič, conducted by Pavla Hermína Neuner, March 2016, Oral History Collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague, interview no. 298. 10. ​See Vládní nařízení č. 61 Sb., ze dne 24. srpna 1945, o přípravě opce podle Smlouvy mezi ČSR a SSSR o Zakarpatské Ukrajině ze dne 29. června 1945, in Státní občanství ČSSR: Ucelený výklad právních předpisů, upravujících československé státní občanství, ed. Jan Černý and Václav Červenka (Prague: Orbis, 1963), 188–189. For more about the uncertain ­legal position of the Carpathian Jews in postwar Czecho­slo­va­kia, see Jaroslav Vaculík, “Židé z Podkarpatské Rusi jako optanti pro československé státní občanství v letech 1945–1947,” in Mezinárodní vědecká conference: Akce Nisko v historii ‘konečného řešení židovské otázky’, ed. Ludmila Nesládková (Ostrava: Facultas Philosophica Universitatis Ostraviensis, 1995), 292–300. 11. ​The only number is mentioned by Pavlo Chudiš based on a secret report of the Repatriation Department of the Transcarpathian regional council. Two thousand ­people should have been repatriated from Czecho­slo­va­kia to the Soviet Union in the first postwar years, out of which 31 should have been Jewish. No date is given for the report. See Pavlo Chudiš, “Zakarpatskí židia v migračných procesoch medzi Československom a Sovietskym zväzom v rokoch 1945–1948,” Acta Historica Neosoliensia, 19, no. 1 (2016): 64. 12. ​So far, I have been able to analyze only part of the Jewish registers of births, deaths, and marriages from the individual Jewish communities in postwar Czecho­slo­va­kia. Separate registers for Jewish communities (kept in parallel to Christian communities) existed up to 1949. In addition to ­those registers kept by the religious communities, ­people could also register at a state registry office if they w ­ ere not religious or did not want to be registered as such. All the registers are deposited in the National Archives in Prague. 13. ​“ ‘OSE’ organisirt hilf tetikeyt far Yidn in Tshechoslovakiye,” Der Vidersthtand/The Re­sis­ tance VII, no. 20 ( January 7, 1946): 1. 14. ​Kateřina Čapková, “Germans or Jews? German-­Speaking Jews in Poland and Czecho­slo­va­ kia ­after World War II,” Jewish History Quarterly 2 (2013): 348–362; Jan Láníček, “What Did It Mean to Be Loyal? Jewish Survivors in Post-­War Czecho­slo­va­kia in a Comparative Perspective,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60, no. 3 (2014): 384–404; Lisa Peschel, “ ‘A Joyful Act of Worship’: Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezín Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 1945–48,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 2 (2012): 209–228. For an introduction to the broader set of prob­lems facing the German-­speaking Jews of central Eu­rope, see Kateřina Čapková and David Rechter, “Germans or Jews? German-­Speaking Jews in Post-­War Eu­rope: An Introduction,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 16 (2017): 69–74. 15. ​Memorandum from Berthold Konirsch, March 20, 1946, UNA, UNRRA-­Czechoslovakia Mission, S-1326-0000-0040. The UNRRA translation is slightly amended ­here. 16. ​Kateřina Čapková, “Between Expulsion and Rescue: The Transports for German-­Speaking Jews of Czecho­slo­va­kia in 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 62, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 66–92.

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17. ​Katharina Schramm, “Introduction: Landscapes of Vio­lence: Memory and Sacred Space,

History and Memory, 23, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 6. 18. ​AJJDC, Czecho­slo­va­kia, R 45/54-200, Research Department Report No. 32, based on the analy­sis of Israel J. Jacobson for December 1946–­March 1947, published July 7, 1947. 19. ​See Michael Laurence Miller, Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 55–59. 20. ​Gustav Fleischmann, “The Religious Congregation, 1918–1938,” in The Jews of Czecho­slo­va­ kia: Historical Studies and Surveys, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961), 267–329; Kateřina Čapková, “Die jüdische Glaubensgemeinschaft,” in Handbuch der Religions-­und Kirchengeschichte der böhmischen Länder und Tschechiens im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Schulze Wessel and Martin Zückert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 187–208. 21. ​See the letter of Mořic Lebovič, born in Malé Gejovce, from 1936, to the representatives of the Jewish community in the Karlín district of Prague a­ fter two months of teaching Jewish religion at several schools (primary as well as secondary) in the Karlín district. He writes that he had to start with the Hebrew alphabet in all the classes, b­ ecause none of the ­children ­were able to read Hebrew. See the Archive of the Jewish Museum in Prague, file Karlín, shelf mark 34940. The letter is without a date, but it refers to the months September and October 1936. 22. ​The term “Neolog” shows that the list of seats was written by Carpathian or Slovak Jews who identified Reform Jews with the Neolog movement in Slovakia. ­There ­were officially no Neolog communities in the Bohemian Lands before or a­ fter the war. See Archive of the Jewish Community of Teplice, lists of seats—­Neolog and Orthodox (sedadla neolog, sedadla orthodox) in an untitled notebook, 1950–1953. 23. ​NARA Washington, RG 59, General Rec­ords of the Department of State, 1955–1959, Central Decimal File, box 4554, American Embassy in Prague, to the Department of State, Washington, “Jewish Religious Life in Czecho­slo­va­kia ­Today,” 849.413/10-2259, report from October 22, 1959. 24. ​Interview with Ašer Lebovič, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Teplice, March 2013. 25. ​Interview with Věra Studená, née Herškovič, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Prague, May 2017. 26. ​Martin Šmok, “  ‘­Every Jew Is a Zionist, and ­Every Zionist Is a Spy!’ The Story of Jewish Social Assistance Networks in Communist Czecho­slo­va­kia,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 44, no. 1 (2014): 70–83. 27. ​Interview with Pinchas/Pavel Landerer, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Tel Aviv, June 2017. 28. ​Interview with Tomáš Kraus, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Prague, September 2018. 29. ​Heitlinger, In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism, 43. 30. ​Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popu­lar Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 31. ​Interview with Malvina/Malke Hoffmann. 32. ​Interview with Malvina/Malke Hoffmann. 33. ​ Interview with David Jakubovič, conducted by Kateřina Čapková in Ramat Sharon, June 2017. 34. ​Pepík is a Czech diminutive of the name Josef. 35. ​A diminutive of Marie. 36. ​Interview with Malvina Hoffmann and Věra Studená, née Herškovič. 37. ​They ­were g ­ oing to dif­fer­ent schools, so it seems that this was not a custom specific to one school only. Interview with Malvina Hoffmann and Věra Studená. 38. ​Interview with Malvina Hoffmann and Věra Studená. 39. ​Based on the Jewish birth, death, and marriage registers from localities that ­were, like ­those of the Christian communities up to 1949, kept separately from the state registers for



Erased from History 53

p­ eople who w ­ ere not religious (or did not want to be registered as such). A database using t­ hese data is currently being constructed. 40. ​Interview with Věra Studená, née Herškovič. 41. ​The photo from 1948 is in the possession of Daniel Adler. 42. ​ Věstník židovské obce náboženské v Praze, November 1952, 99. Coincidently, this article mentions the f­amily of Věra Studená, née Herškovič, who did not know about this article before I sent it to her in 2017. 43. ​“Jidiš,” Věstník židovské obce náboženské v Praze, 2 parts, January 1, 1961, 8–9, and February 1, 1961, 7–9. 44. ​Andrea Sinn, “Despite the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany ­after 1945,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 64, no. 1 (2019): 143–158.

3 • ON THE BORDERS OF LEGALIT Y Connections between Traditional Culture and the Informal Economy in Jewish Life in the Soviet Provinces VA L E RY D YM S H I T S

­After World War II, historical research on the Soviet Jews was conducted almost exclusively outside the USSR and the pro-­Soviet countries, mainly in the United States and Israel. The limits of such research are obvious: the Soviet Union was ­behind the “Iron Curtain,” and all Western scholars of Soviet Jewry had to base their research on written sources: the mass media and an extremely ­limited number of published documents. For historians who focused on the 1960s and 1970s, the major prob­lem with using t­ hese written materials as their primary or even sole sources was the absence of an object of research: ­there was no public Soviet policy ­toward the Jews in the USSR in ­these de­cades. Before World War II, however, the USSR intervened actively in the social, economic, religious, and cultural lives of Soviet Jews. In its efforts to transform the social and economic profile of the Jewish population, the newly established regime sought to suppress the Jewish religion while investing an enormous amount of effort and finances in building and spreading Yiddish secular culture and education. The Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee, established in 1941, was active during the war. Not only was this committee dissolved in 1948 but also most of its members w ­ ere sentenced to death in 1952. The early postwar years are also known for the campaign against “cosmopolitism” and the “Doctors’ Plot” (see chapter 5 by Anna Shternshis in this volume). Available official materials and the mass media documented ­these po­liti­cal activities and events at the time, and so they could be researched thoroughly. By contrast, in the 1960s—­and even more so in the 1970s and 1980s—­what was widely called the “Jewish Question” and even the word “Jews” dis­appeared from 54



On the Borders of Legality 55

official Soviet discourse. Propaganda began to use actively the word “Zionists” instead of the word “Jews.” According to official Soviet propaganda, the Soviet regime had “unmasked” Zionism and waged a militant campaign against the State of Israel. The government oppressed small groups of Jewish activists, especially the refuseniks who w ­ ere seeking to emigrate, although some w ­ ere allowed to leave USSR in the early 1970s.1 Among ­those Jewish activists ­were impor­tant public intellectuals. Still, they ­were unknown to the vast majority of Soviet Jews. Our knowledge about that vast majority of Jews living during the final years of the USSR is very ­limited. As a result of state pressures to assimilate, together with antisemitic policies, ­there are very few written documents from this period, which has made the work of historians very difficult. It is tempting to say that in Jewish history the Soviet Union was reduced to the history of a po­liti­cally active pro-­ Zionist minority. Few historians tried to reconstruct the life of the Jewish “­silent majority” ­behind the Iron Curtain.2 For example, studies of the so-­called economic ­trials of the 1960s read as standard histories of Soviet state antisemitism, even though ­those “­trials” ­were evidence of Jewish participation in the “shadow” economy.3 Through his research efforts, Mordechai Altshuler made an intellectual breakthrough in the study of the life of Soviet Jews.4 The difference between Altshuler and other historians of his generation was that he “had no liking for propagandistic dichotomies, and always sought to see the more complex historical picture.”5 Altshuler’s Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964 was a pioneering study on Soviet Jewish religious communities.6 He emphasized the role of synagogues and illegal prayer groups in preserving Jewish life ­after the repression of official Jewish secular culture and education. It was he who called into question the commonly held perception of Soviet Jewry as “the Jews of Silence.”7 But ­because he worked mainly with published documents, his sources w ­ ere also ­limited. The situation has changed radically since the 1990s. Israeli, West Eu­ro­pean, and American researchers have been granted access to archives in post-­Soviet countries, enabling their research to delve much deeper (for example, see Arkadi Zeltzer8 and Elissa Bemporad9 on the microhistory of the Jews of Soviet Belarus). For the first time, it became pos­si­ble to or­ga­nize expeditions to former shtetls in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova where researchers could conduct social and cultural anthropology fieldwork and oral histories. This work started thirty years ago and still continues. Among the pioneers of Jewish fieldwork ­were American linguists: beginning in the second half of the 1990s, the Yiddish dialectologists Dovid Katz (University of Vilnius) and Dov-­Ber Kerler (Indiana University) made systematic expeditions to the territory of the former “Yiddish Land” (from Lithuania to the Carpathians) and recorded local dialects from the last native speakers of Yiddish. L ­ ater, Jeffrey Veidlinger joined the team. Participants in the expeditions w ­ ere initially interested in capturing Yiddish dialects, never staying very long in one site but traveling around to as many regions

56

Va lery Dymshits

as pos­si­ble to rec­ord as many local speech features as pos­si­ble: the researchers ­were mainly interested in how rather than what their narrators said. Still, many recordings of conversations lasted as long as several hours and had significant historical potential: they ­were the basis for the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories Proj­ect (AHEYM). The acronym itself has meaning: in Yiddish, the word “aheym” means “homeward.” This archive currently contains about 350 interviews.10 The results of ­these impressive expeditions are summarized in Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl.11 This book and the collection of articles titled Shtetl. XXI c. Field Studies12 published by the Petersburg Judaica Center are the first two published Jewish field studies since World War II. Veidlinger’s research focuses on recollections of the prewar period captured in oral histories, but it also documents the postwar memorialization of victims of the Holocaust. The Petersburg Judaica Center (Eu­ro­pean University at St. Petersburg) and the SEFER Center in Moscow or­ga­nized in the period 2004–2010 the complex field expeditions to the former shtetls in dif­fer­ent parts of the former USSR. This fieldwork had a dif­fer­ent aim: to investigate continuities of “Jewish life” (in economic, cultural, social spheres) from the prewar to postwar period. ­Because of the lack of documents for the late Communist period, oral history has played an invaluable role in researching the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union in the last three de­cades of its existence. In contrast to the AHEYM proj­ect in which all interviews ­were conducted in Yiddish, in the Petersburg Judaica proj­ ect we de­cided to conduct interviews in both Yiddish and Rus­sian. We ­were thus able to interview middle-­aged narrators, most of whom did not speak Yiddish. Moreover, narrators competent in “ethnographic” ­matters spoke Yiddish poorly or not at all. Fi­nally, by using Rus­sian, we could also conduct interviews with non-­ Jewish narrators who had in­ter­est­ing and sometimes unique knowledge about living with Jewish neighbors. It was, however, very useful to compare our results with ­those of the AHEYM team, ­because several of our expeditions worked in the same regions.

The Changing Socioeconomic Structure of Jewish Society in the Soviet Union The historiography of Soviet Jewish studies has been greatly influenced by Zvi Gitelman’s distinction between “thin” and “thick” Jewish culture. Gitelman ­adopted Geertz’s anthropological concept.13 “Thick” culture—­understood as a combination of language, community institutions, and religious and ethnographic practices—­was, according to Gitelman, generally absent in the Soviet Union.14 His thesis has since become a consensus. For instance, in their book on the folklore of Jewish emigrants from the former USSR, Mariia Elenevskaia and Larisa Fialkova argue that Soviet Jews ­were initially deprived of any manifestations of national culture.15



On the Borders of Legality 57

Field research suggests, however, that the m ­ atter was much more complex. Some groups of Jews continued to preserve traditional forms of culture, including the Yiddish language and religious life, throughout the Soviet period. It is impor­ tant to identify such groups and their social and economic resources, understand what motivated their be­hav­ior, and describe their culture. ­Doing so requires revising the concept of “thin and thick cultures” as applied to Soviet Jewish studies. The culture of Soviet Jews, b­ ecause of its syncretic nature, often included hidden “thick” ele­ments, as discussed by Anna Shternshis.16 Recent scholarship is focusing on links between the preservation of traditional Jewish culture and vari­ous forms of the ethnocentric economy, traditional occupational patterns, and living arrangements. Such studies have pointed to the existence of traditional forms of the ethnocentric economy both in the former shtetls of Ukraine and Moldova17 and in the suburbs of Moscow.18 This research has focused mainly on economic ­factors. The goal of this chapter, however, is to answer a dif­fer­ent question: Why and how did some Jews maintain forms of traditional religious life despite the repressive actions of the Soviet regime? Before the Rus­sian Revolution of 1917, the majority of Rus­sian Jews lived in the shtetls and towns of the Pale of Settlement, where they made up a significant part of the population. Yet the Jewish community was already modernized by 1917: almost all its members w ­ ere literate in Yiddish and many also in Rus­sian; many middle-­class families provided their ­children with a secular education; the press and vari­ous social, cultural, and po­liti­cal organ­izations and institutions had a widespread influence.19 The destruction wrought by World War I, the Rus­sian Revolution of 1917, and of the 1918–1921 Civil War, combined with the repressive Soviet regime, contributed to decimating the traditional economy and way of life of the shtetl. Most Jewish men worked in trade and crafts and lost their livelihoods; they w ­ ere forced to work in factories and on collective farms. They felt that ­these new jobs duties stripped them of their dignity as ­human beings. Like many non-­Jews, self-­ employed Jews felt a loss of freedom in the transition to ser­vice on behalf of the state or state-­owned enterprises. Jews ­were, moreover, subjected to antireligious laws and could no longer celebrate the Sabbath, Jewish holidays, and life-­cycle events. All ­these mea­sures seemed to enforce a lack of freedom. Jews ­were impoverished a­ fter the collapse of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1929, which for a brief time had permitted private Jewish entrepreneurship, allowing the craftsmen-­turned-­factory workers to return to their workshops. As a result of high rates of unemployment and rigid stratification along class lines, 40 ­percent of the Jews in the former shtetls w ­ ere relegated to the category of “lishentses” (disenfranchised), which meant that they ­were deprived of social support and work. Former shtetls became social disaster zones, as the Soviet press stated repeatedly in the 1930s.20 The policies of the Soviet regime regarding the USSR’s economy, culture, education, and social prob­lems changed many times in the seventy years of its existence.

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But one goal never changed: to reform the entire population of the state and so change their economic and cultural be­hav­ior. In the guise of modernization or transformation, traditional forms of life ­were often changed beyond recognition ­under continuous Soviet pressure. However, the effects of Soviet policies often differed dramatically from their intended aims. Some Jews welcomed the Soviet policy ­toward former shtetls in the 1920s and 1930s and the opportunities it brought to move to the big cities. Young p­ eople entered universities and received training in modern professions in exchange for their acculturation and assimilation. Ironically, even though official Soviet policy was aimed at emancipating the c­ hildren of the working class, many Soviet Jewish students came from prerevolutionary middle-­class families. As mentioned, the ­middle class had fought to secure a modern education of their ­children even before the Revolution. At the same time, the petty bourgeoisie wanted to leave their native towns as quickly as pos­si­ble, ­because, in the eyes of the new Soviet regime, they had a “bad” reputation at home. The civil engineering activities of the Soviet authorities focused first on the urban population. ­Because most of the Jews in the USSR by then lived in an urban environment, they ­were u­ nder enormous pressure from the outset to conform to the forced transformation that this Soviet experiment entailed. It should be noted that Jewish culture and Yiddish (specifically, the nontraditional and secular Soviet variety) received the protection and support of the state only ­until 1938. ­After that year, Yiddish schools and the Jewish press ­were shut down, although theaters and book publishers w ­ ere allowed to remain open for another de­cade.21 From 1948 onward, the suppression of Jewish cultural life assumed a drastic form, only becoming much less severe a­ fter Stalin’s death in 1953. Yet, in the postwar period, ­there was no official state protection of Soviet Jewish cultural traditions, even ­those “purified” of their religious ele­ments. Yet despite Soviet policy and the destruction wrought by war and revolution, small-­town life continued ­until 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The world of the “under­ground shtetl” was almost entirely destroyed during World War II, when the majority of the Jewish population who had not already left t­ hese small towns ­were killed by the Germans. Nevertheless, in certain areas some shtetl-­ like towns continued to function u­ ntil the early 1990s. One such area was the southwestern corner of Ukraine’s Vinnytsa Oblast (southwestern Podolia).

Southwestern Podolia’s Jewish Settlement During World War II, Jews living in the former shtetls of southwestern Podolia ­were ­under Romanian occupation. In the Romanian occupation zone, then known as Transnistria, Romanian troops did not carry out the total extermination of the Jewish population, and so this region was one of the few territories in which Jewish communities survived the war. This is why the Transnistria region was chosen as the site of folklore and ethnographic expeditions or­ga­nized between 2004



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and 2010 by the Petersburg Judaica Center, ­housed at the Eu­ro­pean University at St. Petersburg, and the SEFER Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization in Moscow. Most interviews w ­ ere conducted in the Vinnytsa Oblast in Mohiliov-­Podilskii (Mogilev-­Podolskii), Sharhorod (Shargorod), and Tulchin and in the Balta region (the Odessa Oblast). ­These expeditions took place for about a month e­ very summer from 2004 to 2010. About twenty p­ eople, both professional researchers and students, took part in each one. During that month, participants tried to interview all the Jewish inhabitants of a town, as well as many el­derly local non-­Jews, using a comprehensive survey with more than 2,000 questions. The questionnaire addressed a variety of topics, including folklore and oral traditions, rituals associated with the annual holiday cycle and life-­cycle events, and folk medicine. More than 1,000 full-­scale interviews ­were conducted; they are stored in the archive of the Petersburg Judaica Center. Some of the results of this research are published in an edited collection, Shtetl, the 21st ­Century.22 This research initially focused on the preservation and evolution of Yiddish in the former Podolian shtetls of the postwar period. While collecting material about Yiddish, however, I noticed that the use of Yiddish correlated with many other social and religious characteristics. The interviews and fieldwork presented h­ ere provide an understanding of the cultural value of an alternative economy and its connections to forms of communal and religious Jewish life in the former Soviet province. Oral testimonies about the “Jewish life” of the inhabitants of Mogilev and other “Transnistrian” (Podolian) towns are based primarily not on fragmentary childhood memories from the prewar years but on personal experiences from the 1960s to the 1980s. Mogilev-­Podolskii, the administrative center and the largest town in the Transnistria region, was the site of most of the fieldwork. In the 1980s, it had about 30,000 residents, including some 6,000 Jews. Although many Jews had died during the war at the front and in Romanian ghettos and concentration camps, the Jewish population grew considerably in the postwar period as a result of migration from small neighboring shtetls that had been nearly completely abandoned by the Jews in the early 1960s; the population increased so much that the number of Jews in postwar Mogilev-­Podolskii exceeded that before and during the war. By the end of the 1980s, Jews represented at least one-­quarter of the urban population, and by the early 1990s, the percentage of Jews in Mogilev-­Podolskii population was the highest among all towns and cities in the Soviet Union. By comparison, the proportions of Jews in the large Soviet cities at the end of the 1980s w ­ ere much smaller: 2 ­percent in Leningrad (about 100,000 Jews), 4 ­percent in Kiev (about 100,000 Jews), and 6 ­percent in Chernovits (about 15,000 Jews). Traditional Forms of Social Prestige and Hierarchy Traditional forms of social prestige and social hierarchy ­were destroyed by the Soviet state’s attacks not only on traditional economic and social life but also on

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religious and communal life. This is illustrated well by how the role of the synagogue in communal life was drastically changed. Before the revolution, the space of the synagogue reflected the social hierarchy: where someone sat reflected his level of honor and, hence, value, in communal life. Men who participated in the life of the Community could clearly identify their place in the social hierarchy by where they sat. A ­ fter the revolution, even if not all the synagogues w ­ ere closed, they lost their role as a place in which to demonstrate and rank social prestige, as shown by Arkady Zeltzer.23 The connection between financial or professional success and one’s place in the synagogue was broken. Indeed, participation in religious ceremonies became a major obstacle to professional advancement, even resulting in dismissal from state school or work. Alternatives to a “Soviet ­career” included forms of employment that the Soviet government considered second-­rate: work in cooperatives or in licensed arts and crafts (tailors, shoe­makers, tinsmiths). This type of employment often provided a higher level of income than work in the state sector, but a person was completely cut off from any official social prestige. It is impor­tant to note that Jewish craftsmen ­were held in low regard and ­were located at the bottom of the social hierarchy even in prerevolutionary times. Traditional Jewish society treated craftsmen contemptuously, considering them ignorant of the Talmud and other religious texts, ­because they made their living from physical, not intellectual, work. Paradoxically, in the Soviet system Jewish craftsmen and artisans ­were, by contrast, the ones able to move up the ladder of Jewish social stratification. The attack on private entrepreneurship was renewed at the end of the Stalinist period with Khrushchev’s investment in light industry and the ser­vice sectors. Typically, many of our el­derly in­for­mants in Mogilev and Tulchin w ­ ere natu­ral “Stalinists” ­because state antisemitism, which affected the intelligent­sia in the larger cities, had a much smaller impact on small-­town Jews in the early 1950s. Yet they had clear memories of subsequent developments when Khrushchev’s policies destroyed their businesses. Even in the 1960s, when most Jewish craftsmen in Ukraine ­were forced to work in state consumption centers (bytkombinaty), the former craftsmen continued off-­the-­ books work in what could be described as the shadow economy. Along with formally ­legal activities, under­ground plants (tsehoviky) continued to function illegally.24 ­People employed in t­ hese profitable but not socially valued areas w ­ ere often jailed for economic “crimes,” but it was impossible to dismiss them from their work for attending synagogue or using Yiddish to communicate with a client at the workplace. Members of cooperatives and craftsmen ­were primarily the ones to maintain forms of traditional folklore and religious customs. It was through their religious involvement, charitable work, and participation in traditional rites of passage that income generated by semi-­criminal (according to the state point of view) activity could be converted into social prestige and status. In addition to the usual infrastructure of the Soviet administrative center, a highly successful machine factory, the Kirov Plant (Zavod im. Kirova), was located



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in Mogilev-­Podolskii.25 This plant guaranteed a high salary for its staff, good working conditions, and—­what is impor­tant—­social prestige. One of our in­for­mants, L. B., recalled with plea­sure his social status: Na Oktiabr’skie idesh’ na demonstratsiiu. Diktor ob’iavliaet: “Na ploshchad’ vstupaet kolonna Zavoda im. Kirova. Vperedi udarnik sotsialisticheskogo truda—­tokar’ L. B.” On October holidays, you went to a demonstration. The announcer declared. “A column from the Kirov Plant enters the square. At the front [is] the hero of socialist l­ abor—­milling machine operator L. B.”26

Many of ­those who worked in the Kirov plant—as workers, engineers, and even the director—­were Jewish. Understandably, t­ hese jobs prevented them from ­going to synagogue e­very day; they even caused their linguistic be­hav­ior to change. ­People who spoke only Yiddish at home used Rus­sian at work, even if it was difficult for them. When we asked about the use of Yiddish in the factory, all our respondents replied that to do so inside the plant was “indecent.” At the same time, our in­for­mants understood that the rejection of one’s native language was an act of conscious conformism. Of par­tic­u­lar interest to us was a story told by one of our Jewish interview subjects. An unskilled laborer at the Kirov plant, he thus belonged to the “plebs” of the factory. He stressed that the entire staff of the plant spoke Rus­sian. But when the director and heads of the departments and workshops gathered for a professional meeting in the director’s office (he, of course, was never invited), they only spoke Yiddish among themselves. In his opinion, this made their jobs easier for them, but s­ imple ­people had no choice and had to “suffer” by speaking Rus­sian. What he described ­here, of course, never happened: it was only in his imagination. But this legend shows us that in the eyes of the s­ imple workers, Yiddish became a “privilege” and a “secret language” for the high-­ranking Jews. An alternative to a job at the Kirov plant was a less prestigious but well-­paid ­career as a tailor, market seller, butcher, shoemaker, barber, and the like. All the traders and craftsmen who ­were engaged in vari­ous “gesheftn” (private business) ­were second-­class citizens in the eyes of the authorities and “ordinary” Soviet ­people. They built an alternative system of success, prosperity, and social prestige on the edges of the law and even outside it. Religious observance, charity, and Community involvement played an enormous role in the lives of this group. The interviews paint detailed pictures of this social alternative in the 1970s and 1980s. The Concept of the “Illegal” The epithet “illegal” was widely used by our interview subjects whenever they ­were discussing something “Jewish.” However, in their local dialect of Rus­sian, “illegal” does not mean something against the law but rather “not allowed but also not prohibited,” as in the following:

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V Mogileve bylo tri sinagogi, i vse tri—­nelegal’nye. In Mogilev ­there ­were three synagogues, and all three w ­ ere illegal.27 Sobiratel’: A na utrenniuiu molitvu khodili? In­for­mant: Obiazatel’no. Kazhdoe utro a min’en byl. Starichki prikhodili nelegal’no. Researcher: Did somebody go ­every day for morning prayer? Interviewee: Definitely. ­Every morning ­there was a minyan [prayer quorum]. The old men came illegally.28 Na Yonkiper sobiralis’. Mnogo narodu: mozhet tysiacha, mozhet bol’she. Nariadnye, s zhenami, s det’mi. Stoiali vse vot tut, na Stoliarnoi [ulitse], zhdali, kogda vyidet ravvin trubit’ [v shofar]. No eto vse, konechno, nelegal’no. The Jews gathered on Yom Kippur [Day of Atonement]. Th ­ ere ­were a lot of ­people, maybe a thousand, maybe more. All ­were well-­dressed, with wives, with ­children. Every­ body stood ­here, on Stoliarnoi [Street], waiting for the Rabbi to blow [the shofar]. But of course, all this was illegal.29

Five synagogue buildings in Mogilev-­Podolskii w ­ ere confiscated and subsequently destroyed by the government before World War II. All three of the “illegal” synagogues mentioned in ­these interviews ­were in private ­houses, specially purchased for this purpose ­after the war: none was registered with the state. Gradually, by the end of the 1970s, a­ fter the death of the older, more religious generation, two ­were closed down; the third “illegal” synagogue, which was located near the market square in the heart of town, was registered in the perestroika era, when it ceased to be “illegal.” Other impor­tant ele­ments of this alternative Jewish infrastructure ­were the podriads (Yiddish for seasonal matzah bakeries). ­These bakeries carried out not only illegal religious activities but also illegal economic activities. The organizers of the podriads bought flour or used customers’ own flour supplies to bake and sell matzah for Passover not only for the residents of Mogilev but also for Jews in many surrounding towns. I estimate that they managed to bake tens of tons of matzah each year. The podriads w ­ ere open for about two months before Passover each year, and the work done ­there was very challenging physically. In many cases, young workers and secondary-­school students worked ­there to earn extra money. Some of ­these young ­people w ­ ere members of Komsomol (Communist youth organ­ ization), had no interest in Judaism, and never visited a synagogue; yet working in a podriad seemed perfectly natu­ral to them. Several interview subjects recalled the podriads of their youth in the 1960s:



On the Borders of Legality 63

Ia posle podriada kostium kupil na tantsy khodit’. ­After the podriad I bought a suit to go dancing.30 V podriade zarabotal na velosiped. In the podriad I made money to buy a bike.31

In small towns the existence of illegal synagogues and podriads was likely known to all. How then to prevent the authorities from shutting them down? Clearly, the ­whole enterprise was impossible without the use of bribes, although the respondents offered no recollections or specific details; they only shared that the local Soviet and Communist Party leaders did not want to quarrel with a substantial part of the population of “their” town. From time to time, this harmony would be disrupted when a new official would come to town and lead a raid on an illegal synagogue, greatly damaging the synagogue property and ritual objects. Then every­thing returned to as it was as before. Often such stories of destruction became part of folklore with motifs of the “good king” or “God’s punishment of the blasphemer.” Th ­ ese motifs are typical of Eastern Eu­ro­pean folklore, both Slavic and Jewish. For example, in Mogilev-­ Podolskii ­people told us that many years ago a new militia officer, a typical “new broom,” sacked one of the “secret” synagogues and confiscated ritual objects. The old men wrote a complaint to the Soviet leader Brezhnev at the time, and every­thing was returned. In Chernivtsy, a small Podolian shtetl, a new militiaman—­a true antisemite—­confiscated all the Torah scrolls from the synagogue and used them to make a roof for his h­ ouse. Soon the h­ ouse burned down, together with the owner. The Soviet Cooperative Shechita A considerable prob­lem for el­derly ­people was getting access to kosher meat—in Mogilev, this meant chicken slaughtered by the shoykhet (Yiddish for shochet). The Jewish population was not Orthodox but was conservative and traditional, especially the ­women who fed their families. They w ­ ere not ­going to change their ways, ­because they ­adopted their traditions not in educational institutions but from their ­mothers and grand­mothers. The prob­lem of securing kosher chickens was solved in Mogilev-­Podolskii the same way as it was in Tulchin, Balta, and—­ according to oral testimonies and memoirs—in many other towns and former shtetls of Ukraine and Belarus ­until the end of the 1970s. A shed belonging to the procurement cooperation stood in the market square. A bearded el­derly Jew sat inside and slaughtered chickens for both Jewish and non-­Jewish customers who purchased them at the market stalls; for the Jewish buyers, he said the appropriate blessings. The fee for his work was the fluff and feathers, which he was harvesting for the state. Every­one knew that the old man in the market was a professional

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shoykhet with semikhah (rabbinical permission). This arrangement satisfied one of the key religious needs of the Jewish population in a way permitted by the regime. Congregants of the Synagogue As mentioned, one of the key issues investigated in our ethnographic expeditions concerned the evolution and gradual disappearance of Yiddish. To my direct question, “In what segment of the population did Yiddish continue to exist longer as an everyday language?” one interview subject, a very educated person, answered quickly: V sinagogu bol’she khodili remeslenniki. Mainly the craftsmen visited the synagogue.32

This response was quite typical: one’s occupation, membership in a religious Community, and the everyday use of Yiddish constituted a single, indivisible w ­ hole. ­There ­were seven under­ground cheders in Mogilev-­Podolskii, according to the interviews and vari­ous memoirs.33 One interviewee said that even a­ fter World War II some families continued to hire melameds for their sons. In response to my question, “Which families did that? ­Were they especially religious families?” he answered, Te, chto byli pobogache. Naprimer, miasniki. Oni i melameda priglashali, i detei uchili na skripke. ­ ose who ­were richer. For example, butchers. They invited the melamed and also taught Th their ­children to play violin.34

The synagogue served as the center of charitable activity. ­People said the following about one of the cooperative members, reputed to be the richest man in Shargorod: Vsegda v sinagogu khodil, bednym pomogal, ves’ gorod kormil. He attended synagogue all the time, helped the poor, fed the w ­ hole town.35

In Mogilev-­Podolskii and Tulchin, traditional charity funds existed ­until the 1980s. P ­ eople donated money for young w ­ omen without dowries and to buy new clothes for ­children, and matzah and other food for poor families before Passover. Raising funds was assigned to the most respected members of the Community. It was an honorable duty, entrusted to t­ hose who had made the greatest donation. For example, in Mogilev-­Podolskii this function was invariably assigned to the director (essentially the owner) of a cooperative sausage plant.



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One of the most striking fruits of this charitable work was the establishment of the Talmud Torah in Mogilev-­Podolskii in the postwar years, a cheder for orphans and ­children from poor families and funded by the Community. We learned that the Jewish Community, ­after the liberation of Mogilev-­Podolskii, had illegally opened a Talmud Torah in 1944 for boys whose ­fathers had been killed at the front.36 It operated for about two and a half years, u­ ntil 1947. Some respondents showed us the large two-­story building where the Talmud Torah had operated, having been purchased by the Community for this purpose. The ­children went ­there ­every weekday for several hours a­ fter attending state school. They w ­ ere fed ­there as well, which was crucially impor­tant in the years of postwar hunger. I wondered what the c­ hildren could learn in ­those few hours they attended. I gradually came to understand that they w ­ ere taught how to recite the Kaddish, the memorial prayer in Aramaic. ­Fathers had the obligation to teach their sons this prayer: war orphans, who had the responsibility to say Kaddish, had no way to learn it, and so the Talmud Torah was established. Our respondents did not remember exactly who had financed this Talmud Torah for the orphans, but all agreed that it had been “Tsvey-­dray reyche yidn [Two or three rich Jews].”37 The Talmud Torah combined traditional forms of communal charity, religious practice, and the Soviet idea of helping c­ hildren whose ­fathers had been killed at the front. They w ­ ere similar in purpose to the Suvorov state military schools, established during the war to educate soldiers’ orphans. ­Those who engaged in traditional forms of economic activities (crafts, brokerage38, and trade39) required a way to convert the money they earned into traditional forms of honor and prestige: t­ here w ­ ere no other ways to spend it u­ nder the conditions of Soviet provincial life and a semi-­subsistence economy. One way was to contribute large amounts to communal charities and maintaining the synagogue, which would lead to benefactors being given communal and synagogue leadership roles. Thus, the local Jewish Community covertly replicated pre-­Soviet patterns of Jewish internal stratification. An impor­tant role in this pro­cess was played by Jewish members of cooperatives, artisans, and craftsmen who ­were si­mul­ta­neously active in the Soviet shadow economy. Using their illicitly gained economic assets, they ­were active in sustaining some ele­ments of the traditional Jewish system of stratification while transforming it by moving higher up the social hierarchy and gaining greater prestige. The Transformation of the Community The idea that the synagogue is not only a h­ ouse of worship but also a place of symbolic exchange and of gaining status is evident in the transformation of the Community ­after perestroika. In the 1990s, throughout the former Soviet Union, religion once again gained public importance and re­spect; in Mogilev-­Podolskii that meant that the leadership roles in the Jewish Community and the synagogue, which recently had been legally registered with the state, ­were assumed by retired staff members of the

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Kirov plant, many of whom had never visited it before but now had a g­ reat deal of ­free time. The duties of the cantor w ­ ere performed by the former head of the plant design bureau, the trea­surer of the Community was the former head of quality control, and the chairman had been the head of a department. Reflecting the factory hierarchy, former engineers sat on the front benches close to the Torah ark, and former workers sat or stood at the back. A former head of the factory department, who was born far from Mogilev to a f­ amily of a Soviet officer, confirmed this arrangement: Ia v etom nichego ne ponimaiu. Ochen’ skuchno. No ne mogu zhe ia ne khodit’, tam vse nashi (imeiutsia v vidu sosluzhivtsy, drugie nachal’niki tsekhov). I ­don’t understand a word. It is very boring. But I ­can’t be absent; all of our ­people ­[co-­workers and other heads of departments] are t­ here.40

Only a few older members of the Community still remain, and they come to synagogue only on holidays. Most emigrated, ­because their artisanal work could only exist in a society of scarcity. An old barber, who once was a committed member of the Community, explains, A chego mne tuda khodit’? Ia tam nikogo ne znaiu, i razgovory ikh mne ne interesny. Why should I go t­here? I d­ on’t know anyone t­here, and I’m not interested in their conversations.41

Economic transformation destroyed the shadow economy and, with it, the old Mogilev Jewish community. This destruction may be the most striking indicator of the close relationship between the shadow economy and the “shadow Jewish community.” The mechanism of change in the Jewish religious Community (similar pro­cesses took place, with some variation, in Tulchin and Balta) shows that the synagogue had long served as the staging ground for the formation and functioning of an alternative system of social status to that of the Soviet.

Conclusion One of the unanticipated consequences of the post-­revolutionary destruction of the market economy was the pro­cess of de-­urbanization. Only one of e­ very four to five shtetls remained; the o­ thers w ­ ere transformed into villages. Jews ­were motivated to leave the shtetls and move to the larger towns where the authorities ­were less repressive. Yet parts of the Jewish community remained quite strong in their desire to preserve the traditional way of life, with its native language, religious Community, charity, and traditional occupations and activities. An alternative to assimilation was accessible to small-­town Jews engaged in the cooperative sector of



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the economy, who ­were able to use its “shadow” economic aspects and transform illegal streams of revenue into social prestige in lieu of the official prestige offered by the state. Their activities may be seen as acts of re­sis­tance to the “anthropological” policies of the Soviet regime. This re­sis­tance was based on the per­sis­tence of an alternative value system rooted in personal, as well as religious and communal life.

notes 1. ​Petrus Buwalda, They Did Not Dwell Alone: Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1967–1990 (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Yaacov Ro’i, “Soviet Policy ­toward Jewish Emigration: An Overview,” in Rus­sian Jews on Three Continents: Migration and Resettlement, ed. Noah Lewin-­Epstein, Yaacov Ro’i, and Paul Ritterband (London: Psy­chol­ogy Press, 1997): 45–67; Maxim D. Shrayer, Leaving Rus­sia: A Jewish Story (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). 2. ​Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 3. ​Yaacov Ro’i, “Economic T ­ rials,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Eu­rope, vol. I, ed.  Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 454, https://­ yivoencyclopedia​.o­ rg​/­article​.­aspx​/­Economic​_­Trials (accessed on July 26, 2019). 4. ​Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure. Studies in Population and Urban Demography, No. 5 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987). 5. ​Arkadi Zeltzer, “A Tribute to Mordechai Altshuler,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 49, no.  3 (2019): 261–263. 6. ​Mordechai Altshuler, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union 1941–1964, 2nd  ed. (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012). 7. ​Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). 8. ​Arkadi Zeltzer, “The Shtetl during the ‘­Great Watershed’ of 1929–1931: The Case of Vitebsk Region,” Jews in Rus­sia and Eastern Eu­rope 46, no. 3 (Winter 2001): 5–33. 9. ​Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 10. ​For more on AHEYM, see https://­libraries​.­indiana​.­edu​/­aheym​-­project, accessed on July 27, 2020). 11. ​Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-­Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 12. ​Valeri A. Dymshits, Aleksandr L. L’vov, and Alla V. Sokolova, eds., Shtetl, XXI vek: Polevye issledovaniia (Saint Peterburg: Izd-vo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-­Peterburge, 2008). 13. ​Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Old Socie­ties and New Socie­ties: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: ­Free Press of Glencoe, 1963). 14. ​Zvi Gitelman, “Thinking about Being Jewish in Rus­sia and Ukraine,” in Jewish Life a ­ fter the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 49–63. 15. ​ Mariia Elenevskaia and Larisa Fialkova, Russkaia ulitsa v evreiskoi strane: Issledovanie fol’klora emigrantov v 1990-kh v Izraile (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2005). 16. ​Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popu­lar Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 17. ​Marina Hakkarainen, “Jewish Tradition ­Faces the Soviet Economy: Moral Dilemma of ‘Shadow’ Entrepreneurship in the Former Pale of Settlement, Ukraine,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish

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Affairs 43, no. 2 (2013): 190–205; Anna Kushkova, “An Essay on the Jewish Ethnic Economy: The Case of Belz (Moldova),” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 43, no. 1 (2013): 77–100. 18. ​Kushkova, “An Essay on the Jewish Ethnic Economy.” 19. ​For a discussion of Jewish life in the Rus­sian Empire during the last de­cades prior to the October Revolution, see Zvi Gitelman, A ­Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Rus­sia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Pre­sent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Rus­sia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 20. ​Several impor­tant works on the social and economic life of the shtetl in the 1920s and 1930s ­were published, for example, in the collection of articles by V. G. Tan-­Bogoraz, ed., Evreiskoe mestechko 1926—­Evreiskoe mestechko v revoliutsii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926). See also Ben-­Cion Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews ­under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Arkadii Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki. 1917–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006). 21. ​The only exception was Eynikayt (Unity), the newspaper of the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee, published in Yiddish during the ­Great Patriotic War. 22. ​Dymshits et al., Shtetl, XXI vek. 23. ​Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii. 24. ​ For the shadow economy in the USSR more broadly, see Aron Katsenelinboigen, “Coloured Markets in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 1 (1977): 62–85; and Caroline Humphrey, “Traders, Disorder, and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Rus­sia,” in In Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, ed. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 19–53. For the Jewish component of the shadow economy, see Hakkarainen, “Jewish Tradition ­Faces the Soviet Economy.” 25. ​For the “Kirov Plant” in Mogilev-­Podolskii, its place in the life of the town, and the mentality of its inhabitants, see Mikhail Lur’e et al., “Lokal’nyi tekst goroda i ego slovarnoe opisanie. Slovar’ lokal’nogo teksta kak metod opisaniia gorodskoi kul’turnoi traditsii (na primere Mogileva-­Podolskogo),” in Shtetl, XXI vek, 186–196. Sergey Kirov (1886–1934) was a prominent Soviet leader. 26. ​L. B., born in 1943, lives in Mogilev-­Podolskii. 27. ​R. Sh., born in 1938, lives in Tulchin. 28. ​A. T., born in 1940, lived in Mogilev-­Podolskii and currently resides in the United States. 29. ​E. Sh., born in 1936, lived in Mogilev-­Podolskii. 30. ​L. B., born in 1943, lives in Mogilev-­Podolskii. 31. ​R. Sh., born in 1938, lives in Tulchin. 32. ​R. Sh., born in 1938, lives in Tulchin. 33. ​See, for example, the rich collection of memoirs in David Shekhter, Soldaty na pereprave. Vospominaniia khasidov Khabada, sobrannye i literaturno obrabotannye Davidom Shekhterom (Moscow: Knizniki, 2014). 34. ​E. G., born in 1936, lived in Mogilev-­Podolskii and currently resides in Israel. 35. ​E. B., born in 1952, lives in Shargorod. 36. ​The Red Army liberated Mogilev-­Podolskii in March 1944. 37. ​E. Sh., born in 1936, lived in Mogilev-­Podolskii. 38. ​The under­ground market for intermediary ser­vices was very popu­lar in the USSR, for example, for the exchange of apartments, ­etc. 39. ​The total deficit of goods and ser­vices in the USSR made semilegal and illegal brokerage very useful. The person who had access to some benefits could “trade” with his or her connections. 40. ​S. J., born in 1950, lives in Mogilev-­Podolskii. 41. ​I. K., born in 1928, lives in Mogilev-­Podolskii.

part 2

PERCEPTIONS OF JEWISHNESS

4 • FROM FRIENDS TO ENEMIES? The Soviet State and Its Jews in the Aftermath of the Holocaust DI AN A DUM ITRU

The Jews who lived in the Soviet Union during the interwar period experienced a power­ful disillusionment a­ fter the war. Although this feeling was shared by many Eu­ro­pean Jews, the c­ auses of Soviet Jews’ disenchantment differed, primarily ­because Soviet Jews could not reprimand the government for ­earlier antisemitic policies. During the war, the USSR was among the small number of Eu­ro­pean governments that did not carry out the Holocaust, and it also took the lead role in defeating the Nazi regime and liberating hundreds of thousands of Jewish prisoners from concentration camps across Eu­rope. Nevertheless, the regime’s assault on Jewish individuals and organ­izations was taking clear shape by the end of the 1940s. By that time, both Jews and non-­Jews had a growing conviction that the Soviet state was embracing a policy of antisemitism. The bewildering transformation climaxed during the Doctors’ Plot, an episode understood by some historians as “Stalin’s version of a ‘final solution.’ ”1 Even if Stalin’s death brought the Doctors’ Plot to a halt and set in motion the exoneration of its victims, the relation between the Soviet government and its Jews had been altered forever. It advanced through vari­ous ebbs and flows, accompanied by a lingering and, at times, increasing feeling of restricted opportunities for Jews. In this new context many Jews started to perceive the USSR as a “step-­motherland,” as expressed most explic­itly by the onset of mass emigration.2 How could an ethnic minority that a­ fter the October Revolution had been embraced by the Bolshevik government as one of the Soviet Union’s most trustworthy groups and whose population was decimated during World War II—­a war that became the main legitimizing event of Soviet statehood in the postwar era—­ end up in an acrimonious relationship of such magnitude? How did the death of about one-­third of the prewar Jewish population during the Holocaust influence the relationship between the surviving Jews and the rest of the Soviet population? 71

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Why and how did Soviet Jews become an “incon­ve­nient group” in the postwar era? This chapter explores ­these questions and examines ­factors and circumstances that led to the major postwar transformation of conditions for Soviet Jews. In ­doing so it focuses primarily on the second half of the 1940s, during which a crucial reassessment of relations between Jews and the Soviet state took place. The issue of official antisemitism during late Stalinism has become a subject of scholarly attention since the opening of Rus­sian archives in the 1990s. A prolific scholar in this field, Gennady Kostyrchenko, emphasizes Stalin’s predominant role in the evolution of antisemitism, suggesting that official antisemitism began increasing as early as the mid-1930s.3 He notes that during World War II, Stalin was careful not to allow antisemitism to increase, which might provoke hostility among Western allies and unnecessary tensions within Soviet echelons of power during a desperate war. The historian Shimon Redlich agrees with Kostyrchenko’s point about the restraints imposed on the Soviet government’s antisemitism during the war.4 Kostyrchenko offers a multiplicity of reasons for the postwar increase in antisemitism: the “unwinding of the mechanisms of repression,” the creation of the State of Israel and the Soviet state’s shock at Soviet Jews’ expressed enthusiasm for it, Stalin’s personal degradation and paranoia, and the accompanying fears of American-­Zionist plots.5 Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, who wrote a book-­length study of the Doctors’ Plot, see it as “the natu­ral outgrowth of the bureaucratic, po­liti­cal, psychological, and moral structure of Stalin’s system of government.” In the context of the early years of the Cold War, the Doctors’ Plot manifested Stalin’s desire to purge the state of undesirable ele­ments, in case ­there would be war with the United States.6 Although this research offers pertinent analy­sis and explanations of the changes of policies of the Soviet regime ­toward the Jews, they identify Stalin as the main protagonist of this story. It is no coincidence that the majority of the books’ titles emphasize the centrality of Stalin.7 Importantly, in t­ hese accounts the Soviet Jewish community is primarily assigned the passive role of an object, a mere victim of Stalinist manipulations; it is not treated as a major ­factor in influencing the po­liti­ cal constellation in the postwar era.8 By contrast, this chapter uses a dif­fer­ent lens that sees the transformations taking place in the Soviet Union as being s­ haped by the Jews’ interactions with the Soviet regime. By exploring numerous unpublished and published archival documents, I trace how and why the surviving Jewish community, a notable and vocal presence in Soviet society, was removed from the guardianship of the Soviet leadership.

Aiming ­toward a “Committee of Jewish Affairs”? In scholarly lit­er­a­ture on postwar Soviet Jews, the fate of the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee ( JAC) occupies a central role. Kostyrchenko surmises that “for almost five years, the leadership of JAC—­the small group of ­people who spoke shyly in 1944 for the rights of the national minority standing ­behind them—­were in hid-



From Friends to Enemies? 73

den opposition to the state suppression machine.”9 Redlich points out that during the post-­Holocaust era some Jews considered JAC to be a “Jewish address,” seeking support and assistance for multiple prob­lems.10 As this chapter shows, in the immediate postwar years JAC became much more than a ­simple “address” or a “hidden opposition,” nor did the members of JAC speak “shyly”: instead it became an active promoter and defender of Soviet Jews’ interests. Some of its actions grew out of its war­time responsibilities, yet other actions w ­ ere prompted by JAC leadership’s vision of the organ­ization’s role in the postwar environment. Created in 1941 by the Soviet government, the JAC secured a ­great deal of external support for the war effort. According to some estimates, it attracted a minimum of US$45 million in donations for the Red Army, and its publishing operation disseminated approximately 23,000 articles and 3,000 photo­graphs abroad in twelve countries.11 During a seven-­month trip to the United States, Mexico, Canada, and ­Great Britain, the JAC’s members Solomon Mi­khoels and Itzik Fefer met thousands of ­people. Despite some criticism of JAC’s vari­ous public statements, both its international prestige and the domestic support of the Soviet leadership likely emboldened its members to go beyond the sphere of their mandated activity once the war was drawing to a close. A ­ fter receiving harsh criticism in late 1943 and early 1944 for “nationalistic distortions” and for seeking to expand the governmental functions of JAC, its members forcefully rebuffed t­ hose accusations and argued that it should continue to serve as an efficient vehicle for Soviet propaganda.12 They also continued soliciting funds on behalf of Soviet Jews, aiming to alleviate their hardships. One such intervention was made ­after learning about the difficulties faced by thousands of Holocaust survivors following their liberation in Ukraine. On May 18, 1944, JAC sent a letter in an alarming tone to Viacheslav Molotov, first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. As described in this communication, the survivors could not get back to their homes or retrieve their stolen property, while the local authorities showed indifference and some non-­Jews actively hindered the return of Jews. Reportedly, ­these non-­Jews “took part in the killings and plunder of Soviet [ Jewish] ­people” and ­were afraid of consequences of ­these antisemitic actions.13 Suggestive of the power held by JAC is that this letter resulted in an inquiry by Molotov; two weeks l­ater, Lavrentii Beria, head of the P ­ eople’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), submitted a report with his recommendations. Beria suggested that Nikita Khrushchev, then the first secretary of the Communist Party (CP) of Ukraine, be instructed to resolve the issues of employment and the living conditions of Jewish survivors, to send a governmental representative to the regions with high concentrations of Jews to help them return home, and to recommend to JAC representatives in the ­future to send all received complaints and requests to the appropriate corresponding institutions.14 Although this letter and its response indicate the authority held by JAC and the confidence of its leaders when dealing with central officials, Beria’s final recommendation, advising it to use regular channels of appeal, reveals a faint note of

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annoyance (presumably shared by other members of the bureaucracy) with the methods deployed by JAC’s leaders. ­These and other similar solicitations on behalf of Jews led to some bureaucrats remarking that JAC was becoming a “kind of ministry of Jewish affairs,” a body that felt entitled to involve itself in many more issues than ­those assigned by the Communist Party during the war.15 Indeed, archival documents indicate that some bureaucrats who w ­ ere in direct contact with JAC as part of their job ­were annoyed by what they perceived to be its members’ excessive aggrandizement of the organ­ization’s self-­importance. On April 21, 1944, in a message sent to Aleksandr Shcherbakov, director of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), by his subordinate N. Kondakov, its editor and secretary, the latter points out that “at least an exaggeration of the role of the pre­sent Committee” was vis­i­ble in a newspaper article titled “Canada at the Third Plenary Session of the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee in the USSR.” Kondakov highlights the article’s “improper tone” and notes that it could give the impression that “a kind of international Jewish committee convened in Moscow, to discuss the activity of organ­izations of vari­ous countries” (emphasis in the original).16 Kondakov also suggests that it might be better just to emphasize the role of Soviet Jews in fighting Hitlerism and not to allow “even a hint that the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee in the USSR is a kind of directing center on a scale g­ oing beyond the borders of our country.” However, Kondakov is careful to show that he is not seeking a harsh rebuke, but rather that the Sovinformburo “somehow correctly [kak-to korrektno] rectify the comrades from the JAC” on that issue.17 With the end of the war approaching, JAC wanted to continue its activity on behalf of evacuees and Holocaust survivors and opened discussions with the government on this issue. In April 1945 Solomon Lozovskii, Scherbakov’s deputy in charge of JAC, sent a message to Georgii Malenkov, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, that highlighted JAC’s impor­tant “tight connections with an enormous number of anti-­fascist organ­izations around the world, especially in the USA and the UK.” He advocated the need for JAC to continue its work and to take advantage of its “useful connections” for the benefit of the USSR.18 To support this claim, Lozovskii attached a substantial list titled “The biggest and most influential foreign organ­izations with which the JAC within the USSR is maintaining permanent business connections and collaboration.” Several years ­later, this document would come to acquire dangerously self-­incriminating overtones. Possibly attempting to overcome institutional tensions or seeking to increase JAC’s status, Lozovskii forwarded a request to release all Soviet anti-­fascist committees (­there ­were five) from the control of the Sovinformburo and to make their heads directly responsible to the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the USSR.19 ­After extended discussions about its ­future and its plans, in August 1946 JAC was separated from the Sovinformburo and placed u­ nder the direct supervision of the CC’s Foreign Policy Department. Despite the victory, t­hese changes risked being interpreted as attempts to carve out an in­de­pen­dent space for JAC and to increase its access to the Kremlin in the Stalinist chain of command. Seek-



From Friends to Enemies? 75

ing greater autonomy and a higher status in the hierarchy of power ­were perilous impulses to display in a po­liti­cal system that mostly cherished dutiful subordination and the indisputable implementation of ­orders. Yet, JAC apparently disregarded Beria’s ­earlier suggestion and kept approaching top officials over their superiors’ heads. For example, in August 1945 (when the JAC was still ­under the supervision of the Sovinformburo), Mi­khoels and Fefer sent a letter to Malenkov requesting that foreign organ­izations aiming to help in the reconstruction in the Soviet Union be permitted to focus their efforts on par­tic­u­lar proj­ects or par­tic­u­lar cities.20 JAC leaders criticized the existing structure, which redistributed all financial and material aid through the Red Cross, claiming that this pro­cess was “de-­personifying” the received support. As an example of the prob­lems associated with the current redistributive approach, the letter described the transfer in 1943 of an electrical station, food, clothes, and medi­cation by the organ­ization Ambijan (the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidzhan)21 to an orphanage nearby Sta­lin­grad that was caring— as the document substantiates—­for more than 500 c­ hildren of vari­ous nationalities. Furthermore, although Ambijan sent the orphanage all the descriptions of ­these goods and invoices for them, it had not received the contributions by 1945, and a representative of the orphanage had traveled to Moscow to look for the donated materials.22 In response to this request, two months l­ater, a clearly infuriated Georgii Alexandrov, the head of the CC’s Propaganda and Agitation Department (Agitprop), sent to Malenkov his explanation for the government policy. Alexandrov first noted that the government had issued an order on March 2, 1945, that all goods donated from abroad for par­tic­ul­ar entities be delivered to their addressees. He emphasized that Mi­khoels and Fefer knew about this decision and had participated in conversations with civil servants related to the subject. Giving that they are raising the subject again, wrote Alexandrov, “it can be concluded that they want to achieve that Jewish foreign philanthropic organ­izations could offer material help directly to the Jewish population of our country” (emphasis in original). Alexandrov also noted that ­these and other issues raised by Mi­khoels and Fefer ­were part of a petition sent to Molotov in February 1945, which had been denied.23 Alexandrov sternly characterized this par­tic­ul­ar request as inadmissible ­because, in his opinion, it followed the line of “adaptation of the Soviet rules to the natures and traditions of the capitalistic countries” and would increase the possibility of bourgeois propaganda by the philanthropic organ­izations. Moreover, he stated, “The accentuation of Jews from the mass of the population of the Soviet Union w ­ ill create conditions for antisemitism.”24 Thus, Alexandrov believed that giving special visibility to the Jews was likely to stimulate antisemitism among the masses. Despite this response, circumstantial evidence suggests that at the end of the war, JAC members viewed their position as secure on the Soviet po­liti­cal stage and had no intention of reducing their lobbying activity. This level of confidence led to foolhardy be­hav­ior on the part of JAC leadership. For example,

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in December 1946 Fefer falsified the signature of Leyb Kvitko, another member of the JAC presidium, on a letter to Molotov requesting permission for Fefer and Mi­khoels to visit Prague, at the invitation of the Czech minister of information. True, the letter’s content had been verbally approved by Kvitko, but when he was not immediately available to sign it, Fefer de­cided to “speed up” the pro­cess and forged Kvitko’s signature.25 An inquiry was initiated u­ nder the direction of Matvei Shkiriatov, the head of the Party Control Commission; its report stated that “the ­matter was not only related to the preposterous act of comrade Fefer, which has no justification, but in ­those disorders and dissoluteness which are pre­sent at the JAC.”26 It harshly criticized the JAC’s management, particularly its decision-­ making pro­cess, finding that decisions w ­ ere not made collectively but had more of a “­family character.”27 The report suggested that its removal from Sovinformburo’s control had had a negative impact, noting that since the beginning of 1946, JAC “in essence is led by nobody.” Such a lack of control and direction was seen at the basis of many “of the distortions of the Committee’s work.” Furthermore, Mi­khoels’s and Fefer’s action in this case indicated that they did not correctly understand the aims of the ­future work of JAC and mistakenly tried to get involved in cultural-­educational issues. In conclusion, the report noted that if the Communist Party ­were considering the continuation of JAC, it would recommend that it “define the scope of its activities, to strengthen its leadership by selecting strong po­liti­cal leaders,” or other­wise to disband it, deeming it to have exhausted the goals it had fulfilled during World War II.28 The message conveyed in this report is, that if JAC ­were to be allowed wider prerogatives than initially attributed to it, this should emanate exclusively from the party, but not be appropriated by JAC through its own initiative. Without doubt, the members of JAC ­were seasoned politicians who ­were not living outside the Stalinist real­ity and who understood very well the dominant po­liti­cal frame and the “rules of game” laid out by the highest echelon of power. Mindful of ­these, the JAC maneuvered through the po­liti­cal minefield, while still lobbying for issues impor­tant for Jews made them prone to attacks by civil servants on the grounds of propagating “Jewish nationalism” and other “sins.” An illustration of this situation was JAC’s fight beginning in 1944 for the publication of the now well-­known The Black Book of Soviet Jewry or simply The Black Book, a 500-­ page book in Rus­sian. It was a result of JAC’s effort to document Jewish losses in the Holocaust and the participation of Jews in the re­sis­tance during World War II. Strategically, when arguing for its publication, JAC tried to convince the  Soviet leadership (see the message of JAC to Andrei Zhdanov, the CC PCUS member in charge with ideology, on November 28, 1946) that a special section of this book would describe how “Rus­sians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, offered brotherly help to Jews in a most difficult time of racial terror that had been unleashed” and that this book would stand as a “monument of unity and friendship of the Soviet ­people.”29 However, Alexandrov was not convinced by this statement and forcefully stated in February 1947 that The Black Book “creates a false impression about



From Friends to Enemies? 77

the true character of fascism and its organ­izations.” The head of Agitprop was alarmed by the fact that “the red thread of this book is the idea that Germans looted and destroyed Jews only.”30 In October 1947 Agitprop issued a decision that it could not be published. Despite JAC’s efforts to sway the Soviet leadership, the book’s placement of the theme of Jewish suffering during World War II in the public square was contrary to the state’s official narrative, which chose to highlight instead the indiscriminate tragedy of the entire “Soviet p­ eople.” To an extent, the case mirrored a phenomenon of both postwar Western and Eastern Eu­ro­pean socie­ties, in which the history of the Jewish victims and of the Holocaust was subsumed into a larger narrative of the “victims of fascists.” Postwar efforts to find national unity and healing around the “common suffering” narrative offered very ­little space for the recognition of specifically Jewish suffering.31 The Black Book episode can be understood as more than a manifestation of antisemitism by a Soviet bureaucrat. Clearly, Alexandrov’s decision was a po­liti­cal one connected to the primary goals of his institution, yet he was also bound by his own reading of the situation as a professional propagandist. Nazi casualties included a staggering number of Soviet civilians—­approximatively 17.9 million victims—­a figure vastly larger than civilian deaths in Western Eu­rope and even in some parts of Poland.32 Of ­these victims 2.5 million ­were Jews.33 The information gathered by the Agitprop personnel necessarily differed from that collected by JAC, which concentrated on atrocities perpetrated against the Jews. During the war, the Agitprop unit had sifted through an avalanche of daily reports about war crimes committed against vari­ous ethnic and social groups, in addition to prisoners of war, on many parts of Soviet territory. For example, in 1943 partisans sent Alexandrov information about “abominable, unheard of atrocities” in the Leningrad region, including indiscriminate killing of the population, bombardments of villages and forests where this population had been hiding, and the burning of entire villages.34 Similar information arrived from the regions of Poles’e and Zhitomir.35 The partisans of Belorussia informed the leadership that all the villages from the district of Seveiskii within the Vitebsk region had been burned down, noting that more than half of the victims ­were ­children.36 Information sent by the advancing Red Army about their discoveries of Soviet prisoners of war was similarly terrifying and frequently supported with photo­graphs of mutilated bodies—­ often with missing limbs, broken heads, or pieces of skin cut out.37 Officials like Alexandrov had to read through numerous pages of such material sent by journalists, the military, partisan leaders, and secret police personnel, selecting the most relevant information for propaganda purposes. Moreover, they had access to the material of the activities of the Extraordinary State Commission, which was created by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and investigated Nazi war crimes against the Soviet population. For Alexandrov, the head of Agitprop, the massacres of Jews ­were only one part of a broader story of the Nazis’ crimes committed against “Soviet citizens.” Given their po­liti­ cal purpose and the nature of the reports sent to them, members of the Agitprop

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­ ere reluctant to approve a special focus on the Nazis’ genocide of Jews: they w ­were not ready to allow anything to be published that would take attention away from the murder of “other” “peaceful Soviet civilians.” By far the biggest error of judgment that JAC committed, in hindsight, was to submit to Stalin and Molotov a proposal regarding the creation of a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic, at the same time as it openly described the Birobidzhan proj­ ect, which created a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East in 1934, as a failure.38 Instead, the Jewish leaders proposed to create a new Jewish republic on the territory of Crimea, which was deemed more suitable for this purpose: its goal was to help “to make fully equal the situation of Jewish masses among brotherly nations” of the Soviet Union.39 The idea turned out to be very dangerous po­liti­ cally; a few years ­later ­those members who proposed it would be accused of attempting to promote “the plan of American imperialists” to create “a Jewish state in Crimea.”40 In the fall of 1948, the Politburo ordered that the JAC be shut down, contending that “as the facts show, this Committee is a center of anti-­Soviet propaganda and regularly submits anti-­Soviet information to organs of foreign intelligence. The publishing agencies of the Committee should be closed accordingly and the Committee’s files confiscated. Nobody should be arrested yet.”41 Most of the members of the JAC would be arrested and killed in 1952.

Opposing Antisemitism Despite the Soviet state’s attempts in the interwar era to quell antisemitism among its population t­ hese efforts did not achieve the desired goal. True, when compared to the non-­Jews from neighboring East Eu­ro­pean territories, the Soviet population seemed less willing to violently attack Jews in the summer of 1941, proving that the policy making it illegal to persecute the Jews was having some effect.42 Yet, during the war and subsequent occupation, this pro­cess went unwinding. Both on the occupied territories and in the territories beyond the line of Axis occupation ­there ­were signs of increased antisemitism among the population.43 Multiple ­factors have set in motion this occurrence. In some cases, ­earlier suppressed feelings of antisemitism among the former Soviet population resurfaced once the Stalinist regime seemed on the brink of collapse in the summer and fall of 1941. Anti-­Jewish sentiments ­were also exacerbated by the tremendous difficulties of everyday life ­under the war and by the genocidal campaign of the Nazis and their allies. Old and new aspersions about Judeo-­ Bolshevism, Jews’ inherent malice, and their attempts to conquer the world became part of the daily war experience in the areas ­under Axis control. Antisemitic prejudices and actions ­were especially vigorous in the territories occupied by the USSR in 1939–1940, where t­ here was a long tradition of antisemitism and many non-­Jews ­were willing to interpret the upward social mobility enjoyed by some Jews (in 1940–1941 and immediately a­ fter World War II) through the Judeo-­ Bolshevik trope. One unintended consequence of the westward expansion of the



From Friends to Enemies? 79

Soviet state was to “escalate” antisemitism to a rec­ord strength. As p­ eople moved throughout the enlarged Soviet state, both during the war and a­ fter, “Soviet” and “non-­Soviet” norms and habits met and clashed in multiple locations, shaping in vari­ous ways the participants in t­ hose encounters. In theory, the Soviet ideology should have erected a restrictive barrier on this new source of antisemitism; in practice, without the state’s active intervention, the increased expression of antisemitic views likely encouraged the “normalization” of such attitudes among Soviet citizens. Vari­ous sources indicate that by the end of the war t­ here ­were signs of significant antisemitism among the Soviet population, even in t­hose Soviet territories that had seemed most accommodating to Jews during the interwar period. For instance, Leonid Averbuch, a native of Odessa, on returning home a­ fter his imprisonment in a Transnistrian camp, was quick to notice that the city to which he returned “was a dif­fer­ent Odessa.” Importantly, “­there was antisemitism” in his city, which he assumed was contracted from the fascists during the occupation.44 “Why did you come back?”: non-­Jews often aimed this question in a form of rebuke to t­ hose Jews who returned home, as shown in multiple sources referring to multiple locations. It came to symbolize both the non-­Jews’ forceful attempt to occupy the space of absent Jews and the difficulties of Jewish survivors’ reintegration in post-­Holocaust society. Jewish individuals ­were not the only ones to notice a spike of antisemitism in the postwar environment. According to a report, sent in 1944 by the Ukrainian NKGB to the Central Committee of Soviet Ukraine, members of the Ukrainian security apparatus also believed that an escalation of antisemitism was occurring at the time.45 However, the Ukrainian party leadership did not appear (or did not want) to be convinced by the report and undertook its own inquiry of the alleged increase. The results of the investigation characterized the antisemitic incidents described in the NKGB report as “isolated cases” that did not reflect the real situation in the republic. Moreover, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) also suggested that Gersonskii (most prob­ably Jewish), the deputy head of the Second Directorate of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR and the author of the 1944 report, “by g­ oing to the extreme [vpadaia v krainosti], is making po­liti­cal ­mistakes in his work” and should be removed from his position. The Ukrainian NKGB was accused of embracing the “dispositions of Zionist ele­ments” from Ukraine, who allegedly ­were spreading false information about the existence of an antisemitic po­liti­cal current and about the antisemitism of the Ukrainian government itself.46 Nevertheless, the party investigation did acknowledge that a number of antisemitic incidents, even if seen as isolated cases, w ­ ere occurring in Ukraine, sparked by “hooliganism, prob­lems with housing, or other daily issues.” It also attributed ­these antisemitic episodes to “the remains” of the Germans and the Ukrainian nationalist propaganda against Jews during the occupation.47 What the document did not explic­itly mention was that antisemitism was widely shared among the

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population of Western Ukraine and was only further galvanized during World War II. The reincorporation of this territory into the Soviet Ukraine sent the level of antisemitism in this republic soaring. Jews from the Soviet territories w ­ ere becoming increasingly indignant, especially when faced with antisemitism from representatives of the state. When one Jewish individual (mentioned in the NKGB report) was summoned to substantiate his claims of the alleged antisemitism he had witnessed and to give testimony in front of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian SSR, he insisted his statement include the following: “if the Party changes its attitude t­ owards Jews even one inch, I ­will kill myself.”48 Another curious protest came in the form of the refusal of three Jewish correspondents to prepare the news bulletin on the death of Shcherbakov (May 10, 1945), a fact reported to Alexandrov by the secretary of the Party Bureau of All-­Union Radio Committee Murav’ev. Two of the Jewish reporters justified their refusal by being too old and “their nerves not holding participations to funerals,” whereas the editor Shaia Kruman declined to write the bulletin claiming Shcherbakov was known at the time in the “entire Moscow” area for driving away Jews from central apparatus. As Kruman saw it, Shcherbakov, influenced by anti-­ Jewish prejudice, was “distorting” Stalin’s order (which was never discovered by historians) about “not sending temporarily Jews in leadership positions to the former occupied districts, in order not to discredit Jews.”49 Alexandrov considered the incident of interest and forwarded an informative note to Malenkov. ­After the war, when they returned to work or live in the new western Soviet borderland, the Jewish natives of historically Soviet territories quickly became aware of the existence of mass-­based antisemitism in the region. For instance, a Holocaust survivor, Rosa Gershenovich, a­ fter moving to Lviv, initially was completely enchanted by the city’s Eu­ro­pean allure and architecture. Yet Rosa soon understood that “the local population hated Soviet power, but was scared of Stalin.” She also observed that “at first the locals w ­ ere afraid of the Jews, but then antisemitism burst out. ­There ­were inscriptions everywhere on the walls: ‘K-­kes, get out of Ukraine!’ and ‘Get out of L’vov!’ ”50 If the Soviet Jews seemed not to know how to respond to such local incidents, they ­were not ready to put up with antisemitism encountered inside Soviet institutions. During a meeting with Andrei Gazun, the vice head of the propaganda section of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), Leonid Kornfeld, a Jewish poet, playwright, and folklorist (a native from the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic), mentioned, “Kishinev smells of antisemitism everywhere, and much to [my] regret, antisemitism has contaminated the apparatus of the CC of the CP of Moldavia.”51 As in Ukraine, the accusation did not sit well with the Moldavian leadership, and two days l­ater, on May 22, 1946, a meeting was set up between Kornfeld and Nikita Salogor, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the MSSR. The minutes of their conversation show that the leader of the Moldavian party intended to make his guest think twice about making accusations of antisemitism inside the Moldavian Central Committee. Yet Kornfeld



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remained adamant: “If antisemitism, as a recurrence of war­time, ­after the occupants’ furious agitation, is felt in the markets, this is totally understandable and this phenomenon w ­ ill be gradually liquidated in our country, where any possibility of persecuting a nation is excluded. But if some employee of the CC is guided in his work by hostile and intolerant feelings t­ owards Jews, this w ­ ill not lead to good results.”52 Other Jewish individuals also brought anti-­Jewish words and deeds to the authorities’ attention. In April  1949, the first secretary of the MSSR, Nicolae Coval, received a note from the republic’s chief prosecutor informing him that the chairman of the Lenin kolkhoz (collective farm) from the Novo-­Cherepkanskii village council had acted on a verbal order from the chairman of the Sculeni party council: he sent forty-­seven carts to the Jewish cemetery to remove gravestones and monuments and to bring them to the kolkhoz to use for building materials to construct a mill. In the pro­cess, more than three hundred gravestones and monuments ­were destroyed. The note to Coval read, “The Jewish population of Sculeni was extremely outraged, ­there w ­ ere statements: the Soviet regime is obliged to protect us from pogroms, so why are pogroms allowed in the Soviet state?” In response, on April  8, Coval signed an order that this incident be “immediately investigated. To immediately restore the gravestones at their places. The culprits to be brought to justice. Results to be reported.” Six days ­later a report signed by the secretary of the Sculeni party council clearly tried to shift blame for the incident from the local party authorities. As the report claimed, although permission to take the gravestones was given “only for the German cemetery,” which is adjacent to the Jewish one, the workers took most of the stones from the Jewish cemetery. The chairman of the kolkhoz, Krasnikov, was officially reprimanded for negligence of his work duties, and the prosecutor was asked to initiate l­egal cases against ­those and other residents of Sculeni “who take stones from the Jewish cemetery for personal needs.”53 Yet the protests of the Soviet Jews did not manage to bring the issue of postwar antisemitism to the top of the Soviet po­liti­cal agenda: antisemitism remained a low-­ranking priority for the state officials. They w ­ ere inclined to see Jewish claims of anti-­Jewish actions as exaggerating the gravity of the situation. The dominant official view is reflected in a review document prepared by the Agitprop for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, which summarized the points of a public lecture on the “Palestinian Prob­lem” and offered a synopsis of the questions and written notes received from the audience. The author of the review, V. Lutskii, mentioned receiving sixteen notes complaining about antisemitism: half about antisemitism in general and half on antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Four of ­these notes asked (in vari­ous forms) how the Soviet regime was fighting against increasing antisemitism. Concluding that “­under the influence of commotions ­under which many Jews suffered, they are inclined to exaggerate the real scale, importance, and perspectives of antisemitism in demo­cratic countries, Lutskii recommended to “fixate public opinion on the fight with the last remnants

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of antisemitism. This ­will help to eradicate the antisemitism itself, as well as the inaccurate exaggerations about its scale. This ­will also help to liquidate the bourgeois-­ nationalistic prejudices among Soviet Jews.”54 Despite officials’ attempts not to allow open expressions of antisemitism and their refutation of accusations of antisemitism, the masses may have interpreted vari­ous party actions and pieces of public narratives differently. Th ­ ese actions included the “cleansing” of party members, which intensified in the postwar era, and the fight against cosmopolitanism—­both of which touched Jews. The conflicting messages that undergirded policies of fighting against “pollution of cadres” and “cosmopolitans” ­were seen by some Soviet citizens as clues of change that anti-­Jewish sentiments should not be suppressed anymore. Soviet society generally seemed more open to testing the bound­aries of permissibility regarding antisemitism—­bound­aries kept in force before the war—as seen in the malicious innuendoes permeating the correspondence of ordinary ­people with the authorities. One such message was sent in 1949 by the vice head of Soiuzopgalantereia’s storage from Kishinev, who complained about the abuse meted out by his boss, somebody named Kustovskii, who presumably was Jewish. The author of the letter alludes to one of the most widely circulated ste­reo­types about Jews in the postwar era in the Soviet Union—­dodging soldiering on the frontline: Comrade Kustovskii, a very healthy man, did not serve in the army, when t­here ­were fights he was sitting in jail in the Far East, not quite clear for how long. I ­won’t touch [the issue of] his nationality, neither [the nationality of] his wife, but [­isn’t it] in­ter­est­ing? He is a very rough man, the workers enter his office with fear, a very shrewd and agile merchant, who is ready to put hundreds of ­people in jail for his well-­being, but ­will manage to remain clear [himself].55

The investigation of the complaint against Kustovskii’s misdeeds concluded that ­there was insufficient evidence to allow a criminal prosecution. Direct appeals to central state agencies, although they circumvented local authorities, ­were not novel in the USSR, nor w ­ ere they made exclusively by the Jewish population to file complaints of ill treatment. Personal letters, denunciations, and petitions w ­ ere often sent by elites and masses to vari­ous central bodies and their leaders. This “war on paper” was a competition of individuals and institutions for influence and ­favors (which could change abruptly ­under the Stalinist regime). Correspondingly, each complaint could become an instant weapon used against bureaucrats in charge of a specific area or activity. The bureaucrats tried to protect themselves using all available means, carefully maneuvering in the shifting ideological space delineated by Stalin’s leadership. They ­were also keen on following clues from the Kremlin on the increasingly aggravating “Jewish Question” while making sure they would not be accused of antisemitism themselves.



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“Dangerous Liaisons” and the Soviet State’s Reappraisal of Its Jewry As was true of the entire Soviet society during the war, many within the Jewish population also had expectations of liberalization in the immediate postwar period. Profoundly impressed by the rallying of world Jewry in their fight against the Nazis, as well as by information about this support found in the Soviet media, many Jews felt that new po­liti­cal developments w ­ ere pos­si­ble inside the USSR. For example, when summoned to the residency of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian SSR to substantiate his accusations of antisemitism flourishing inside the republic, a Jewish man felt comfortable stating that he viewed the Zionist Party from the United States as a progressive party and “considers it acceptable to have such a party in the USSR.”56 Notes from the Lutskii report raised the possibility of Soviet Jews being allowed to participate in the World Jewish Congress and engage in activities for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine; it also questioned why Jews ­were not allowed to study and publish in Hebrew inside the Soviet Union.57 ­After the war Jews, more than members of any other ethnic group, w ­ ere in contact with the outside world, especially cap­i­tal­ist countries. Thousands of Jewish ­people established back-­and-­forth communications with foreign Jewish organ­ izations and individuals, primarily exchanging information about their relatives, friends, colleagues, and neighbors in the areas previously occupied by Nazis. Presumably, the Soviet citizens who went through the ­Great Terror w ­ ere aware that one could be arrested and murdered for corresponding with relatives abroad. We do not have data about the regional patterns of this correspondence, and it may be pos­si­ble that letters went to or came from the newer western territories, which lacked “training” in 1930s Soviet repression. Th ­ ese large numbers of communications among Jews from both sides of the Iron Curtain became extraordinarily significant in the context of an intensifying Cold War and with the creation of the state of Israel, which soon sided with the West. As Jeffrey Veidlinger rightly points out, when the State of Israel came into being, the Jews of the USSR ­were transformed into a diaspora nationality, and all their expressions of national identity and external bonds started to be reinterpreted through a negative lens.58 Even before the proclamation of the state of Israel, Soviet secret police raised serious concerns regarding Jews’ communication with the outside world and made sure to convey this message to the party organs. In April 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Belorus­sian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) sent a message to Stalin and Molotov, signaling “increased anti-­Soviet activity of Soviet nationalistic Jewish ele­ments” in the territory of the BSSR. The incriminating ele­ment emphasized in this message was that “in the year 1947 the correspondence of persons of Jewish nationality abroad undertook a mass-­ character.” To illustrate the point, the note mentions that more than 10,000 p­ eople

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corresponded at the time with Jewish persons and “committees” in the United States, 3,890 with “­unions” and individuals in Palestine, and “many other persons of Jewish nationalities” w ­ ere maintaining connections with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administrations offices (UNRRA), as well as vari­ous Jewish organ­izations in West Germany, Austria, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Argentine.59 At the same time, in 1946 in the city of Minsk alone, 1,050 parcels had been received compared to 1,924 parcels in 1947 and 1,405 parcels in the first quarter of 1948, all from the United States.60 In addition “a significant number” of Jewish members of the Communist Party and leading functionaries in Soviet institutions w ­ ere corresponding with vari­ous Jewish committees using figureheads for conspiratorial purposes.61 In this message to Stalin and Molotov, the Central Committee of the BSSR inferred that t­hese communications w ­ ere in part financed by espionage organ­ izations and, as evidence, noted that a number of the questions addressed to the Soviet Jews “­were ­going beyond the limits of private correspondence”; such questions asked about the life of the Soviet ­people, the fate of a person who might speak out against the state or Communism, how Soviet ­people perceive the American government and p­ eople, what the level of inflation was in the USSR, and if ­there ­were any difficulties getting food and clothes.62 The party members disliked that this correspondence was a channel for the outside world to learn about the “alleged famine and penury” in the Soviet Union and was a source of other “slanderous messages about the eco­nom­ical and po­liti­cal situation of the Soviet Union.”63 Equally worrisome w ­ ere the signals of members of the Jewish Community’s intention to emigrate (or “emigration moods”) to the United States, Palestine, and Poland. Importantly, Jewish members of the Communist Party ­were not spared from such accusations.64 The Central Committee of the BSSR also observed that numerous documents w ­ ere sent to the United States, Palestine, and Iran that shared lists of names of many Jewish Communities members and the addresses of wanted ­people (prob­ably lost during the war). Similar signals w ­ ere coming from another republic with a significant Jewish population, the Moldavian SSR. At the beginning of 1950, a report sent to Malenkov by the inspector of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Tkachev, mentioned that in the MSSR 55,000 ­people ­were involved in correspondence with fifty-­four countries, including Romania, the United States, Palestine, France, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Germany; in addition, the inhabitants of Kishinev received 1,294 parcels from the United States, Palestine, France, and other ­countries. Tkachev also emphasized the increased connectivity through the international phone station of Kishinev. He connected this large volume of communications to the presence of a significant Jewish population, stating that living in Kishinev at the time ­were 31,000 Jews, making up 25 ­percent of its population. He commented, “Many of ­these, ­after losing private commerce and vari­ous unearned income, suffer from emigrant dispositions.” He quoted in this context the uncovering of the under­ground Zionist organ­ization “Gordonia,” which had “large con-



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nections with abroad” (emphasis in original). Tkachev’s report tied together the Zionist and nationality issue in Soviet Moldavia when he claimed, “Frequently Zionists together with other kulak-­nationalistic ele­ments speak on behalf of ‘Bessarabians,’ and pit the hesitant Moldavian intelligent­sia against both the ethnic Rus­sians and Moldavians from the left bank [of the Dniester River, the Soviet territory during the interwar era].”65 ­There are indications that, by the end of the 1940s, the central authorities came to believe that foreign Jewish organ­izations w ­ ere using their correspondence with Soviet citizens to serve the goals of foreign intelligence ser­vices. A document titled “Reference [spravka] about Zionist organ­izations and their anti-­Soviet activity,” prepared in 1950 by A. Tushunov, an employee of the Committee of Information of the Ministry of State Security—an organ­ization that between 1947 and 1951 controlled Soviet foreign intelligence and military intelligence—­and sent to the attention of Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, claimed that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC) was being used by the U.S. intelligence ser­vices. It referred to the arrest by the Ministry of State Security (MGB) of a U.S. intelligence agent, Alfred Fockler, who in July 1949 testified that American intelligence was using JDC to receive information from and about the USSR.66 Allegedly, on JDC’s instructions, vari­ous Jewish religious Communities within Soviet cities ­were compiling detailed lists with the addresses of ­those Jews who had relatives or friends in the United States. JDC was supposedly using ­those lists to encourage Jewish American residents to send pre­sents to their relatives in the USSR and also transmitted them to U.S. intelligence agencies. Through this mechanism, the CIA “was establishing the possibility to use, u­ nder favorable conditions, Jewish relatives residing in the Soviet Union.”67 Another document prepared by Valerian Zorin, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, and sent to Mikhail Suslov (editor-­in-­chief of Pravda), Andrei Vyshinskii (minister of foreign affairs), and Andrei Gromyko (the first deputy minister of ­foreign affairs), stated that Jewish Zionist organ­izations from sixty-­three countries had links to the American center from which it received financial and po­liti­cal support. It also emphasized that JDC “headquarters from the USA and its representatives in other countries are used by the American intelligence for subversive activity against the USSR and demo­cratic forces in the entire world.”68 It further claimed, “­Under the coverage of Israeli diplomatic repre­sen­ta­tions in countries of public democracy residencies of Israeli intelligence w ­ ere created, which have been connected to the intelligence ser­vices from the U.S., UK, and France. In the countries of popu­lar democracy the Israeli intelligence relies predominantly on the Zionist ele­ments of the local Jewish population.”69 Bricha, an under­ground movement that helped Eu­ro­pean Jews illegally emigrate to Palestine, also aroused suspicions. To coordinate the mass movement of Jews, it was involved in complex negotiations with relief agencies, governments, military and intelligence organ­izations, transport agencies, and numerous sympathetic

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individuals.70 Given this high level of activity, several intelligence ser­vices tried to infiltrate it while si­mul­ta­neously suspecting it was already infiltrated by adversary agents.71 British intelligence, aiming to curb Jewish emigration to Palestine a­ fter 1945, showed a special interest in Bricha. In an extraordinary attempt to involve Soviet authorities in impeding the movement of Jews, it even in­ven­ted a deception scheme to suggest that MI6 was exploiting Jewish emigration channels in Bulgaria and Romania to exfiltrate agents to the M ­ iddle East and that Jewish mi­grants ­were an impor­tant source of information on Soviet activities b­ ehind the Iron Curtain.72 We have no information w ­ hether this par­tic­u­lar deception scheme achieved its aim, but documents from the Kremlin’s top secret “Special Folder” claimed that Bricha was involved in spying on the territory of the USSR and its satellites. It identified as the leader of Bricha in the Socialist Bloc countries somebody named Kaminger, “who during the years of war was an employee of the En­glish intelligence.” The document noted that in 1943 Kaminger was parachuted into Romania by the United Kingdom for intelligence work; a­ fter the war ended he still spent most of his time ­there, frequently visiting the bordering areas of the USSR while inspecting Bricha sites. It also claimed that in 1948 Kaminger “arrived illegally in Chernovtsy (Ukrainian SSR) for anti-­Soviet work among the Jewish population.”73 Presumably, such work included promoting emigration to Israel. The fact that at least some Soviet Jews responded favorably to such overtures was perceived by the Soviet regime as the ultimate proof of betrayal.

Conclusion In the postwar era Jewish individuals and groups formed an active and vigorous interlocutor for the Soviet government, an interlocutor that had an impor­tant role to play, even if a tragic one. The Holocaust and its significant postwar effects ­were crucial in shaping ­these interactions. A ­ fter the war, Soviet Jews had high expectations that the country’s leadership would have a more favorable attitude to Jewish interests and greater intransigence ­toward anti-­Jewish feelings. For many Jews the fight against antisemitism was a po­liti­cal priority, and they expected a zero-­ tolerance attitude by the state ­toward manifestations of postwar anti-­Jewish sentiments. When priority was not given to quelling antisemitism, harsh accusations ­were voiced against non-­Jewish individuals and groups, including the leadership of the Communist Party. Generally, as indicated in the documents of the era, the Soviet state was not planning to allow popu­lar antisemitism to recur on its territory in the aftermath of the war and was prepared to punish pos­si­ble transgressors. Importantly, it showed a par­tic­u­lar sensitivity ­toward accusations of antisemitism among the party’s officials and was committed to defend its reputation. However, Soviet civil servants viewed the situation of Jews and the level of antisemitism in the postwar era less harshly than did Jews themselves. Although willing to admit that Nazi antisemitic propaganda had affected the local population and stirred up antisemitism inside



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Soviet society, they felt that Jews w ­ ere exaggerating the gravity of the situation ­under the influence of the tragedy they suffered during the war. ­These two diverging outlooks on postwar society created hard feelings on both sides. Just as surviving Jews tried to do in other countries, Soviet Jews ­were looking for ways to reinstate themselves in the transformed postwar society. Nevertheless, their ­great energy and concerted efforts did not result in the authorities’ increased attention to issues of primary importance for the Jewish community. On the contrary, the Soviet regime was developing a new perspective on its relationship to its Jewish population. Uniquely integrated into all segments of society, including the top echelon of power, Soviet Jews began to emerge as a strong and cohesive community, with high-­profile, out­spoken representatives. The sprawling foreign contacts of Jewish Soviet citizens, their openly asserted national sentiments and strong ties to Israel, and the vigorous interest of international Jewish organ­izations in Soviet Jewry roused fears of betrayal among the Stalinist leadership. The end of 1940s saw Soviet Jews make a transition from a position as a trusted nation to a potential e­ nemy of the state, a painful fate e­ arlier experienced by other groups that the Soviet leadership had deemed in need of vigilance.

notes 1. ​Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003). 2. ​Zvi Gitelman, “Moscow and the Soviet Jews: A Parting of the Ways,” Prob­lems of Communism ( January–­February 1980): 18–34; and Jewish Identity in Post-­Communist Rus­sia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). From 1948 to 1968 few Soviet Jews ­were allowed to emigrate. At the end of the 1960s the Soviet authorities started to grant permission to leave; in the next de­cade thousands of Jews ­were leaving yearly for Israel, the United States, and other Western countries. The peak of emigration was reached in 1979, when more than 51,000 Jews left. Another wave of massive emigration was caused by the fear of the state collapse in 1989–1991. 3. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, ed., Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 1938–1953: Documenty (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 5. This volume puts into circulation impor­tant archival documents contained in several archives of the Rus­sian Federation. 4. ​Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic, 1995), 160. 5. ​ Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 8. 6. ​Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, 2, 5–6. 7. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2001); Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov.” Vlast’ i evreiskaia intelligentsiia v SSSR (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003); and V plenu u krasnogo faraona: politicheskie presledovaniia evreev v SSSR v poslednee stalinskoe desiatiletie. Dokumental’noe issledovanie (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1994); Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Post-­War Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime. 8. ​Among notable exceptions are Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality: The ‘Black Years’ Reconsidered,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003): 4–29; and Arkady Zeltzer, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem,

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2018). See also Yuri Slezkine’s account, where the success of Soviet Jews equals their downfall: The Jewish C ­ entury (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004). 9. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, “The Genesis of Establishment of Anti-­Semitism in the USSR: The Black Years, 1948–1953,” in Revolution, Repression, and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience, ed. Zvi Gitelman and Yaacov Ro’i (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 185. 10. ​Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in War­time Rus­sia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder: East Eu­ro­pean Monographs, 1982); and “The Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee in the USSR: New Documentation from Soviet Archives,” in Der Spät-­Stalinismus und die “jüdische Frage.” Zur antisemitischen Wendung des Kommunismus, ed. Leonid Luks (Wien: Boehlau Verlag, 1998), 59. 11. ​Arno Lustiger, Stalin i evrei: Tragicheskaia istoriia Evreiskogo antifashistskogo komiteta i sovetskikh evreev (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), 154. 12. ​See the letter of Epshtein from November 23, 1943, where he rejects the accusations against the JAC, in Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, 287–289. 13. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 50. 14. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 52. 15. ​Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov,” 145; Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, 65–66. 16. ​Rus­sian State Archive of Social-­Political History (RGASPI), F. 17, op. 125, d. 246, l. 149. 17. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 246, l. 149. 18. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 1–4. 19. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 2. 20. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 283. 21. ​On the activity of Ambijan in the postwar years, see Henry Felix Srebrnik, Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Proj­ect, 1924–1951 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), chapters 12 and 13. 22. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 284. 23. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 285. 24. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 285. 25. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 288. 26. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 288. 27. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 285, l. 290. 28. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 317, l. 290–291. 29. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 438, l. 215. 30. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 438, l. 216–218. 31. ​Jean-­Michel Chaumont, who studied French and Belgian public memories about World War II, pointed how slow and difficult has been the pro­cess of memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust in Eu­rope. For example, in 1967, at the inauguration of the monument in Birkenau, Robert Waitz resigned from the position of president of the International Auschwitz Committee, protesting the fact that Jews w ­ ere not mentioned on the commemorative plaque; the text was not corrected ­until 1994. Only in 1995 was the word “Jew” mentioned on the monument erected in memory of the victims of Auschwitz in the Père Lachaise cemetery. Jean-­Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes: Génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris: La découvert, 2002), 63. 32. ​ Łukasz Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-­Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 30–31. For the number of casualties, see Michael Haynes, “Counting Soviet Deaths in the ­Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-­Asia Studies 55, no. 2 (2003): 300–309. 33. ​Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), p. 525.



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34. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 171, l. 14–15. 35. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 171, l. 15–16. 36. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 171, l. 18. 37. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 171, l. 23–25. One disturbing example occurred near the station of

Chernozem where 74 bodies w ­ ere discovered, most of which had signs of heavy torture, including five of them “with bellies cut open” and twelve bodies with amputated legs or arms. 38. ​ Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 47. 39. ​From 1924 to 1934, more than 250 Jewish agricultural colonies w ­ ere created or consolidated in southern Ukraine and Crimea, as a result of cooperation between the Soviet authorities and the Agro-­Joint, an organ­ization created by JDC. The Soviet state allotted lands for agricultural settlements, and the Agro-­Joint provided financial support, training, high-­quality seeds, and other help to about 200,000 colonists. The Jewish philanthropic organ­izations left by 1938 but the Communities survived u­ ntil 1941, when the Nazi troops entered the region and murdered all the Jews who failed to evacuate. Given the organ­ization’s status and connection with foreigners, during the ­Great Terror a number of Agro-­Joint leaders ­were persecuted brutally. See Jonathan Dekel-­Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924‒1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Mikhail Mitsel, “The Final Chapter: Agro-­Joint Workers—­Victims of the G ­ reat Terror in the USSR, 1937–1940,” East Eu­ro­ pean Jewish Affairs 39, no. 1 (2009): 79–99. 40. ​D. Nadzhafov and Z. Belousova, eds., Stalin i kosmopolitizm, 1945–1953: Dokumenty Agitpropa TsK (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 15. 41. ​Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, 464. 42. ​Diana Dumitru, State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chapters 3, 5, and 6. 43. ​On antisemitism in the Soviet rear see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 242–243. 44. ​Interview with Leonid Averbuch, Ukraine, Odessa, July  2003. Centropa: http://­www​ .­centropa​.­org​/­biography​/­leonid​-­averbuch. 45. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 41. 46. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 43–44. 47. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 41. 48. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 42. 49. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 125, d. 310, l. 17–19. 50. ​Interview with Rosa Gershenovich, Ukraine, Lvov, July  2002. Centropa: https://­www​ .­centropa​.­org​/­biography​/­rosa​-­gershenovich. 51. ​Archive of Social-­Political Organ­izations of the Republic of Moldova (AOSPRM), F. 51, inv. 4, d. 57, f. 1. 52. ​AOSPRM, F. 51, inv. 4, d. 57, f. 12. See more about this episode in Diana Dumitru, “Jewish Social Mobility u­ nder Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (2019): 993–995. 53. ​AOSPRM, F. 51, inv. 8, d. 69, f. 58–61. See more about this case in Dumitru, “Jewish Mobility ­under Late Stalinism,” 993–995. 54. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 128, d. 1057, l. 117–136. 55. ​AOSPRM, F. 51, inv. 8, d. 105, f. 133. 56. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 42. 57. ​RGASPI, F. 17, op. 128, d. 1057, l. 117–136. 58. ​Veidlinger, “Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora,” 6. 59. ​The UNRRA played a major role in helping displaced persons from Eu­rope return to their home countries ­after the war. Hence, during this period the organ­ization was contacted by many ­people, including Jews, who ­were looking for surviving relatives.

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60. ​RGASPI, F. 82, op. 2, d. 113, l. 130. 61. ​RGASPI, F. 82, op. 2, d. 113, l. 125. 62. ​RGASPI, F. 82, op. 2, d. 113, l. 129. 63. ​RGASPI, F. 82, op. 2, d. 113, l. 130. 64. ​RGASPI, F. 82, op. 2, d. 113, l. 131. For more on the international ties of the Belorus­sian Jews,

see Leonid Smilovitsky, Jewish Life in Belarus: The Final De­cade of the Stalin Regime (1944–53) (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014), chapter 8. 65. ​RGASPI, F. 573, op. 1, d. 41, l. 45–50. 66. ​According to the historian Stefan Karner, Fockler was an Austrian criminal officer who initially fought against the National Socialists, l­ater joined them, and a­ fter the war became a U.S. agent. Fockler was arrested by the Soviets in 1948 in Austria, was tried by a military tribunal in October  1950, and was executed a month l­ater. Stefan Karner, Im Kalten Krieg der Spionage: Margarethe Ottillinger in sowjetischer Haft 1948–1955 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2016), 31–32; Barbara Stelzl-­Marx, “Soviet Espionage in Austria: Arrests, Sentences and Executions in 1950–1953,” in The NKVD/KGB Activities and Its Cooperation with Other Secret Ser­vices in Central and Eastern Eu­rope, 1945–1989 (Bratislava: Nations’ Memory Institute, 2008), 319–320. 67. ​RGASPI, F. 81, op. 3, d. 86, l. 42. 68. ​RGASPI, F. 81, op. 3, d. 86, l. 36. 69. ​RGASPI, F. 81, op. 3, d. 86, l. 36. 70. ​Steven Wagner, “Occupying Power: The Secret Strug­gle to Prevent Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine,” Intelligence and National Security 29, no. 5 (2014): 700. 71. ​For example, in 1946, U.S. intelligence launched an operation to uncover Soviet agents who presumably had infiltrated Bricha channels. See Kevin C. Ruffner, “Proj­ect SYMPHONY: US Intelligence and the Jewish Brichah in Post-­War Austria,” Studies in Intelligence 51, no. 1 (2007): 33–46. 72. ​Keith Jeffrey, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Ser­vice 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 693. 73. ​Jeffrey, MI6, 52.

5 • “I WAS NOT LIKE EVERY­B ODY ELSE” Soviet Jewish Doctors Remember the Doctors’ Plot ANNA SHTERNSHIS

On January  13, 1953, Pravda published a front-­page article revealing that nine doctors (six of them Jewish) had been arrested and accused of trying to murder members of the Soviet government, including Joseph Stalin himself. The article described the “plot”: The majority of the participants of the terrorist group—­Vovsi, B. Kogan, Feldman, Grinshtein, Etinger and o­ thers—­were bought by American intelligence. They ­were recruited by a branch-­office of American intelligence—­the international Jewish bourgeois-­nationalist organ­ization called “Joint.” The filthy face of this Zionist spy organ­ization, covering up their vicious actions ­under the mask of kindness, is now completely revealed. Relying upon a group of corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists, the professional spies and terrorists of “Joint,” through assignments from and u­ nder the direction of American intelligence, extended their subversive activity even into the territory of the Soviet Union. As the prisoner Vovsi revealed ­under interrogation, he received directives “about the extermination of leadership cadres of the USSR,” from the USA. Th ­ ese instructions ­were handed to him, in the name of the spying-­terrorist “Joint” organ­ization, through Dr. Shimeliovich and the well-­known Jewish bourgeois nationalist Mi­khoels.1

­These arrests noted in the Pravda article and the subsequent “propaganda” campaign had their origins in a course of events that began in August 1948, when cardiologist Lydia Timashuk (1898–1983) was called to examine Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948), a Politbiuro member and a former chair of the Verhovnyi Soviet of 91

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the Soviet Union, who had fallen ill; she diagnosed him as having had a heart attack. Her diagnosis was not confirmed by Zhdanov’s personal doctor, Vladimir Vinogradov (1882–1964), and he allowed Zhdanov to continue working. When Zhdanov died the next day, from a second heart attack, Timashuk reported Vinogradov for negligence. Although the accusation was initially dismissed, four years ­later it was retrieved as evidence that Vinogradov and his colleagues murdered Zhdanov and then conspired to murder Stalin2 on o­ rders from Britain, the United States, and other countries. The language used in the Pravda article signaled that many prewar taboos on the portrayal of Jews ­were now officially broken. The accused doctors w ­ ere named as Jews, and the organ­izations that they allegedly supported w ­ ere also called “Jewish”—­not just Zionist or cosmopolitan, the code words used by the Soviet media for Jews before that time. Sentences and phrases from this article ­were l­ater repeated in private conversations, republished in national and local newspapers, morphed into rumors, and built what ­later became known as the narrative of the delo vrachei (“Doctors’ Plot”). At first the doctors ­were accused of killing Zhdanov and then A.  S. Scherbakov. Many other prominent figures ­were added, such as Georgi Dimitrov, former head of the Comintern; several Soviet generals; Grigory Malenkov, a Politburo member; and impor­tant foreign Communists as well. Jewish doctors ­were accused ­either of murdering t­ hese leaders themselves or conspiring with U.S. intelligence and the corrupt Ministry of State Security (MGB) to have them killed. Hundreds of doctors ­were arrested over a period of five months, from October 1952 to February 1953. The consequences of the plot did not stop ­there, however. Fantastic rumors circulated that Jewish doctors ­were poisoning Rus­sian ­children, injecting them with diphtheria, and killing newborns in maternity wards.3 Another rumor suggested that Soviet Jews would be collectively punished for the actions of ­these doctors and would be deported from their places of residences to the Soviet Far East. Although historians have long proved that plans to deport Jews to the East ­were never actually made, let alone executed, rumors of deportations also circulated widely in the late 1940s. Gennady Kostyrchenko, who spent de­cades combing the government archives, explains that t­hese rumors of Stalin’s plan to deport Jews to Siberia or, in some versions, to Birobidzhan started as whispers during the late 1940s; during the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, the rumors w ­ ere fleshed out with details and seemed credible in the context of arrests of Jewish celebrities, postwar campaigns against cosmopolitanism, and everyday hostility to Jews.4 Indeed, Jeffrey Veidlinger argues that the persecution and harassment of Jews that took place during this time are best understood in the context of actions taken to deport minorities and promote the supremacy of the Rus­sian ­people.5 Even though no deportations occurred, we should not dismiss ­these rumors as insignificant. They could have potentially informed the be­hav­iors and choices of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Moreover, we should use them to make sense of what it



“I Was Not Like Everybody Else” 93

was like for Jews to live through this time, when the Doctors’ Plot seemed like a prelude to a much worse and massive attack on Soviet Jews. The Doctors’ Plot had three stages: first, the arrests of a small number of doctors, usually in positions of authority; second, a media campaign condemning both ­these doctors and Jews in general, much of it being satirical in nature and delivered in the form of humoresques, feuilletons, and caricatures; and third, widespread rumors and derogatory, casual conversations about Jews.6 In the weeks that followed the article in Pravda, physicians, patients, and members of Soviet society at large all seemed to be discussing Jews—­usually from a negative perspective but often defending them too.7 Jewish doctors, who constituted about one-­quarter of all Soviet physicians at that time, w ­ ere the center of attention of both the Soviet punitive system and public discourse.8 In Belarus, the Pravda article opened a Pandora’s box of openly expressed animus with Jews, especially in regional hospitals; this discourse had not been aired previously in public.9 In Brest, the local hospital called a meeting to discuss Jewish doctors’ negligent care. Some w ­ ere accused of keeping patients waiting for a long time and o­ thers of engaging in over-­the-­top self-­promotion. The Grodno hospital administration reported that patients ­were afraid to be operated on by Margolin, a Jewish surgeon.10 Similarly, in Minsk, patients and administrators alike expressed doubts about the professional qualifications of Professors Moisei Shapiro and Boris Tsipkin, who both held positions of top orthopedic surgeons.11 On January  21, 1953, Pravda reported that Timashuk received the Order of Lenin for reporting to authorities that a Jewish doctor was negligent. A few days ­later, she wrote a small note that was published in Pravda thanking ­people for the flood of appreciative letters addressed to her. Then in February  1953, Pravda ­published a piece written by Olga Kolesnikova titled “From the Mail to Lidia Timashuk,” in which she praises Timashuk for her vigilance and patriotism. The word “Zionist” or “Jewish” is not mentioned in the article, but the phrase “Rus­sian patriot” appears more than once.12 A number of elite medical professionals, including Professors Zelenin, Gel’shtein, Rappoport, Shereshevsky, Egorov, Preobrazhensky, and Nezlin, ­were arrested in February 1953. During the first two weeks of February, the top MGB bureaucrats officially launched cases against thirty-­ seven p­eople, including twenty-­eight doctors and their wives.13 The arrested doctors ­were brutally interrogated; two died in the pro­cess. In Ukraine, Jewish doctors w ­ ere fired or demoted in some hospitals from their positions in Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk. In Latvia, where about 20 ­percent of all doctors ­were Jewish in 1952, Jewish medical professionals ­were publicly humiliated and harassed. For example, Israil Drizin, the chief surgeon of Riga’s largest hospital, was fired.14 In Kemerovo (Siberia), a number of local Jewish doctors was arrested.15 In Molotov (now Perm’), a city near the Ural Mountains, the chief surgeon of the regional hospital Kats was demoted and expelled from the Communist Party, and other Jewish doctors ­were fired. In

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Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) a special commission was created to investigate abnormalities in hospitals (a code phrase for investigating Jews).16 As so often happened in the Soviet Union, messages from the official media and their unofficial interpretation combined to create a mass of information circulating in public and in private. Although Timashuk’s name appeared in Pravda only four times, her image became a fixture in Soviet rumors circulating during the time; depending on who was describing her, she represented e­ ither the best or the worst of Soviet society. The Doctors’ Plot provided fertile soil for the resurrection of war­time rumors about Jews—­allegations about how they survived by ­running to the East, how they loved money and used it to sabotage o­ thers, how they parasitized society and got away with d­ oing “easier jobs,” and above all, that they ­were unpatriotic. In addition to ­these classic antisemitic tropes, widespread fears of doctors and modern medicine surfaced as well, with t­ hese rumors growing into coherent, easily disseminated narratives. An anonymous writer sent a following letter to Ilya Ehrenburg, outlining some of ­these stories that ­were in circulation in February 1953: The leaders of the Party and the government did not have the right to claim ignorance about a pos­si­ble wave of antisemitism that would be provoked a­ fter the publication of a piece about doctors and the hellkites on January 13. It is hard to report the influence of this piece on backwards ­people, including some Party members. So many bigoted deliriums spread—­that Jews give shots and induce cancer, that Jews kill Rus­sian newborns in hospitals, with statistics of 600 babies killed, some ­people say 1600 and so on.17

The tropes of the accusations sound strikingly familiar to the Blood Libel, in which Jews ­were accused of killing Christians and using their blood for ritual purposes. Elissa Bemporad argues that the 1953 Doctors’ Plot represented a secularized blood libel, a metamorphosis of this belief that retains the ritual murder accusation but removes its religious purposes.18 One cannot help but won­der how Jews, especially ­those in the medical system, made sense of what was ­going on around them. Based on oral histories and memoirs, this chapter discusses the many ways in which the Doctors’ Plot influenced perceptions, be­hav­iors, and c­ areer paths for medical professionals. Unlike p­ eople in other professions, health care professionals—­ranging from doctors to nurses to pharmacists—­had no choice but deal ­every day with the fears, prejudice, and other harmful effects of the Doctors’ Plot. They ­were the frontline subjects of rumors and workplace conversations. Often, they had professional opinions about whether accused doctors had indeed performed malpractice, and even more often, they were asked about it. In the rest of the chapter, I present excerpts from these doctors’ oral histories and show how their stories help us understand both the Doctors’ Plot and its impact on Soviet Jews.



“I Was Not Like Everybody Else” 95

“Miraculously I Have Not Been Fired”: Jewish Doctors Discuss 1953 Between 1999 and 2010, I interviewed 474 Jews who w ­ ere born in the Soviet Union or in the Rus­sian Empire before 1928. Most of the interviewees emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, some emigrated ­earlier in the 1970s, and ­others never left. They w ­ ere born in a wide range of places: small towns of Ukraine, the largest cities of Rus­sia and Belorus­sia, and even Poland and the Baltic States. Of them, fifty-­eight ­were physicians interviewed for this proj­ect, forty-­one ­were practicing medicine in 1953 (seventeen w ­ ere medical students at that time); e­ very ­single one said that they ­were aware of the Doctors’ Plot accusations. Fifteen respondents ­were demoted, and their salaries decreased. The Twenty-six continued to hold their posts and all reported meetings with their superiors, at which the chiefs of staff promised they could keep their positions at the same rank and salary. Ilya Sh. (born in Voznesensk, Ukraine, in 1913) recalls, In 1953 I used to work in a polyclinic [in Moscow]. At that time, ­things ­were brewing. Once, at a staff meeting, the chief of staff, who was Rus­sian, she said, “You know, ­there are many t­ hings being said right now about nationalities. Do not pay attention to them. We ­will not let anything happen to you. Work as you always work. No-­one w ­ ill be fired or excluded. That was the end of it.” Of course, ­there ­were also some unpleasant p­ eople. They used to say: “Do not refer me to that Jewish doctor. I want to [see] another doctor.” But t­ hese w ­ ere rare cases, and no-­one seemed to pay attention to this.19

Presenting by far the most optimistic account of the events of 1953 among t­ hose interviewed, Ilya mentions that some patients w ­ ere afraid to be seen by Jewish doctors. ­Every single doctor told me that they themselves or their colleagues had encountered patients who feared Jewish doctors. Fortunately for Ilya, his superiors ­were on his side. Many ­others w ­ ere not so lucky, especially ­those who worked in Ukraine. Yulian Rafes (1924–), a doctor who practiced in Dniepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and was the head of a general medicine department in a local hospital in 1953, pre­sents a gloomier picture of how he had to navigate both the fear of patients and the suspicions of some of his superiors: I was sick with strep throat, but it was my shift. Dusya [my wife] begged me not to go, but I went to work anyway. I worked all night in a non-­heated triage, and as a result got a kidney infection. Then I got sick. That day was the famous January 13th with the article about Doctors the Murderers. . . . I went to see Fyodor Kirrilovich Nyushko, the head of the Health Ministry, and told him I wanted to resign. As I Jew, I said, I could not work in an atmosphere like that, and cannot give ­orders. He answered:

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“Do you think I can work [ethnically] as a Rus­sian? They condemn me in the Ministry that my wife is Jewish, and I am surrounded by Jews!” I knew this was not true. Only one other Jewish doctor was in a high position in the ministry. But I appreciated the sentiment. Nyushko explained that resigning would mean an automatic investigation, and advised me “to stay sick” for a while. I went to the hospital and stayed ­there as a patient. A friend told me ­there that she heard that my department was ­under investigation, and I personally was being investigated. I would have been the perfect candidate for the “doctor the murderer” figure: a known doctor, with administrative experience, a Yiddish speaker, former subscriber of Eynikayt. Besides, I grew up in cap­i­tal­ist Poland and came from a f­amily of with a famous member of Vilno Bund.20 I was twenty-­nine years old. . . . ​Newspapers published exposes on doctors ­every day. Every­one waited for a sensation related to Jewish doctors in Dnepropetrovsk. Sure enough, an article about Mikhail Golomb, a Sorbonne-­educated pediatrician, surfaced. The article claimed he was not educated. Golomb went to the newspaper headquarters and yelled, “This is a piece of shit!” Another friend, Fedya Shapiro, a Red Army doctor heard that he was about to be fired. He went to the headquarters of the regional Party. He said, “I defended the Motherland!” “Where is your motherland?” the official replied. “This is my motherland!” Shapiro answered. “Are you sure? B ­ ecause I am not!” and [he] showed him the door.21

Rafes depicts the range of reactions of his fellow doctors to the newspaper reports. The bravest acts of re­sis­tance came from his colleague Fedya, who goes to complain at how ­people discuss the antisemitic article, but it ends, like all other attempts to argue against the sentiment of Jews being traitors, in failure. ­There is one ele­ment common to all ­these varied reactions: not one doctor doubts that the article in Pravda put all Jewish doctors in danger, not just the alleged spies. Their colleagues, superiors, f­amily members, and patients also understand that Jewish doctors are ­under threat, and each one chooses a strategy to deal with it: some comply, ­others resist, yet ­others wait and see. In ­these circumstances, each patient choosing to see a Jewish doctor makes a conscious decision e­ ither to ignore or actively resist a strong atmosphere of distrust and rumors. Patients expressed fears of seeing Jewish doctors both in writing and in conversation. Even ­under normal circumstances, doctors w ­ ere not trusted fully, but in the 1950s, ­these fears w ­ ere validated.22 Sometimes, interview subjects said that patients saw them b­ ecause of a lack of available physicians, o­ thers ­were proud to turn an antisemitic patient into a person who was not scared of Jews, yet ­others emphasized that their patients ­were not scared of them at all. Not a single doctor suggested that patients expressed a neutral or admiring attitudes t­oward doctors or failed to mention anything at all about the Doctors’ Plot. In fact, the distrust



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expressed by patients was mentioned as a serious concern for Jewish doctors, second only to their fear of losing their jobs.23 An atmosphere of fear—­both of being fired or imprisoned—­enveloped all who worked at prestigious centers, such as medical research institutes or clinics attached to certain ministries. ­Because the oldest research doctor among my respondents was only thirty-­two in 1953, and most ­others had just begun their ­careers at that time, their narratives often shared concerns about other (often more se­nior) scientists. Fira G. (born in 1925 in Efingar, in the Nikolaev region of Ukraine), a newly appointed medical research assistant at the Nikolaev Medical Research Institute, recalls: The Doctors’ Plot was a horror story. Many doctors in my institute slept with dried bread nearby. [Dried bread is prepared in case a person is sent to prison, so that they can take it with them.] I was still a young doctor, so I w ­ asn’t in any danger. I was already respected, but I was young. But the older surgeons, other specialists, many ­were preparing dried bread.24

The sentiment that the older, more experienced, and, at times, foreign-­trained doctors who ­were still practicing in the 1950s ­were in more danger than the younger, Soviet-­trained physicians was widespread. Many ­people believed that doctors trained before 1917 and who practiced in the 1920s and the 1930s had extensive contacts with foreign colleagues25 and could potentially be accused of espionage and treason. In ­earlier de­cades, patients and doctors alike ­were in awe of ­these professionals and of their international connections, but in 1953, having such a network became a liability.

In Fear of Exposure: ­E very Jewish Name Has a Secret In the first few months of 1953, Jewish health care professionals lived ­under constant scrutiny—­their secrets about connections to p­ eople abroad, their war­time past, or other m ­ atters that could be used as evidence in t­ rials against them ­were waiting to be exposed. ­Every accusation—­from a neighbor, a former patient, or even a colleague—­could be seen as part of the larger Doctors’ Plot, implying that all Jewish doctors worked together trying to poison or other­wise harm their patients. In fact, having a Jewish name presented a real danger to practicing physicians. Starting in 1932, one’s Jewish nationality was recorded in internal identification documents. Some p­ eople ­were able to erase the word “Jewish” from their passports and also Russify their names (changing Israel to Igor, Sarah to Sofia, Haya to Klara). Many did so during the war, often on the advice of their commanding officers, who said life would be easier for them with a less Jewish-­ sounding name. ­Others de­cided to do it once an opportunity allowed them to

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alter their identification documents, such as ­after marriage or discharge from the army or return from evacuation.26 Although many p­ eople prob­ably took the initiative in changing their l­egal names, in stories that circulated about such actions, they always had the informal support of Soviet officials in ­doing so—as long as they did it before 1953. In 1953, the language of Soviet officials changed. The act of changing one’s name or nationality in such an atmosphere was treated with suspicion; in fact, trying to conceal anything seemed to provoke anxiety about imminent punishment or even arrest. Semion Sh. (born in 1918  in Kuty in the Vinnitsa region of Ukraine), recalled that he changed his name from Zunya Peysakhovich to Semion Petrovich in 1939. During the war he served in the army and settled in Vladimir Volynsky, in northwestern Ukraine ­after his release from the military. In 1953, while working as an otolaryngologist, he began to be harassed at his workplace for changing his name: When I was a student, right before the war, I worked in Stavropol. I worked as a paramedic at the m ­ ental hospital. Th ­ ere was another paramedic t­ here, Luka Matveevich Galushka. When I came to report for duty, he asked my last name and registered it, then asked for my name and patronymic. I said “Shunya Peysakhovich.” He said: “What? What?” He did not like the sound of it. He wrote me down as Semion Petrovich. Since then I kept that name. ­After the war, I worked at a hospital in Vladimir. ­There was a boss ­there, an Ossetian Hasov. He did not like me. In 1953, he would gather all workers together and read the satirical pieces from newspapers about Jewish doctors. He did it once, twice, three times. On the third time I got outraged. I was sitting ­there, like a dummy. I let him finish, and then I said: “I d­ on’t want to see such meetings h­ ere. If you want to read ­these humorous pieces, read them in a recreation room, Lenin’s corner. Go ­there during the lunch break and read it ­there. This is a doctor’s station, a workplace.” Did I say the right ­thing? Right! AS: How did he react to this? He did react. He was friends with the head of SMERSH (Death to Spies Department).27 Once I met that head of SMERSH, the lieutenant col­on­ el. It was a week, maybe a few days before the doctors w ­ ere arrested for the Doctors’ Plot. He asks me: “What was the name of your ­father?” I say: “Peysakh.” He then asked me, “Why then are you Semen Petrovich?” I could not stand it anymore, and tell him boldly: “Go ask the head of the hospital. I w ­ ill not answer this question.” It was my luck that they [the accused doctors] ­were acquitted a few days ­later, and he was fired from this post; another one was hired. So, this is my story about Peysakh and Petrovich. I was very bold.28

Semion’s story of the workplace atmosphere includes significant details for our understanding of the climate in which Soviet Jews lived in the 1950s. Having to



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listen to satirical stories about Jewish doctors being read aloud from both national and local newspapers and magazines—­stories that w ­ ere published almost e­ very other day during January and February 1953—­illustrates the difficult position of the narrator. On the one hand, he knows that the stories are antisemitic and directed at him, but on the other hand, they are produced by the official press and therefore cannot be criticized in public. The normalization of antisemitic ­discourse, unapologetic expressions of schadenfreude, loud jokes about doctors told within earshot—­all ­these poisoned the lives of many interviewees, who seem to remember the tiniest details seventy years ­after they occurred.

“My Talents Saved Me”: Strategies Used to Achieve Personal Victories in 1953 Feelings of powerlessness and anger are not forgotten easily,29 but the story of one’s anger was often compensated for by the recollection of real or imaginary revenge.30 In his interview, Semion emphasized a few times, and even asked for affirmation from the interviewer, that he was brave and had resisted the verbal abuse. In other words, he stressed that he did not react passively to offensive remarks. Interviewees almost never spoke of being passive victims in situations where they ­were the target of frequent abusive remarks from their workplace superiors. Instead, their testimonies are filled with descriptions of re­sis­tance, like what Semion described. We do not know w ­ hether they indeed said or did the t­hings they claimed, but analy­sis of the interviews reveals a series of strategies that narrators described using to fight injustice. Men usually appealed both to their war­time heroism—­either as soldiers, officers, or as workers in the rear—­and the re­spect they received from their patients. W ­ omen, even t­ hose with similar backgrounds as men, tended to appeal to the compassion of p­ eople in charge: they asked for pity for their dependents (­children and parents). Both men and ­women spoke about complaining to higher party authorities about the proizvol (arbitrariness) of officials in misinterpreting government policies and, indeed, in using the campaign against cosmopolitanism as an excuse to validate their bigotry. Indeed, most interviewees attributed their prob­lems in 1953 to the personal views of the individual ­people in charge, rather than to the government’s policies, despite their full awareness of the directives and instructions to “harass Jews.”31 They rarely suggested that their own job losses w ­ ere the consequences of anything but the personal antisemitism of their immediate superiors. On the flip side, if they discussed supervisors helping them, the interviewees stressed that this was ­because ­these officials knew them personally and respected their professional achievements. ­People rarely expressed anything but sympathy for the heads of the local party committees who helped them obtain better jobs. In fact, interviewees very often attributed their ability to find support among Soviet apparatchiks as evidence of their personal strengths.

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At the same time, based on archival evidence, non-­Jews in positions of authority within medical institutions faced their own difficult choices about how to deal with the Doctors’ Plot, and almost none of ­these decisions, it seems, ­were determined by their personal attitudes t­ oward Jews. Numerous confidential inquiries from the Brest, Bobruisk, Vitebsk, Molodechenskoy, and Polotsk regional local party committees ­were dispatched to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, with requests to clarify how to implement the new policy and fight growing antisemitism and nationalism. ­People living in difficult times often make sense of their lives by telling stories about how their initiative, wit, energy, and creativity helped them survive. Just as Holocaust survivors speak about their decisions that may have saved their lives and how they took charge in situations that w ­ ere completely beyond their control,32 Jewish doctors preferred to speak of their individual circumstances and personal victories during the Doctors’ Plot era. For example, ­here is the story of Irina (Fira) G. who graduated from a medical institute in 1948. She had a passion for infectious diseases but was advised to go into epidemiology, a field that she did not consider in­ter­est­ing but one in which she could have a more successful c­ areer, possibly ­because she was a Jew. She chose to focus on parasitology, ­because it seemed the closest area to the infectious diseases field. When she was ready to defend her dissertation in 1953, however, she faced serious prob­lems: I arrived at the [dissertation] defense [in Moscow]. Elenka Leikina, my se­nior ­colleague told me, whispering, “­They’re ­going to fail you. We ­were sent tricky ­questions to ask you so that you ­wouldn’t pass.” . . . ​At the defense, they indeed challenged every­thing that I said, and at the end, they d­ idn’t pass me. When they failed me, I ripped up all my visual [aids], left the room, and began crying. Professor Shul’man, my adviser, followed me, and so did Leikina. Shul’man was the best specialist in parasitology in the country. He told me, “Ira [short for Irina], ­don’t cry. When they failed my doctoral [post-­kandidat] dissertation, I ­didn’t cry. Th ­ ese ­people ­were out of control. You could see that you had been failed for no good reason.” Then I de­cided to visit Academician Skriabin.33 He lived in the sanatorium “Uzkoe”—­for academicians only. I got ­there the next day at 9 a.m. I gave him my dissertation. He asked me if I could stay in Moscow for three more days. I said I d­ idn’t have any money, but I would try. Three days l­ater, I came back. He typed a memo with a letterhead which said, “Academician Skriabin, Hero of Socialist ­Labor.” Then he outlined all the innovations of my approach, and stated that in his opinion, the work met all the requirements of the kandidat degree. But it d­ idn’t help.34

The warning that Fira received from a se­nior colleague, Elenka Leikina, a Bulgarian parasitologist who worked in Moscow during that time, is significant. Leikina was not Jewish, but her dark hair and somewhat Jewish-­sounding last name deceived Fira into thinking that Leikina’s sympathy to her cause stemmed



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from her Jewish origins. Thus, the story of Fira’s individual failure to successfully defend her dissertation turns into a story of both collective punishment and ­Jewish solidarity in the face of persecution. All the Jewish doctors in the story are portrayed as victims of the system, including Professor Evgenii Shul’man (1899–1990), despite his ability to have an illustrious c­ areer: he was head of the helminthology department at the Parasitology Institute (­later the Institute of Medical Parasitology) in Kharkov ­until 1964 when he moved to Moscow to assume the position of a se­nior research scientist at the First Moscow Central Institute of Tropical Diseases and Medical Parasitology.35 He was one of the leading parasitologists in the Soviet Union. But it is a non-­Jew, Academician Skriabin, who is the most praiseworthy in her story. It is his superior power that allows him to rise above bigotry and to praise the true achievement of a Jew. But even he, the most power­ful scientist in the field, is powerless in face of the machinery that oppresses Jews and Jewish doctors. The initiative to seek help from Skriabin is presented as Fira’s own, for which she is rewarded with a rare and impor­tant endorsement. Not only is Skriabin the world’s leading expert in the field but he is also a non-­Jew who testifies to Fira’s professional ability, which is no less impor­tant in the story than the reiteration of the atmosphere of general anti-­Semitism.36 Narratives of the persecution of Jewish doctors often mention fellow Jews who suffered from similar ordeals, but they rarely speak of Jews in power who helped or tried to help them. Fira G.’s story is no exception. What I suspect most likely happened was that it was Shul’man, a former student of Skriabin, who contacted Skriabin (finding him living in a government-­protected sanatorium) and advised Fira G. to contact him. If this was so, it was Shul’man’s connections that ultimately helped Fira receive the endorsement. Yet she does not pre­sent it that way. That detail would not fit her story of Jewish persecution in the Soviet Union that she wants to tell the interviewer. Instead, it would pre­sent a story of Jewish mutual aid, or worse, of a younger Jewish colleague receiving the help of a fellow Jew at a se­nior position, which could be perceived negatively as suggesting that Jews benefited from favoritism. The issue of who helps whom in stories requires further investigation. In Soviet professional micro-­worlds, it was close to impossible to achieve any professional success without help from friends and families, usually from echelons higher up within the Communist Party. But as mentioned, the interviewees almost never directly acknowledged that a Jew in power helped them. Quite to the contrary, numerous stories speak about how such help was expected or even assumed on the interviewee’s part but was never obtained. Gennady Shul’man, the son of Evgenii Shul’man (the parasitologist from Fira  G.’s story), was a medical scientist who wrote a memoir in which he described his difficulties in obtaining a job in 1953: ­ fter I finished university [in 1953], I was faced with a difficult life. Though I was one A of the best students, it was obvious I could not stay at the university [as a scientific

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worker] or work in my specialty. I remember printing about a hundred application letters where I suggested that I was ready to work in any area of science, even as a technician in a lab. . . . ​W hat ­else could I do? I was surprised that all my letters ­were answered. Though the form of each response was dif­fer­ent, the content was identical: “For you, we have no vacancies.” Even my current place of work, the Institute of Biology of the South Seas, where I have been working for forty years, rejected me then. Only one person wanted to hire me. It was Nikolai Evgenievich Salnikov, who was the director of the Institute of Sea Fishing and Oceanography at the time. I worked ­there for twelve years.37

Gennady Shul’man never mentions that he asked for his ­father’s help or even ­whether his ­father offered it to him. His f­ ather, an impor­tant doctor and scientist who had name recognition across the Soviet Union, could have made a call on his son’s behalf but it would prob­ably have been in­effec­tive. All the interviewees who held higher positions in medicine spoke of their inability to hire Jews or help their relatives find work ­because of fear of being accused of “creating a synagogue.” To better understand Gennady Shul’man’s story, it is helpful to put it into several contexts. One is the con­temporary setting, in which the author is an immigrant who wants to speak about the persecution and tribulations of Jews in the Soviet Union. A second context is that of the mechanisms of ­labor in postwar Soviet society, when knowing the “right ­people” was a necessity for upward economic mobility. B ­ ecause Jews who helped each other advance in their work w ­ ere accused of  nationalism—­even though non-­Jews freely used their connections to help ­others—­Jewish workers w ­ ere u­ nder a serious disadvantage that could halt or seriously delay their professional success. A third context is the perception of non-­ Jews. Many believed that Jews helped each other and characterized them as a nation whose members stood up for one another. Even sympathetic Soviet scholars acknowledged that Jewish mutual help enabled this minority to survive in a larger, generally hostile society.38 Although the perception of Jews enjoying comfortable positions within the Soviet economic system and benefiting from the help of fellow Jews prevailed at this time, the views of my interviewees did not agree with this sentiment. Instead, many complained of their inability to use the help of a higher-­ranking f­amily member or to aid in the c­ areer advancement of a relative in need b­ ecause of the fear of being accused of helping other Jews. In fact, it seems it was easier for a non-­ Jew to help a Jew, and vice versa, than for Jews to support each other. In the field of medicine, especially in 1953, the inability to enjoy mutual support seriously damaged the ­careers of Jewish doctors.

Loss of Networks Despite the f­ ree medical care that was theoretically available to all Soviet citizens, getting proper treatment in the Soviet Union was often a m ­ atter of luck.



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Poor-­quality training, shortages of medi­cations and hospital space, and generally insensitive attitudes ­toward patients among Soviet medical professionals led to a situation in which getting proper medical care depended significantly on personal connections that f­amily members might have in the medical field.39 Many stories from interviewees discussed the connection between the loss of their positions in the medical profession—­either from demotions or their general lack of authority and re­spect in the workplace—­and their inability to provide better (or adequate) medical care for their ­family members. Sara K. (born in Artemovsk of the Donetsk Region in Ukraine in 1924) recalls, The Jewish question began for me on January 13, 1953. I lived through a lot as a doctor. I always said, “It is g­ reat luck that my f­ather did not live to see all this.” It is impossible to describe. The humiliation was unbearable. I can only tell you that I worked at a very large military hospital. It was a huge deal for a young doctor. I received incredible training t­here from the old school doctors. My m ­ other got sick: her lung collapsed. I managed to admit her to this military hospital. When the Jewish question arose, my ­mother was discharged immediately. I was still working ­there as a staff member. It is impossible to talk about this.40

We may speculate extensively about the reason for Sara’s m ­ other’s discharge (assuming, that indeed, it was done against medical advice). It is pos­si­ble that the chief of staff of the hospital was worried about the accusation of semeistvennost’—­ loosely translated as family-­based corruption at the workplace—­a word that quickly changed to refer specifically to Jews. Perhaps discharging the ­mother allowed Sara to keep her job as a young doctor in a prestigious hospital. The fact that Sara does not blame specific individuals for deciding to discharge her m ­ other suggests that perhaps she understood, even then, that the choice was between her ­career and her ailing ­mother’s quality of life. She did blame the system for forcing her to make this choice. One should not conclude, however, that Jews ­were fully excluded from informal Soviet networks. Interviewees’ stories discuss numerous instances of how they w ­ ere helped or ­were able to help o­ thers through their positions as working doctors in hospitals and clinics: they provided prescriptions for necessary medi­ cations and acquired needed medicines from their hospitals, as opposed to pharmacies that ­were always short of supplies.41 The informal networks also helped in negotiating better care in hospitals, arranging special consultations with the best surgeons and other specialists, allowing extra visits by ­family members, and obtaining many other unofficial ser­vices that ­were vital yet ­were unavailable through official channels. Although being a Jew affected what could be achieved through ­these networks, it did not prevent all instances of help. It was only in the area of medical science that being a Jew marginalized even the top specialists and best-­positioned interviewees.

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Silences and Secrets: How Holocaust Survivors Responded to the Doctors’ Plot One of the popu­lar tropes of the Doctor’s Plot was its immediate association with Hitler’s ideology. Jews compared it to Nazi propaganda, and antisemitic rumors that circulated during war­time often arose again in the public discourse. Sentiments such as “it was a shame Hitler did not finish them off ” resurfaced. Although most Soviet Jews ­were offended by ­these statements or reacted by fighting against them, both physically and verbally,42 one Jewish group was simply at a loss on how to react and what to do: the Holocaust survivors themselves. Tens of thousands had survived the war u­ nder Romanian occupation or, much more rarely, ­under Nazi occupation. Immediately ­after the war, they ­adopted the mode of silence about their experiences for fear that ­there would be Soviet investigations of ­whether they collaborated with the Germans. During the Doctors’ Plot years, ­these ­people, who often lived with false documents and falsified stories, w ­ ere especially terrified of investigations and exposure. The medical professionals among them w ­ ere u­ nder a ­triple threat as Jews, as survivors, and as doctors. ­There are very few testimonies of how they managed the plot, mostly ­because ­these Soviet Jews trained themselves to keep their secrets and maintain their silence, even de­cades ­after the event. The very few doctors who worked during the plot and w ­ ere survivors all saw the Doctors’ Plot as the return of “­those times.” For example, Semion Sh., whose story about his name change was discussed ­earlier in the chapter, never mentioned to me that he spent a few weeks of the war in the Vinnitsa ghetto in 1941 before he was able to escape it. His wife let this information slip by accident. Semion knew I wanted to hear about his Jewish experiences during the war, but he did not tell me about the ghetto and refused to elaborate on it l­ ater; he spoke about his ­career as a military surgeon but only beginning in 1942. As I listened to a recording of the interview at home, I found nothing about 1941. When I discovered the gap, I called Semion to ask about it, but he did not want to talk about it.43 Overall, stories of how Holocaust survivors navigated the Soviet system still wait to be told, and stories of Jewish Holocaust survivor doctors are among them. Anecdotally, it seems that medical professionals who survived part of the war in occupied territories had greater limitations than other Jews in how they could develop their c­ areers—­too many secrets could come up in background checks that ­were required for work in larger cities and to achieve positions of power. As a result, many of them, including ­those with the potential for greater achievements, ended up working in smaller, less equipped hospitals and clinics, usually located outside urban centers. Th ­ ere is anecdotal evidence that the Doctors’ Plot effectively ended the hopes of many that Jews would no longer be the target of state-­ run discrimination in the Soviet Union.



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End of the Plot On March 31, 1953, Lavrentii Beria, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, signed an order to stop the investigation of every­one involved in the Doctors’ Plot and release all arrested doctors and their f­ amily members.44 On April 4, 1953, the top half of the second page of Pravda featured “A Notification from the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” which stated that all arrested professors ­were acquitted; that their acknowl­edgments of guilt had been given as a result of interrogation techniques not allowed by the Soviet regime; and that the charges of espionage, terrorist, and sabotage had been dismissed. The bottom of the same page contained a two-­line notification that Timashuk’s Order of Lenin had been revoked. Her name did not appear in the Soviet press again u­ ntil ­after the collapse of Soviet ideology in the late 1980s, when the Doctor’s Plot story was again discussed but through a new historical lens. The following day, in 1953, new rumors began to circulate. The reports from several in­for­mants sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs ­after the revocation of Timashuk’s Order of Lenin suggest that a number of ­people speculated that “Jews paid to remove Timashuk as an honest person, they can do anything.”45 Timashuk became almost like a Rus­sian Joan of Arc, a ­woman who put her life at risk to save the country from a conniving and strong ­enemy.46 Doctors themselves ­were often accused of a lack of bravery and integrity: What is so heroic ­here, the workers ask, if they can so easily lie and say ­things about themselves, even ­under the influence of some methods. What about our ordinary ­people, who kept s­ ilent u­ nder torture, when t­ hings w ­ ere burned on their skin and when their body parts ­were cut off?47

Predictably, Jews shared very dif­fer­ent attitudes from Soviet non-­Jews to both the end of the plot and to the (usually antisemitic) speculation on why it happened48: they simply celebrated it. Some wrote letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party demanding, “Stop the vile antisemitic campaign” and arguing that “the campaign resurrects the cursed Hitler.”49 One letter refers to Timashuk as “a conniving creature, a registered Cheberiachka”50 promoting Hitler’s ideology.51 The happiest of all w ­ ere the doctors who felt that they escaped the threat of imminent arrest. ­Here is how Julian Rafes describes the day of April 4 in his memoir: I remember very well, that morning when the radio announced the news of the withdrawal of charges (reabilitatsii) to doctors. Our district doctor, Mariia Timofeevna, was in a very bad mood. I asked her, why she was in a bad mood, ­today was such a g­ reat day for all doctors, but she did not answer and sat with a sour face. I realized that she was upset precisely ­because they ­were released! . . .

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Nevertheless, one cannot say that the story about the withdrawal of charges started some new policy ­towards Jews. . . . ​W ho knows what would have happened had the tyrant not been killed. But antisemitism in the workplace continued. At the same time, something did change. . . . In Kiev, t­ here was a congress of internal medicine. The main hall of Kiev’s Officers Hall was packed. All of the star doctors ­were ­there, but also us, rank and file physicians, and also delegates from other parts of the country. The keynote speaker was Miron Semionovich Vovsi.52 He came up and stood at the podium. Suddenly something amazing started. The audience exploded with applause, and they did not stop. It was an expression of solidarity of all p­ eople. ­There w ­ ere very few Jewish delegates, but t­hese ­were medical professionals expressing solidarity with the colleagues who lived through so much and who was slandered. This was applause for his suffering and the expression of pride in him and the entire medical system. It was an expression of joy that this main “poisoner” would now give his lecture. . . . It lasted for 10 minutes, and no-­one cared about the Chair who asked p­ eople to calm down. Academician Ivanov attempted to help to start the lecture, but he too, was ignored. I think that Ivanov should have been proud. He was asked to provide expert witness opinion against Vovsi. He understood that he could not write that this was idiocy, but he also could not, did not want to be part of this dirty, criminal affair. So he got “sick.” He had a heart attack. Of course. it was a lie. But ­because of this lie, the KGB had to assign the file to another professor who did what they asked of him. Of course, t­ here ­were not a lot of ­people like Ivanov, but they existed, and it was a source of g­ reat happiness that such ­people lived then.53

The spirit of the exhilarating cele­bration, so vividly portrayed in the narrative, can only be compared to narratives of victory during World War II. The dismissal of the Doctors’ Plot was a rare occasion during which ­those who disapproved of the actions of the Soviet government could openly come out as victors, rather than dissidents. Notably, Rafes spends a considerable amount of time emphasizing that not only Jews but mostly non-­Jews also celebrated the end of the affair. One has to won­der w ­ hether, without embracing this attitude, Jews could continue working in Soviet medical institutions and not keep thinking who would have wanted them to be gone had the Doctors’ Plot continued.

Conclusion The Doctors’ Plot lasted less than three months. A public trial, complete with a verdict, was about to be launched, but Stalin’s sudden death or, as a recent study by Joshua Rubenstein argues, the interparty politics that preceded it ended the



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affair as abruptly as it started.54 However, the impact of this short affair was felt well beyond the individuals imprisoned and released. In fact, one can argue, it changed both Soviet society and Soviet Jews forever. First, the Doctors’ Plot firmly established a negative association with Jewish origins among medical professionals. Even ­people who did not experience discrimination or persecution as Jews during the war could not avoid thinking about being born Jewish and associating that with misfortune. Surviving the Soviet experience as a Jew had its challenges, but surviving the Doctors’ Plot as a Jewish doctor had a huge emotional, physical, and professional impact on individuals, who had to learn how to function normally in a society that was so ready to attack them simply ­because they w ­ ere doctors with Jewish last names and patronymics. Oral histories compensate for this misfortune with numerous stories of moral superiority and the narrative of victory, but one cannot help but see this strategy as a way to deal with the trauma, rather than actually getting stronger as a result of winning the fight. Second, the Doctors’ Plot secured a glass ceiling in the medical ­careers of Jews, especially in the field of scientific research. Often, b­ ecause of the lack of opportunities in research institutes, doctors ­were driven to less-­regulated fields of alternative medicine, such as acu­punc­ture, homeopathy, and hypnotherapy. Although no extensive research has been done on this topic, one can see that Jews ­were pioneers in the development of ­these fields in the Soviet Union, especially in the larger cities of Rus­sia and Ukraine.55 Above all, studying the experiences of Jewish physicians during the Doctors’ Plot reveals how Soviet society affected Jewish communal settings. Persecuting Jews working in the medical system, casting aspersions on their collegiality with fellow Jewish physicians, and suspecting that Jews helped each other at the expense of providing quality care to patients could not but ultimately damage the reputation of Jewish doctors. Above all, however, it destroyed the health care networks in which Jews ­were actually able to help one another within the micro-­ worlds of the Soviet economy. Oral histories reveal how gradually Jewish doctors ­were deprived of opportunities to help one another, train other talented Jewish students, and promote their promising Jewish colleagues. They then had to rely on the help of non-­Jews to succeed and advance within the system. Thus, the Doctors’ Plot significantly damaged the informal Jewish community structure in the Soviet Union. Although the doctors ­were ultimately cleared of all charges, the fact that the accusations had found support among their colleagues could not but shake the foundations of collegiality, mutual support, and trust in the medical community. The events of 1953 also may have significantly delayed the development of health care in Rus­sia, as the advancement of medical science is impossible without well-­functioning networks in the profession. Certainly, it remained the central memory point in the history of the postwar Soviet Jewish community.

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notes 1. ​ Pravda, January 13, 1953. 2. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: vlast′ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdun-

arodnye otnosheniia, 2001). 3. ​Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 3–4. 4. ​Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 331. 5. ​Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality: The ‘Black Years’ Reconsidered,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2008): 4–29. 6. ​Galina Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia’: istoki i funktsii slukhov vokrug dela vrachei,” Antropologicheskii Forum 31 (2016): 119–154. 7. ​On public opinion during the Doctors’ Plot, see Leonid Smilovitskii, “Byelorus­sian Jewry and the ‘Doctors’ Plot.’ ” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 27, no. 2 (1997): 39–52. For more on the Doctors’ Plot in general see Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime. 8. ​Viacheslav Konstantinov, Evreiskoe naselenie byvshego SSSR v XX veke: sotsial′no-­demograficheskii analiz ( Jerusalem: Lira, 2007), 185. 9. ​Leonid Smilovitskii, “ ‘Delo vrachei’ v Belorussii: politika vlastei i otnoshenie naseleniia (ianvar’—­aprel’ 1953),” in Repressivnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti v Belarusi, ed. Valerii Andreev (Minsk: Memorial, 2007), 269–311. 10. ​ Zaria (Brest), April 8, 1953. Quoted in Smilovitskii, “ ‘Delo vrachei’ v Belorussii,” 269–314. 11. ​Smilovitskii, “ ‘Delo vrachei’ v Belorussii,” 269–314. 12. ​ Pravda, February 20, 1953. 13. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov”: vlast′ i evreiskaia intelligentsiia v SSSR (Moscow: Politicheskaia ėnciklopediia, 2009). 14. ​Irene Shneydere, “Latviiskie Evrei i sovetskii rezhim (1944–1953),” in Evrei Latvii i sovetskaia vlast’ (1928–1953), ed. Leo Dribins (Riga: Institut filosofii i sotsiologii Latviiskogo universiteta, 2009), 280. 15. ​See all ­these works by Elena S. Genina: “Otgoloski ‘dela vrachei’ v Kuzbasse (1953 g.),” in Ksenofobia: Istoriia. Ideologiia. Politika, ed. Konstantin Burmistrov et al. (Moscow: Sėfer, 2003), 118–130; “Otgoloski ‘dela vrachei’ v Primorskom krae (1953g.),” Uchennye zapiski fakul’teta istorii i mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii Kemerovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 2 (2004): 126–130; “Otgoloski ‘dela vrachei’ v Novosibirskoi oblasti (1953 g.),” in Aktual’nye voprosy istorii Sibiri: Piatye nauchnye chteniia pamiati professora A.P. Goncharova, ed. Valerii Skubnevskii and Iurii Goncharov (Barnaul: Az Buka, 2005), 182–184; “Ideologo-­propagandistskaia kampaniia, sviazannaia s ‘delom vrachei’ 1953 g. (po materialam periodicheskoi pechati Sibiri),” in Sibir’ v istorii Rossii (k 100-­letiiu Zinaidy Georgievny Karpenko): Materialy regional’noi nauchnoi konferentsii (Kemerovo: Kuzbassvuzizdat, 2006), 246–251. 16. ​Anna Kimerling, Terror na izlete: “Delo vrachei” v ural’skoi provintsii (Perm’: Permskii gosudarstvennyi institut iskusstva i kul’tury, 2011), 142. 17. ​ Mordechai Altshuler, Yitzhak Arad, and Shmuel Krakowski, Sovetskie evrei pishut Il′e ­Erenburgu, 1943–1966 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1993), 312. 18. ​Elissa Bemporad, “Empowerment, Defiance, and Demise: Jews and the Blood Libel Specter ­under Stalinism,” Jewish History 26, no. 3/4 (2012): 357. 19. ​Ilya Sh., oral history interview by Anna Shternshis, Moscow 1999. 20. ​Moisei Rafes (1883–1942) was one of the leaders of the Bund and was Yulian’s ­uncle. 21. ​Yulian I. Rafes, Dorogami moei sud′by: Vostochnaia Evropa, XX vek: shtrikhi zhizni v vospominaniiakh vracha (Baltimore: VIA Press, 1997), 178–184. See also Anna Shternshis, oral history interview with Julian Rafes, August 2000, New York. 22. ​Edmund  D. Pellegrino, “Guarding the Integrity of Medical Ethics: Some Lessons from Soviet Rus­sia,” JAMA 273, no. 20 (1995): 1622–1623.



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23. ​Studies of rumors and public opinion of this time confirm this sentiment. Numerous calls

and letters to party officials demanded extra checks on vaccine regimens, use of medi­cation to induce (rather than cure) diseases, and investigate, investigate, investigate! One letter raised an issue that in the local kindergarten kids got sick too often and requested that Jewish nurses be replaced by Rus­sian ones. 24. ​Fira G., interview by Anna Shternshis, New York, 2001. 25. ​On the foreign training and connections of Soviet doctors during the 1920s and 1930s, see Susan Gross Solomon, ­Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Rus­sia between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); and Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson, Health and Society in Revolutionary Rus­sia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 26. ​For more on name changes see Anna Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life ­under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 27. ​The counterintelligence agency in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even ­earlier but was officially founded on April 14, 1943. 28. ​Semen Sh., interview by Anna Shternshis, oral history, New York, 2001. 29. ​Edna B. Foa et al., “Memory Bias in Generalized Social Phobia: Remembering Negative Emotional Expressions,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 14, no. 5 (2000): 501–519. 30. ​James D. Laird et al., “Remembering What You Feel: Effects of Emotion on Memory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy­chol­ogy 42, no. 4 (1982): 646; Aphrodite Matsakis, I C ­ an’t Get over It: A Handbook for Trauma Survivors (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1996); and Martin S. Bergmann, “Reflections on the Psychological and Social Function of Remembering the Holocaust,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1985): 9–20. 31. ​Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov,” 212. 32. ​Doris L. Bergen, “No End in Sight? The Ongoing Challenge of Producing an Integrated History of the Holocaust,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the ­Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (New York: Continuum, 2010), 289–310; and Doris Bergen, “I Am (Not) to Blame: Intent and Agency in Personal Accounts of the Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies, vol. XI, forthcoming. 33. ​Konstantin Skriabin (1878–1972) was a biologist, the founder of Soviet helminthology, and a member of the Soviet Acad­emy of Science, and he won Lenin and Stalin’s state prizes. 34. ​Fira G., interview by Anna Shternshis, New York, 2001. 35. ​Georgii Shul’man, “Ne puskaete na Blizhnii Vostok, budu ezdit’ na Dal’nii,” Mishpokha 12(2) (2002), http://­mishpoha​.o­ rg​/­nomer12​/­a24​.­php (accessed August 21, 2014). 36. ​Thanks to Arkadii Zel’tser for this observation, personal correspondence, October 9, 2014. 37. ​Shul’man, “Ne puskaete na Blizhnii Vostok.” 38. ​Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 508–515. 39. ​For more on doctors and Soviet daily life see Katherine Bliss Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union (New York: Greenwood, 2004), 175–­208. 40. ​Sara K., interviewed by Anna Shternshis, oral history interview, Toronto, 2007. 41. ​Michael Ryan, Doctors and the State in the Soviet Union (New York: Springer, 2016), 54–71. 42. ​Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris. 43. ​NKVD issued a number of special memos that outlined the procedures of interrogation of every­one who survived the war in the Soviet rear. In the case of Jews, the chairs of Judenrats ( Jewish councils in the ghettos) w ­ ere considered starosty, the leaders serving the Nazis. They ­were subjected to punishment and arrest. For the transcripts of memos, see Prikaz NKVD SSSR No. 001683 ot 12 dekabria 1941 goda, “Ob operativno-­chekistskom obsluzhivanii mestnostei, osvobozhdennykh ot voisk protivnika,” http://­reibert​.i­ nfo​/t­ hreads​/­chistka​-­territorij​ -­osvobozhdennyx​-o­ t​-­okkupacii​.­97721 (accessed August  21, 2014). I would like to thank Gennady Kostyrchenko for finding ­these sources for me, and for helping me understand their language (e.g., the explanation that starostas means leaders of Judenrat). 44. ​Kostyrcenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 249.

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45. ​Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia,’ ” 33. 46. ​Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia,’ ” 33. 47. ​Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia,’ ” 33. 48. ​Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia,’ ” 35–38. 49. ​Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia,’ ” 35–38. 50. ​Vera Cheberiak has allegedly killed Andrei Iushchinskii in the Beilis trial. 51. ​Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia,’ ” 35–38. 52. ​Miron Vovsi (1897–1960), a prominent Soviet physician and cousin of Solomon Mi­khoels. 53. ​Rafes, Dorogami moei sud′by, 186. 54. ​Joshua Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin: A Revolutionary’s Life (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2016).

55. ​David S. Friedenberg, “Soviet Health Care System,” Western Journal of Medicine 147, no. 2

(1987): 214; Martin Dinges, “The Contribution of the Comparative Approach to the History of Homeopathy,” Culture, Knowledge, and Healing 3 (2001): 51–72; Alexander Kotok, “Medical Heresy Strug­gles for the Right of ‘Otherness’: Homeopathy in the USSR,” Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte 25 (2007): 229–287.

6 • “­A FTER AUSCH WITZ YOU MUST TAKE YOUR ORIGINS SERIOUSLY ” Perceptions of Jewishness among Communists of Jewish Origin in the Early German Demo­cratic Republic A N N A KO C H

Lotte Winter, born as Lotte Fleischhacker to a Jewish middle-­class f­ amily in Elberfeld, Germany, joined the Communist Party as a young w ­ oman in 1932, convinced that Marxism was the right way to b­ attle the poverty and misery she witnessed in her work for Workers International Relief.1 ­After the rise of Nazism, she emigrated to Switzerland, then France and Norway, and fi­nally Sweden. When the war ended Winter returned to Germany as soon as she could and settled in the Soviet Occupied Zone, hoping to build a better Germany. Judaism had played l­ ittle role in her home growing up, and by embracing Communism, she had distanced herself even more from her Jewish origins. Yet the Nazis persecuted her and murdered her parents ­because they ­were Jewish. Her memories of persecution and genocide made it impossible for her to disregard her own Jewishness, even though she still primarily identified as a German Communist. Reflecting on her experiences Winter concluded that “my personal relationship with Judaism was forced upon me from the outside by Hitler and the Nuremberg Laws.”2 Like Winter, other German Communists of Jewish origin grappled with what being Jewish could and should mean for them in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Although most had distanced themselves from their Jewish background and primarily identified as German Communists, Jewishness continued to play a role in their lives. Their persecution and the genocide of Eu­rope’s Jews caused some to reconsider their relationship to their Jewish origin. ­Others had always seen their Jewishness as an integral part of their self-­understanding and had turned to leftist 111

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politics to b­ attle antisemitism, perceiving their antifascism to be intertwined with their Jewishness. Regardless of their own relationship to their Jewishness, it affected how their comrades and the state perceived them. Even if they themselves considered their Jewishness unimportant, ­those around them saw them as Jews.3 In contrast to much of the lit­er­a­ture that brushes aside the Jewish origin of ­these German Communists as being of l­ ittle relevance, this chapter highlights the myriad ways in which they positioned themselves in relation to it. Relying on the term “Jewishness,” rather than Jewish identity, allows me to consider how being of Jewish origin affected the lives of ­those who did not identify or not primarily identify as Jewish. It also highlights the fluid and constructed nature of the category.4 This chapter reveals how the historical actors in this study and their environment defined and redefined the category. Communist Jews’ perspective on the meanings of Jewishness and the import it played in their lives was varied, fluid, and at times contradictory. Indeed, focusing on t­ hese so-­called non-­Jewish Jews emphasizes the importance of moving beyond narrow and fixed definitions of Jewish identity and of finding new ways of conceptualizing Jewishness.5 Highlighting the ways in which German Jewish Communists reflected on their Jewish origin, this research also contributes to recent efforts to go beyond an often judgmental perspective on t­hese Jewish politicians, intellectuals, and artists that depicts them as misguided and instrumentalized by an oppressive state.6 Many of ­these Jewish Communists left Germany immediately ­after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. In the early days of the Nazi regime, it was their po­liti­cal ideology rather than their Jewish origin that put them in danger of arrests. They fled as po­liti­cally persecuted antifascists, and that is how they primarily understood themselves when they returned. Yet during their years in exile some developed an interest in Jewish ­matters, associated with other Jewish emigrants, and joined Jewish exile organ­izations.7 In par­tic­ul­ar, emigrants in Mexico closely followed and discussed the news about the Nazi persecutions.8 A number of Communist Jews such as Leo Zuckermann, Erich Jungmann, and Rudolf Feistmann joined Menorah, an organ­ization of German-­speaking Jewish refugees founded in Mexico in 1940.9 Anna Seghers, Otto Katz, and Egon Erwin Kisch, among ­others, founded the Heinrich Heine Club, another Mexican exile organ­ization that or­ga­nized readings, lectures, and concerts. The club, as well as the journal Freies Deutschland, frequently discussed the persecution of Jews in Eu­rope.10 The journal’s editor, Alexander Abusch who l­ ater became the German Demo­cratic Republic’s (GDR) minister of culture, reflected on the persecution of Jews throughout German history in his writings both in the journal and elsewhere.11 “How can we think about the c­ hildren’s shoes of Maidanek, without thinking about our own ­children,” wrote Abusch in 1944.12 The news about the Nazi crimes did not leave Communist Jews untouched. Most had lost friends or ­family, and they grieved for their murdered loved ones.13 Most German Jews could not envision living in the “country of murderers” ­after the war. Still, a small number chose to go back, and Communists or Socialists



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who considered themselves primarily as po­liti­cal exiles ­were more likely to return. The exact number of Communist Jews who chose to s­ ettle in East Germany is difficult to establish ­because most did not register with a Jewish Community. A 1946 census suggested that more than 9,000 Jews lived in the Soviet Occupation Zone; the estimated number of p­ eople listed as racially persecuted ­under Nazism was more than 30,000.14 Despite their small numbers, Jews held an impor­tant symbolic role in both East and West Germany. Scholarship on postwar ­German Jewish history often neglects Jews living in the GDR, yet their attitudes, perspectives, and experiences w ­ ere distinct from Jews in Western Germany and deserve attention. Their experiences also differed from Jews in other parts of Communist Eu­rope, not only ­because of Germany’s distinct role in the Holocaust but also b­ ecause Germany did not have a distinctly Jewish leftist working-­class movement before the war. Jews had been a small minority among German Communists.15 In the 1950s, the spread of anti-­Communism made life increasingly difficult for ­those German Jewish Communists who had emigrated to the United States, but most did not return to Germany out of necessity.16 Instead, Communist Jews settled in Soviet-­occupied Germany b­ ecause they nurtured high hopes for the possibilities of creating a dif­fer­ent society. They returned to build this new Germany in the eastern part of the country, the first “socialist state on German soil.”17 Yet not all of them ­were socialist hardliners. Some sympathized with socialism and shared the dream of an antifascist Germany without being party members. As Hans Mayer, who did not join the party but considered himself a Communist, recalled, “We allowed ourselves to hope a lot, back then, when the war had ended, and every­thing seemed pos­si­ble.”18 For a few years their optimism seemed justified. More so than the Western Allies, Soviet authorities followed a stringent denazification policy.19 Jewish Communists filled positions in the SBZ’s cultural and po­liti­cal elite, and the support they received from the party meant that, unlike other German Jews, they did not have to begin from scratch in 1945. Frequently the party assisted returnees in finding suitable positions. Alfred Dreifuß, a dramaturge who survived the war in Shanghai, explained that ­after their return the party leadership discussed placements for returnees. He welcomed the proposal to help reconstruct the Volksbühne (­People’s Theater). Looking back, he remembers that his heart was “filled with pride and with the knowledge that now he ­really belonged again.”20 Initially a multifaceted self-­understanding that combined Jewishness and Communism seemed pos­si­ble in the emerging East German state. The attitude of the po­liti­cal elite to Jewish ­matters seemed mostly unproblematic. Members of the party leadership attended Jewish festivities and holiday cele­brations, supported the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine, and acknowledged crimes against Jews. Although most Communist Jews remained atheists, some de­cided to join one of the re-­founded Jewish Communities ­after they returned.21 Leo

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Zuckermann and his wife who had returned from Mexico, for instance, registered with the Community and convinced ­others to take the same step. The journalist Hilde Eisler likewise joined, arguing that although being Jewish played ­little role in her life, “­there is solidarity and the feeling of belonging [among Jews], especially ­after the Holocaust.”22 Clara Berliner, who returned to Berlin from the Soviet Union, agreed. “­After Auschwitz,” she declared, “one must take one’s origin, one’s past, seriously.”23 Their self-­understanding as antifascists became intertwined with a wish to show solidarity with Nazism’s primary victims.24 For some the Nazi genocide proved the need to build a socialist society. Julius Meyer, a member of the Communist Party and since 1946 the leader of the Jewish Community in East Berlin, connected his suffering during the war with the need to build a better ­future: “83 of my ­family members ­were killed in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. My wife and my son w ­ ere also gassed in Auschwitz and burned. . . . ​I had to watch once how thousands of ­children w ­ ere gassed and burned. Iw ­ ill do all in my power to make sure that such a t­ hing can never happen again in Germany.”25 Like Meyer, other Communist Jews publicly commented on and discussed the persecution of Jews ­under Nazism.26 Disputing the notion that the Holocaust was marginalized and suppressed in East Germany, recent research shows how Jews in East Germany created room for remembering their par­tic­u­lar history of persecution within the state’s antifascist framework.27 Jewish Communists did not only join the reemerging Communities but they also engaged with Jewish displaced persons, soldiers, and relief workers who temporarily lived and worked in Berlin and in the SBZ. Anna Seghers, for instance, interacted with and wrote about the Jewish refugees in the Berlin DP camp, taking a stance against frequent antisemitic attacks in the German press.28 In the immediate aftermath of the war, Jews in the Soviet zone, some of whom w ­ ere Communists, also received support from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC), and initially the party tolerated the material aid that the JDC provided to Jewish Communists. Charlotte Holzer who had joined the Communist Party in 1931 and ­later became a member of a Jewish re­sis­tance group, was in dire need of assistance ­after the war. She frequented events or­ga­nized by JDC, enjoying not only the food but also the opportunities to meet other survivors, as well as Jewish soldiers from all over the world.29 Some Jewish Communists advocated for the return of Jewish property and survivors’ rights for state support.30 Yet the postwar status of Jewish victims, as well as potential restitution, soon became a point of tension. Some in the higher echelons of the party like Paul Merker, a member of the Central Committee of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party; SED), or Leo Zuckermann, head of President Wilhelm Pieck’s chancellery, advocated for Jewish interests; ­others within the SED rejected both restitution and the notion that Jewish victims should have rights similar to po­liti­cal opponents of Nazism. The final version of a decree regarding pension and welfare rights of ­those persecuted ­under



“After Auschwitz You Must Take Your Origins Seriously” 115

Nazism, provided additional pensions and support payments but no restitution.31 Jews ­were included in the group of “victims of fascism” as racially persecuted, which qualified them for more generous pensions than given to the average GDR citizen but smaller than ­those granted to Communist “fighters.”32 In the GDR’s antifascist narrative, as well as in many other Eastern and Western Eu­ro­pean countries, active and combatant resisters w ­ ere prioritized over allegedly passive Jewish victims. Some criticized the inherent injustice of this classification system. Fritz Selbiger, a Jewish glazier who had spent the war in forced ­labor, received a position in the newly founded Cultural Office shortly a­ fter liberation; however, he was asked to leave a­ fter six weeks b­ ecause he “was not a re­sis­tance fighter against National Socialism, but only its victim.”33 This renewed official declaration that marked them as “less worthy” troubled Jewish survivors.34 Reacting to this hierarchy of victimhood that resulted not only in lower financial payments but also in a loss of prestige for ­those who ­were deemed less worthy, Communist Jews tended to emphasize their experiences as fighters rather than victims of Nazism when narrating their pasts.35 Kurt Goldstein had joined the Communist Youth movement as a teenager, five years before the Nazis gained power. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine and then returned to Eu­rope, three years ­later to fight in the Spanish Civil War. From Spain he fled to France where he was soon interned in the French internment camp Gurs and from ­there sent to Auschwitz. In the camp Goldstein associated primarily with other Communists, and he recounted his experiences as ­those of a “communist fighter” rather than a “Jewish victim.”36 Some Communist Jews shared the official contempt for Jews’ “passivity.”37 Alfred Dreifuß, for instance, bemoaned the lack of Jewish re­sis­tance, asking, “But what did the wealthy Jews do? They spent enormous amounts for the Nazis. . . . ​ ­There ­were some young Jews who fought. But how few ­were we in the camps who wore the red/yellow badge.”38 Although the artist Lea Grundig did not directly reproach Jewish victims, her depiction of her husband’s artwork “Victims of Fascism,” painted in the immediate aftermath of the war, distinguishes between a passive Jewish victim and an active antifascist fighter: “­There w ­ ere two ­people. One still crooked in death from the hatred and contempt that killed him. He died of it; his prisoner clothing bears the star. The other lies t­ here with the face to the sky. Pride and greatness are in it. They could not break him. He wears the badge of the po­liti­cal prisoner and the number Hans [her husband] wore for five years.”39 Writing about her husband’s painting, she upholds its message that robs the Jewish victim of their agency, focusing on what motivated their murderers, while the po­liti­cal prisoner resisted (“they could not break him”). In Grundig’s depiction, the Jewish and the Communist victim are united in their fate of being persecuted by the Nazis but separated by their presumed reaction to their persecution. Whereas the persecution of Jews and Communists ­under Nazism opened the possibility for both groups to look at commonalities in their past, the distinction between victims and fighters separated them. Communist Jews tended to place

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themselves with the “fighters.” They had no incentive to publicly remember or discuss their recollections of being persecuted for racist reasons as Jews. Application forms to join the Organ­ization of Victims of the Nazi Regime reveal the value system ingrained in the official narrative and surviving Jews’ efforts to fit their experiences into this framework. The form asked respondents to list personal details, time of imprisonment, life in hiding, emigration, illegal membership in po­liti­cal parties or re­sis­tance groups, and party and ­union membership before 1933. Yet the form did not inquire about religious belonging, ethnicity, or persecution on racial grounds.40 When filling out t­ hese forms, some specifically asked to be included as fighters against fascism, rather than victims, highlighting their acts of re­sis­tance.41 Arguably this discourse that devalued part of their past experiences contributed to a self-­depiction and self-­perception that minimized Jewishness. But ­there w ­ ere other reasons, beyond a wish to distance themselves from a past as passive victims, that led Communists of Jewish origin to disregard or downplay the importance of Jewishness within their self-­understanding. Officially, the newly founded state considered Jews a religious group. Angelika Timm critically notes this labeling, stating that “ignoring Jewish history and tradition, East German ideology characterized Jews solely as a religious group.”42 Yet whereas individual Jews in postwar Germany found myriad dif­fer­ent ways to understand their Jewishness, the state’s official stance matched the self-­understanding of the German Jewish leadership ­after 1945, who in rejection of Nazi racial criteria emphasized religious affiliation. In February 1946 the Jewish Community in Berlin sent a letter to the city magistrate to emphasize that “the term ‘Jew’ is again to be understood exclusively in the religious sense.”43 In 1948 Siegbert Kahn, a SED functionary of Jewish descent who had returned two years ­earlier from ­England, published a book titled Antisemitismus und Rassenhetze (Antisemitism and Racial Hatred) in which he argues that Jews form “merely a religious community.” Kahn sympathized with the Jewish national awakening in response to the Holocaust and suggested that Jews should have the right to “their own national development.” Yet he asserted that ­those who remained in Germany should express their Jewishness solely in religious terms.44 A definition of Jews as merely a religious community left ­little room for atheist Communists of Jewish background, and not all subscribed to this definition. Helmut Eschwege, who grew up in a religious ­family, had joined the Communist Party during his years of exile in Palestine.45 ­After the war he returned to the Soviet Occupied Zone. He originally worked as a merchant but then took a position with the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte (Museum of German history) in Berlin and began writing history. Eschwege did not embrace Judaism as a religion, but he explained that he wanted to express his solidarity with the victims. In a party questionnaire Eschwege had stated his nationality as “Jewish,” explaining that the experience of persecution made him regard himself as Jewish rather than German.46 Eschwege’s self-­understanding as Jewish in national terms was an



“After Auschwitz You Must Take Your Origins Seriously” 117

exception, although ­others shared his sense of loyalty to a Jewish collective ­because of the shared experience of Nazi persecution. The official definition of Jews as a religious community also meant that, ­because party members ­were expected to be atheist, Communist Jews ­were expected to refrain from registering with the re-­founded Communities. Kurt Goldstein remembers that Jewish Communists who returned from emigration joined Jewish Communities only for a short time, b­ ecause in the 1950s the SED ruled “that with an atheist world view and a po­liti­cal commitment to the party one could not belong to a religious Community.”47 ­There was also a broader suspicion of a self-­understanding that emphasized particularity, rather than belonging to the Communist collective. In sync with Communist tradition, the SED preached assimilation into a socialist, classless society as the way to end antisemitism and as a solution to the “Jewish Question.”48 According to this view, ­there would be no need to hold onto a Jewish self-­understanding in this new society. Indeed, many Communists of Jewish descent embraced the idea that Communism made any expressions of a Jewish self-­understanding superfluous and emphasized their self-­understanding as German Communists. Recha Rothschild had joined the “Spartakists” in 1917 and continued her po­liti­cal activities under­ ground ­after 1933.49 ­After two years in a Nazi prison she succeeded in crossing the border to France in 1937, where she survived in hiding before returning to East Berlin in 1947. During the last two years of her French exile Rothschild wrote a memoir, conveying her experiences through a character named Mirjam. In her memoir Rothschild emphasizes her self-­understanding as a German antifascist. Looking back at her work with Bertha Pappenheim before joining the Communist Party, she criticizes it as bourgeois and insufficient: “Mirjam did not want to exclusively put her efforts into social work among the Jewish population. She, who had long revoked religious rites, felt a member of the German ­people whose language she spoke and whose culture she had a­ dopted. She also suspected that the solution of the Jewish question was dependent on the general conditions in Germany.”50 Thus, Rothschild, in line with Communist thought, depicts socialism as the solution to the “Jewish Question.” Still, her memoir reveals her pride in her Jewish ancestors and a connection to her Jewish background, despite her self-­ understanding as a Communist who had freed herself from bourgeois Jewish roots. Although most Communists from a Jewish background emphasized their belonging to the Communist collective, their environment continued to mark them as Other. The SED expected its members to renounce Judaism and distance themselves from their Jewishness, but even ­after they did so, the party continued to perceive them and single them out as Jews, creating a confusing and frustrating situation. In 1948 the SED established the Central Party Control Commission (Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission; ZPKK) which investigated, interrogated, and purged party members. Its 1949 plans for the examination of party members mention Jewish emigrants as a group that needed to be particularly scrutinized

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b­ ecause they w ­ ere likely to have contact with Zionist movements, the U.S. Secret Ser­vice, and a “trotzkyite-­Jewish movement.”51 Around the same time, the Soviet Union, with the GDR following suit, changed its outlook on Israel and took an anti-­Zionist stance. The overall atmosphere had shifted. The party’s support for restitution dwindled, and admissions of guilt for anti-­Jewish persecution largely dis­appeared from public discourse. ­Earlier declarations of solidarity with victims of the Holocaust, accepting aid from the JDC, public support for the founding of a Jewish state, or advocating for restitution—in short anything that connected Communist Jews with their Jewishness, even if in an ephemeral manner—­could come to haunt them in the early 1950s. The arrest of Noel Field, who formerly worked for the U.S. State Department, as an “American master-­spy” in Prague in May 1949 marked the starting point of party purges in the GDR. Soon t­ hose whom Field had helped in his position as director of the American Unitarian Universalist Ser­vice Committee’s relief mission became suspect in the eyes of the state; many of ­those who had received his help ­were Communist Jews. In February 1950 Alexander Abusch lost his position in the Politburo. During his second meeting with the ZPKK his interrogators focused on his Jewishness. They asked about his membership in Menorah, his membership—he was not a member—in the Jewish Community, and his relationship with Leo Zuckermann and Paul Merker. In a letter to the examining authorities Abusch emphasized that he had not “shown any interest in Jewish ­matters since his 18th birthday.”52 Abusch’s letter, apol­o­getic in its tone, stressed how distanced he felt from Judaism. He went to g­ reat lengths to hold onto his position and his membership in the party, even denouncing ­others such as Merker.53 ­These interrogations terrified Communists of Jewish descent. They feared the loss of positions, arrest, and worse. Communists like Abusch had built their lives around the party. Their c­ areer, their worldview, and their self-­understanding depended on their belonging to the Communist collective. Exclusion from the party led to social isolation as ­people tended to fear that contact with traitors could endanger them.54 In a 1950 letter to Walter Ulbricht, the General Secretary of the SED, Abusch depicted the loss of his po­liti­cal posts as the “most difficult situation” of his life.55 Clearly, he needed to stress the urgency when pleading his case in front of Ulbricht. Still, his and o­ thers’ reactions show the deeply disturbing and unsettling consequences of ­these party examinations. Rudolf Feistmann, the son of a Jewish timber merchant who, like Abusch, had emigrated to Mexico, committed suicide in June 1950 a­ fter enduring several interrogations. The official cause of his death was listed as meat poisoning, but in a last letter to Paul Merker he explained that he would end his life b­ ecause of the party’s mistrust.56 Merker himself was soon expelled from the Central Committee and the SED ­because of accusations of espionage. Apart from Merker, most of ­those accused in connection with the Field affair w ­ ere Jewish, but the interrogations (Abusch’s case formed an exception) focused on their contacts with Noel Field and accusations of espionage, not on their Jewishness.57



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Public anti-­Jewish rhe­toric became prevalent in late 1952 with the “anti-­ cosmopolitan campaign,” when the SED leadership initiated a purge directed mainly against p­ eople who had returned from their exile in Western countries, many of whom had a Jewish background. The campaign in the GDR formed part of a larger wave of party purges that swept the Eastern Bloc in the early 1950s and labeled returnees from Western exile as “internationalist,” “Trotskyists,” and “cosmopolitans.” As it did u­ nder the Nazi regime, “cosmopolitan” stood largely as a synonym for “Jewish.”58 The party purges originated in Moscow, but the SED leadership seized the opportunity to consolidate its power.59 Like Abusch, other Communist Jews ­were pushed to distance themselves from their Jewish origins during party examinations, although not all chose to do so. Eschwege held onto his belief that Communism and a sense of belonging to the Jewish ­people could be combined.60 The party disapproved of his self-­definition as Jewish in national terms, but Eschwege initially asserted his right. ­After pressure he renounced this self-­definition, but a few weeks l­ ater he sent a letter of complaint to the Committee for the Examination of Party Members.61 The contrast between his understanding and the SED’s official attitude resulted in an ongoing debate with the state authorities over the right to choose his self-­identification.62 Leo Zuckermann likewise had to justify his decision to join the Jewish Community. Like o­ thers, he identified solidarity with the victims as the reason why he became a member of the Community a­ fter 1945.63 During the purges Zuckermann resigned from his positions with the party and declared that his joining the Community was a sentimental ­mistake. Fearing arrest, he fled to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1952 and l­ ater emigrated to Mexico. Paul Merker, who had already been expelled from the party in connection with the Noel Field Affair in 1950, became the prime victim of the purge. A ­ fter the show trial against Rudolf Slánský and other high-­ranking Czech Communists, most of whom w ­ ere Jewish, in November 1952, Merker was arrested as a spy.64 Only six years ­after the liberation of Auschwitz, the German Communist leadership may have feared that an overt persecution of Jews might damage its image. Merker, who had advocated for financial restitution for Jewish survivors and supported the creation of the state of Israel but was not Jewish himself, became the ideal target. ­W hether b­ ecause of his interest in restitution or b­ ecause the party accused him of being a “Zionist agent,” many contemporaries thought of Merker as Jewish.65 He symbolized Jewishness without being Jewish. In the days following Merker’s arrest, the party accused several high-­ranking members with a Jewish background of being Zionist agents, among them Leo Zuckermann and Alexander Abusch. In late 1952, SED agents searched Jewish Community offices, and confiscated their files.66 The Central Party Control Commission detained Julius Meyer, president of the association of Jewish Communities in the GDR, on January 6, 1953. In a second interrogation on January 8, Günter Tenner, vice president of ZPKK, asked Meyer to provide a detailed report on the Community members and their contacts with the West, especially with Israel.

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Meyer refused to do so.67 ­After his release Meyer warned other leaders of Jewish Communities in the GDR of their potential arrest. Within a week, Meyer and most of the Jewish leadership fled the country. More than 400 Jews left the GDR in January 1953.68 On January 4, 1953, the GDR’s official newspaper Neues Deutschland (New Germany) had published a statement titled “Lessons from the Trial against the Slánský Conspiracy.” The ZK argued that the Slánský conspiracy had revealed “the criminal activities of Zionist organ­izations. Sailing ­under a Jewish-­nationalist flag, disguised as a Zionist organ­ization and as diplomats of Amer­i­ca’s client state Israel, t­ hese American agents performed their deeds.”69 Zionism, the text further stipulated, served merely the “interests of Jewish cap­i­tal­ists.”70 The aforementioned journal Freies Deutschland was discredited as an “organ of Zionist opinions.” Using antisemitic ste­reo­types such as the “cap­it­ al­ist Jew,” SED propaganda pushed back on claims for restitution and supported anti-­Jewish feelings among the party elites and the population.71 Yet the SED leadership vehemently denied having antisemitic motives. Heinz Brandt, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who r­ ose in the party before he left the GDR in 1956, remembered a SED functionary giving this explanation in the days following the Slánský affair: As a result of the teachings of the Slansky trial we had to examine functionaries who returned from the West emigration especially. Is it not a fact—­and this has absolutely nothing to do with racist antisemitism—­that Jews stemmed mostly from lower m ­ iddle classes [kleinbürgerlichen Schichten], have no social connection with the working class, and have relatives and friends everywhere in the West?72

While rejecting accusations of antisemitism, this SED functionary relied on antisemitic ste­reo­types of Jews as disloyal cosmopolitans and carriers of bourgeois culture to justify the disproportional attacks on Communists of Jewish origin. Such ste­reo­types of Jews as foreign and conspiratorial and as representing imperialism, capitalism, and Zionism ­were widespread in the SED, marking Jews as a target when fears about the regime’s stability grew.73 This discourse of Jews as cap­i­tal­ist, bourgeois, and disloyal created a Jewish Other specific to the newly founded state’s ideology: a “subjective, negative counter-­ideal against which the power­ful mainstream [was] defined—­and define[d] itself.”74 In the eyes of the party a Jewish background made members suspect, and at the same time Jewishness proved a ­simple way to target ­those who w ­ ere not compliant. Party members who happened to be Jewish ­were easily defamed as “Zionist agents.” Although Jews ­were overrepresented among ­those who came ­under party scrutiny, not all Jews in the party w ­ ere persecuted, neither w ­ ere all of ­those examined Jewish. As the Merker case shows, a constructed association with Jewishness was sufficient. The party leadership used antisemitism as a po­liti­cal tool



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to get rid of members who proved unwilling to subordinate their ideals to the party line and to replace them with more compliant followers.75 Attitudes and motivations among the SED leadership, however, differed considerably, leading to a frequently incoherent message.76 Hermann Axen, a Jewish camp survivor, was promoted to take over the responsibility for training party cadres from Fritz Dahlem, a non-­Jew who was dismissed from all duties in May 1953. At the height of the purges in January 1953, East German courts, in accordance with the GDR’s constitution, gave prison sentences for spreading antisemitic propaganda,77 and as David Shneer shows in chapter 8, the Dutch Jewish singer Lin Jaldati performed and was celebrated in the early 1950s. Th ­ ese mixed messages, the strict denial of antisemitism, and the muddled language that conflated Jewishness, Zionism, and cosmopolitanism made it difficult for Communist Jews to “read” the situation. Consequently, they understood and reacted to the purges differently. The backdrop of the Nazi years could sway them in ­either direction: some feared they w ­ ere failing to see the onset of another wave of persecution, whereas ­others found the antifascist language that denied antisemitism reassuring. The Nazis, ­after all, had openly embraced their antisemitism. The emphasis on anti-­Zionism soothed ­those Communists of Jewish descent who shared the party’s anti-­Zionist sentiments.78 In his memoir the economist Jürgen Kuczynski depicted antisemitism as forced on the SED leadership by the Soviet Union, and the writer Arnold Zweig described accusations of antisemitism as Western propaganda.79 Yet, fellow writer Alfred Kantorowicz, commenting on the Slánský trial, strongly condemned the campaign as antisemitic and compared it to the persecution of Jews ­under Nazism.80 O ­ thers believed in the accusations against Paul Merker, and some like Lotte Winter, mentioned at this chapter’s beginning, appear to have barely noticed the purges.81 Her memoir briefly mentions the flight of her friend Leo Zuckermann, but she sets his sudden disappearance within the context of the Noel Field affair, and although she looks back critically at her reaction at the time, she does not refer to Zuckermann’s Jewishness or the party’s antisemitism: It was a big blow for me when Leo vanished westwards from one hour to the other just before Christmas. My first reaction was anger and indignation, coupled with grief at the loss of a close person who disappointed me, . . . ​I was inexcusably naive, had no idea of the events in the Soviet Union (since 1937). Many years l­ater I learned from ­those concerned of the Field pro­cess. . . . ​Perhaps Leo was afraid of being severely punished even though he was innocent. My opinion at the time was: The party is always right! . . . ​For me it was clear: “Leo has abandoned our republic.”82

­Others focused solely on the persecution of Westemigrants when depicting the purges. Klaus Gysi lost all his positions—­deputy director of the Kulturbund, editor for the Aufbau publishing h­ ouse, and member of the East German

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parliament—­and was out of work for six months. Years ­later he maintained that he had not been targeted as a Jew but rather b­ ecause his brief stay in France during the war had marked him as a “Westemigrant.”83 Similarly, Hermann Axen, in an interview in the early 1990s, did not mention any connection to antisemitism when he spoke at length about the Slánský trial and the ensuing witch hunt in the GDR. Like Gysi he argued that emigration to Western countries caused the s­ uspicions of the party: “I admit in retrospect, that this [the purges] was a bad ­thing. . . . ​ This concerned comrades who ­were in Western emigration. If I had returned from Mexico, the U.S., Sweden, e­ tc., to Germany in 1945, I could also have been affected.”84 Yet Communist Jews’ efforts to distance themselves from their Jewish background and their responses in party interrogations when asked about their Jewishness suggest that most ­were aware that their Jewishness played a role in the campaign. Members of the party’s higher echelons such as Klaus Gysi, Albert Norden, Alexander Abusch, and Hermann Axen obfuscated or minimized their Jewishness.85 Albert Norden, the son of a Wuppertal rabbi who in 1949 had been appointed the head of the Press Section within the East German Office of Information and then purged in 1952, referred to his ­father as an academic.86 Yet it was not only p­ eople in the higher echelons of the party who distanced themselves from their Jewish origins. Victor Klemperer, the son of a small-­town Reform rabbi, came to Communism late in life, motivated by a mix of careerism and belief in the Soviets. Although he became a delegate of the Cultural Association in the parliament, he never held a position of power. Responding in 1953 to an honorific speech that mentioned his Jewishness, he insisted, “I am a German and a Communist and nothing e­ lse.”87 Klemperer had converted to Protestantism twice but felt ambivalent about his conversions.88 He remained a German nationalist, deeply invested in German culture, and had no connections to the Jewish Community. Still, he refers to himself as Jewish at vari­ous points in his diary. In August 1955, he wrote, “But I grieve about my blindness. . . . ​I was alone then—­a Jew, an undefined liberal in a society that did not re­spect me; I am t­ oday in a society that disrespects me.”89 Klemperer’s interest in resuming his academic c­ areer ­after the war and his acute understanding of the po­liti­cal realities in the GDR may have made him wary of any public mention of his Jewish origins, even though he still felt Jewish in some ways. Publicly, Communists of Jewish origin tended to construct life stories that distanced them from their Jewish background.90 Alexander Abusch’s memoir Der Deckname (The Alias) contains a depiction of his bar mitzvah that emphasizes his rejection of Judaism. He looks at Jews with the sympathetic but condescending eyes of a Communist who understands the historic pressures that made them what they are: Who could know what went on in the boy’s head. . . . ​Had he already made the decision [. . .] never to pray in this for him strange and alien language while his



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voice filled the room with the prescribed, upscale litany? . . . ​He did not internally hate ­those whom he renounced. To him ­these ­people remained more or less near and dear as he gradually began to explain . . . ​the social conditioning of their weaknesses and limitations of their customs and traditions.91

In contrast to this vignette, Abusch wrote the remaining text in the first person. Using the third person to describe his final experience as a Jew in the religious sense emphasized how l­ ittle he wanted to connect this experience with his pre­sent self. In an essay titled “The Non-­Jewish Jew,” the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, born in Galicia into a f­amily of religiously observant Jews, who like Abusch distanced himself from religious Judaism, points to the fact that the very rejection of Jewish religion or culture can define the “non-­Jewish Jew’s” Jewishness.92 Abusch’s grappling with his origin and the disclaimers he provides, w ­ hether in the previously mentioned party interrogations or ­here in his memoir, show the extent to which Jewishness or “Jewish difference,” to use a term from Lisa Silverman, ­shaped his narrative, even though and, in some way ­because he insisted on its irrelevance.93 The wave of anti-­Jewish persecutions played out less violently in the GDR than in other Eastern Eu­ro­pean states. ­There was no show trial, and ­after Stalin’s death in March 1953 the campaign petered out. Paul Merker’s trial in front of the GDR Supreme Court in 1955 was held in secret. He was found guilty but a year ­later was quietly released. The SED’s antisemitic campaign deeply unsettled some Jews in the GDR. Helmut Eschwege exclaimed, “For years we Jews in the GDR lived in fear and horror [Angst und Schrecken].”94 Yet other Communists with a Jewish background appeared l­ ittle shaken by t­ hese events. They remained invested in the proj­ect of building an antifascist state in the GDR and de­cided to stay. Some distanced themselves from their Jewishness, whereas other Jewish Communists remained members of the Jewish Community, at times despite party pressure.95 Combining Communism and Jewishness seemed more manageable for ­those who did not rise to higher party echelons and did not seek a po­liti­cal c­ areer.96 Lin Jaldati continued to publicly perform her Jewishness as a Yiddish singer and succeeded in combining her Communism with a strong self-­identification as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.97 As Shneer shows, Yiddish played an impor­tant role in public per­for­mances of GDR antifascism and memorial culture.98 Although German Communists of Jewish origin could appreciate t­ hese per­for­mances as public repre­sen­ta­tions of Jewishness, they by and large did not have any cultural familiarity with Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish traditions, and most had not grown up speaking Yiddish. Yiddish, representing in the eyes of Jaldati’s audiences “the language and culture of an oppressed ­people,”99 perhaps was also embraced as part of East German antifascism, b­ ecause it did not invoke the ste­reo­type of the “petit-­bourgeois,” “cap­i­tal­ist,” “cosmopolitan” German Jew. ­There was no repetition of the public antisemitic discourse of the anti-­ cosmopolitan campaign ­after 1953. Yet Jewishness continued to ­matter, and ­those

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who escaped the purges or ­were rehabilitated may well have worried that their Jewishness could be used against them in the f­ uture. Nathan Steinberger, a Communist from a Jewish Orthodox ­family who had been a victim of Stalin’s ­Great Purges, returned to Germany in 1955. During the investigation of anti-­Stalinist intellectuals in 1956, he came u­ nder suspicion and was removed from his position as departmental chief in the state planning commission. He perceived his removal as connected to his decision to join the Jewish Community ­after his return. ­Later, he learned from his Stasi file that the party considered to discredit him as a “Zionist” to prevent him from talking about his experiences ­under Stalin.100 Alfred Kantorowicz, who had stayed in East German in 1953 despite his reading of the purges, fled in 1956. In a letter to Marta Feuchtwanger he explained his reason, “­under Ulbricht we could not live, just as we could not live ­under Hitler.”101 In the original German he uses the term unsereins, which points to a specific group. Kantorowicz does not explain who he includes within this group, or how he defines this “unsereins,” but his Jewishness may well have played a role ­here. The Feuchtwangers and Kantorowicz, as well as many ­others like Arnold Zweig, Anna Seghers, Hans Mayer, and Rudolf Leonhard, shared left-­wing po­liti­cal views, intellectual interests, experiences of exile, a strong connection to German culture and, even though they mostly did not make it a central part of their self-­image—­a Jewish origin. Jewishness remained part of their hybrid identity and separated them in some ways from the non-­Jewish German community. Communists from a Jewish background had varied and constantly changing feelings ­toward the possibility of such an “unsereins,” the notion of Jews as a distinct group to which they belonged. ­Those who considered themselves as part of a Jewish collective tended to do so in a specific way. They did not regard themselves as religious nor did they practice Judaism, and some did not even join the Community. Most defined their Jewishness as a response to the Holocaust. Isaac Deutscher captured their sentiment when he described his own relationship to Judaism: “Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.”102 They did not necessarily perceive this self-­understanding as Jewish as “forced upon” them, as Lotte Winter described it. For some, stating their Jewishness in solidarity with victims of the Nazi genocide became part of their antifascist and antiracist outlook. Opposing fascism became linked with supporting and showing loyalty to the primary victims of Nazi racism. ­Others considered their Jewishness irrelevant. They stressed a past as antifascist fighters against fascism, rather than as Jewish victims. However, time and again their environment reminded them of their Jewish origin. The examination and interrogation of Jewish members in the early 1950s marked them as outsiders, as having loyalties to another place, when they considered themselves first of all part of the Communist collective: this illustrated the discrepancy between the SED’s ideology that promised integration and equality in exchange for assimilation into



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a communist community and a real­ity that discriminated against ­those of Jewish origin. Jewishness mattered in the GDR, and Communists of Jewish descent, ­whether they rejected or embraced their Jewishness, found themselves forced to grapple with their origin.

Acknowl­edgments This chapter was made pos­si­ble by a Fellowship from the Eu­ro­pean Holocaust Research Infrastructure and support from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. I also thank the editors of this volume for their careful reading and helpful comments.

notes 1. ​Lotte Winter, Unsere Vergangenheit, Unsere Zukunft 1933–1955, Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), ME

961, 118, 119. ­Unless other­wise marked, all translations are my own. 2. ​Winter, Unsere Vergangenheit, 4. 3. ​See Hendrik Niether, Leipziger Juden und die DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht, 2013); and chapter 8 by David Shneer in this volume. 4. ​See Paul Lerner, “Round T ­ able Introduction: Jewish Studies Meets Cultural Studies”; Lisa Silverman, “Reconsidering the Margins”; and Leora Auslander, “The Bound­aries of Jewishness, or When Is a Cultural Practice Jewish?” all in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8 (2009). 5. ​See also Lisa Silverman, “Beyond Antisemitism: A Critical Approach to German Jewish Cultural History,” Nexus 1: Essays in German Jewish Studies (2011): 27–45. 6. ​See chapter 8; Philipp Graf, “Twice Exiled: Leo Zuckermann (1908–85) and the Limits of the Communist Promise,” Journal of Con­temporary History 56, no. 3 (2020); Helmut Peitsch, “Antifaschistisches Verständnis der eigenen jüdischen Herkunft in Texten von DDR-­ SchriftstellerInnen,” in Das Kulturerbe deutschsprachiger Juden, ed. Elke-­Vera Kotowski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 117–142. 7. ​Judit Bokser Liwerant, “Über Exil, Migrationen und Kulturelle Begegnungen,” in Mexiko: Das Wohltemperierte Exil, ed. Renata von Hanffstengel et al. ( México, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Interculturales Germano-­Mexicanad, A.C., 1995), 35–36. 8. ​Graf, “Twice Exiled,” 7. 9. ​Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 42. 10. ​Peter Chametzky, “Paul Westheim in Mexico: A Cosmopolitan Man Contemplating the Heavens,” Oxford Art Journal 24 (2001): 25–43. 11. ​Alexander Abusch, Der Irrweg einer Nation, 1946; and Die Juden von Nuernberg, unter Pseudonym “A. Foerster,” Archiv der Akademie der Künste (AAK), Alexander-­Abusch-­Archiv, 36. 12. ​Alexander Abusch, “Hitlers Todesfabriken und die Verantwortung der Deutschen, 1944,” in Entscheidung unseres Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Aufbau-­Verlag, 1977), 394–401. 13. ​See, for instance, letters from Brunhilde Eisler to Gerhart Eisler, February  26, 1947, and March  19, 1947, Bundesarchiv, Berlin (BArch), NY 4117/61; Friedrich Schütz, “Die Familie Seghers-­Reiling und das jüdische Mainz,” Jahrbuch der Anna-­Seghers Gesellschaft 2 (1992): 151–173; Anna Seghers and Alexander Stephan, Anna Seghers im Exil: Essays, Texte, Dokumente (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993); Anna Seghers, “The Outing of the Dead Schoolgirls,” Kenyon Review 31, no. 5 (1969): 613–642, 637; and Alfred Kantorowicz, Deutsches Tagebuch (Munich: Kindler 1959–1961), 54.

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14. ​Frank Stern, “The Return to the Disowned Home: German Jews and the Other Germany,” New German Critique, 67 (1996): 57–72, 60; Ulrike Breitsprecher, “Die Bedeutung des Judentums und des Holocaust in der Identitätskonstruktion dreier jüdischer Kommunisten in der frühen DDR—­Alexander Abusch, Helmut Eschwege und Leo Zuckermann,” Jahrbuch für Kommunismusforschung 16 (2010): 193–208, 199; Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Köln, Böhlau: 2000), 2–3. 15. ​Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their ­Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 25. 16. ​Gerhart Eisler, a journalist and prominent Communist Party member, was charged for refusing to be sworn in at a hearing before the U.S. Congress House Un-­American Activities Committee and for misrepresenting his Communist Party affiliation on his immigration application in 1947. He was sentenced but managed to flee the United States. On Eisler, see Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in Amer­ic­ a (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999), 124–28. On the witch hunt atmosphere see also Kantorowicz, Deutsches Tagebuch, 98; Ingeborg Rapoport, Meine ersten drei Leben: Erinnerungen (Berlin: NORA, 2002). 17. ​Interview with Ruth Benario in John Borneman and Jeffrey M. Peck, Sojourners: The Return of German Jews and the Question of Identity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 37–60; Recha Rothschild, Memoirs 1880–1947, LBI, NY, ME 243,173; interview with Sophie Marum in Vincent von Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant: Juden in der DDR (Berlin: AufbauTaschenbuch-Verlag, 1993), 27. 18. ​Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 303. 19. ​The much smaller Soviet Occupied Zone scrutinized almost twice as many p ­ eople during its denazification pro­cess as the three other zones. However, the Soviets soon ­adopted the policy of differentiating between “nominal Nazis” and “active Nazis.” By March 1948 all “nominal” Nazis had been reprieved, and a large number of NSDAP members had been integrated into the new society. See Herf, Divided Memory, 73, 74; Norman M. Naimark, The Rus­sians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995), 66, 361, 456; Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 357. 20. ​BArch SGY30 EA 1496, Alfred Dreifuß, Über die jüdische Emigration in Schanghai von ­1939–1947; Alfred Dreifuß, Ensemblespiel des Lebens: Erinnerungen eines Theatermannes (Berlin: Buchverlag Der Morgen, 1985), 222. 21. ​See Helmut Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen: Erinnerungen eines Dresdner Juden (Berlin: Links 1991); Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 159; Interview with Ruth Benario in Bornemann and Peck, Sojourners, 37–60; Matthew Stibbe, “The Limits of Rehabilitation: The 1930s Stalinist ­Terror and Its Legacy in Post-1953 East Germany,” in De-­Stalinising Eastern Eu­rope: The Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims ­after 1953, ed. Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (Basingstoke: ­Palgrave Macmillan), 87–108. 22. ​Interview with Hilde Eisler in Borneman and Peck, Sojourners, 96. 23. ​Interview with Clara Berliner in Robin Ostow, Jews in Con­temporary East Germany: The ­Children of Moses in the Land of Marx (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 85. 24. ​See Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 66; interviews with Ruth Benario and with Hilde Eisler in Bornemann and Peck, Sojourners, 37–60; 81–101; interview with Florence Singwald in Wofgang Herzberg, Überleben heißt Erinnern, Lebensgeschichten deutscher Juden (Berlin: Aufbau-­Verlag, 1990); Nora Goldenbogen, “Leon Löwenkopf, erster Vorsitzender der Jüdische Gemeinde zu Dresden nach der Shoah, Versuch einer Annäherung,” in Zwischen Erinnerung und Neubeginn: Zur deutsch-­jüdischen Geschichte nach 1945, ed. Susanne Schönborn (Munich: Peter Lang, 2006), 99–100; see also Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 159. 25. ​Letter from Julius Meyer to a student, 10/24/1950; Centrum Judaicum Archiv (CJA), Berlin, Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR–5 B1-2.



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26. ​See Alexander Abusch, Irrweg einer Nation (Berlin: Aufbau-­Verlag 1946); Siegbert Kahn,

Antisemitismus und Rassenhetze (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1948); Hilde Huppert, Arnold Zweig, and Heidrun Loeper, Engpass zur Freiheit: Aufzeichnungen der Frau Hilde Huppert über ihre Erlebnisse im Nazi-­Todesland und ihre wundersame Errettung aus Bergen-­Belsen (Berlin: Kontext, 1990); Viktor Mika and Arnold Zweig, Im Feuer vergangen. Tagebücher aus dem Ghetto (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1959). For additional examples of Jews in the GDR using the state’s antifascist ideology to publicly commemorate the Shoah, see chapter 8. 27. ​Stephan Stach, “ ‘The Jewish Diaries . . . ​Undergo One Edition ­after the Other’: Early ­Polish Holocaust Documentation, East German Anti-­Fascism and an Emerging Holocaust Memory,” in Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in Communist Eastern Eu­rope, ed. Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, and Stephan Stach (Budapest: CEU Press, 2021) ; David Shneer, “Eberhard Rebling, Lin Jaldati, and Yiddish ­Music in East Germany, 1949–1962,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (2015); also see chapter 8. 28. ​Klaus Schulte and Anna Seghers, “Was ist denn das überhaupt, ein Jude?: Anna Seghers’ Einspruch anlässlich der antisemitischen Hetze gegen die Insassen der Berliner Transitlager für “displaced persons” in der Presse der Vier-­Sektoren-­Stadt im Jahre 1948: Rekonstruktion,” Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 4 (2002): 196–231. 29. ​Charlotte Holzer, Lebenserinnerungen, BArch, EA 2014/1, pp. 265–269. 30. ​Angelika Timm, “The Approach of the East German Po­liti­cal Elite t­ owards Compensation, Restitution and Reparations, 1945–1955,” Journal of Israeli History 18 (1997): 263–282; Graf, “Twice Exiled.” 31. ​Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden. Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-­ Verfolgte seit 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 361–364; Philipp Graf, “Twice Exiled,” 8–20; Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 312–313. 32. ​Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 301–312; Angelika Timm, “Ein ambivalentes Verhältnis: Juden in der DDR und der Staat Israel,” in Zwischen Politik und Kultur—­Juden in der DDR, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 24; Keßler, Die SED und die Juden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), 38. 33. ​Fritz Selbiger, Memoiren, Familienchronik, CJA, 6.2. Nr. 3. 34. ​Interview with Peter Kirchner, in Herzberg, Überleben heißt Erinnern, 413; see also Goldenbogen, “Leon Löwenkopf,” 96–98; Charlotte Holzer, Lebenserinnerungen, 249. 35. ​Walter Sack, “Berliner Portraets, ‘Bist Du nicht der Oskar?’: Juedischer Arbeiterjunge, antifaschistischer Kämpfer, Emigrant, Handwerker, Bürgermeister,” Berliner Zeitung, December 17/18, 1988; Alfred Dreifuß, “In eigener jüdischer Sache . . .” (Manuskript, ohne Ort, ohne Datum), AAK, Alfred Dreifuß Archiv, 976; see also for instance the accounts of Erich Simon in BArch, DY55/V278/4/56, and Arnold Munter in BArch, DY55/V278/3/176. 36. ​Kurt Goldstein in Herzberg, Überleben heißt Erinnern; see also Sack, “Berliner Portraets”; Dreifuß, “In eigener jüdischer Sache . . .”; BArch DY55/V278/4/56; 37. ​Sack, “Berliner Portraets”; Dreifuß, “In eigener jüdischer Sache . . .” 38. ​Dreifuß, “In eigener jüdischer Sache . . .” 39. ​Lea Grundig, Gesichter und Geschichte (Berlin: Dietz, 1958), 329. 40. ​BArch, DY55/V278/3/176. 41. ​BArch, DY55/V278/4/56. 42. ​See Angelika Timm, Jewish Claims against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy (Budapest: CEU Press,1998), 39. 43. ​Letter of the Jüdische Gemeinde to the Magistrat der Stadt Berlin, 02/11/1946, CJA, 5A 1, no. 73. 44. ​Kahn, Antisemitismus und Rassenhetze, 91. 45. ​Hajo Funke, Helmut Eschwege, and Robin Ostow, “The Unorthodox Approach to Jewish History in the German Demo­cratic Republic: An Interview with Helmut Eschwege,” New German Critique 38 (Spring–­Summer, 1986): 88–104.

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46. ​Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 66. 47. ​Kurt Goldstein in Herzberg, Überleben heißt Erinnern, 351. 48. ​Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 31, 32. 49. ​The Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) was a socialist group active in Germany from

autumn 1914 to the end of 1918. 50. ​Rothschild, Memoirs 1880–1947, 31. 51. ​Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 68. 52. ​Quoted in Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 84. 53. ​Jeffrey Herf, East German Communists and the Jewish Question: The Case of Paul Merker, Fourth Alois Mertes Memorial Lecture. Occasional Paper No. 11 (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1994). 54. ​Jürgen Kuczynski depicts the social isolation of Rudolf Herrnstadt, a journalist and politician of Jewish descent who was removed from his position in the SED’s Politbüro in 1953. Jürgen Kuczynski, Ein linientreuer Dissident. Memoiren 1945–1989 (Aufbau, Berlin 1994), 47. 55. ​Breitsprecher, “Die Bedeutung des Judentums,” 204. 56. ​Herf, Divided Memory, 114. 57. ​Jeffrey Herf, “East German Communists and the Jewish Question: The Case of Paul Merker,” Journal of Con­temporary History 29 (1994): 634, 635. 58. ​Cathy S. Gelbin, “Rootless Cosmopolitans: German-­Jewish Writers Confront the Stalinist and National Socialist Atrocities,” Eu­ro­pean Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 23 (2016): 863–879, 865. 59. ​Soviet antisemitism culminated in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953. Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 59–63; Herf, “East German Communists and the Jewish Question,” 634. 60. ​Interview with Clara Berliner in Ostow, Jews in Con­temporary East Germany, 85. 61. ​Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 66. 62. ​Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 66. Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 159. 63. ​Breitsprecher, “Identitaetskonstruktion,” 201. 64. ​Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries, 140. 65. ​Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 54; also in the early scholarship, see, for instance, Paul O’Doherty, “The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show ­Trials and Anti-­Semitism in Eastern Eu­rope 1948–54,” German History 10, no. 3 (1992): 302–317. 66. ​Mario Keßler, “The Soviet Style of Power in Eastern Germany: Some Notes on the SED,” Rus­sian History 29, nos. 2–4 (2002): 317–327, 325. 67. ​Angelika Timm, “The Burdened Relationship between the GDR and the State of Israel,” Israel Studies 2, no. 1 (1997), 30; Ulrike Offenberg, “Seid vorsichtig gegen die Machthaber”: die jüdischen Gemeinden in der SBZ und der DDR 1945–1990 (Berlin Aufbau-­Verl., 1998), 85. 68. ​Mertens, Davidstern, 56; Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 100–102. Jews made up a small proportion of the large number of p­ eople crossing the border to West Berlin. In March 1953 more than 57,000 East Germans ­were registered as refugees in West Berlin. See Timm, Jewish Claims against East Germany, 56. 69. ​“Beschluss des SED-­Zentralkomitees über die Lehren aus dem Prozess gegen das Verschwörerzentrum Slansky,” in Neues Deutschland 3 (1953). 70. ​“Beschluss des SED-­Zentralkomitees über die Lehren aus dem Prozess gegen das Verschwörerzentrum Slansky.” 71. ​Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 105; Andreas Herbst, “Großmutter im Sterben: Die Flucht der Repräsentanten der Jüdischen Gemeinden 1953 aus der DDR,” in Helden, Täter und ­Verräter: Studien zum DDR-­Antifaschismus, ed. Annette Leo and Peter Reif-­Spirek (Berlin: Metropol, 1999), 27; Timm, “The Burdened Relationship,” 32. 72. ​Heinz Brandt, Ein Traum der nicht entführbar ist. Mein Weg zwischen Ost und West (Berlin: Verlag europäische Ideen, 1977).



“After Auschwitz You Must Take Your Origins Seriously” 129

73. ​Michael Meng, “East Germany’s Jewish Question: The Return and Preservation of Jewish

Sites in East Berlin and Potsdam, 1945–1989,” Central Eu­ro­pean History 38 (2005): 617–619.

74. ​Silverman, “Beyond Antisemitism,” 29. 75. ​Timm, Jewish Claims against East Germany, 56–58. 76. ​For dif­fer­ent interpretations of the motivations b ­ ehind the SED’s antisemitic campaign see

Keßler, Die SED und die Juden, 57–63; Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von links. Kommunistische Ideologie, Nationalismus und Antizionismus in der frühen DDR (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 391–398; Meng, East Germany’s Jewish Question, 617–619; Peter Monteath, “The German Demo­cratic Republic and the Jews,” German History 22, no. 3 (2004): 455. 77.  O’Doherty, “The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show ­Trials, 315. Article 6 of the constitution states, “All citizens have equal rights before the law. Incitement to boycott of demo­cratic institutions or organ­izations, incitement to attempts on the life of demo­cratic politicians, the manifestation of religious and racial hatred and of hatred against other p­ eoples, militaristic propaganda and warmongering as well as any other discriminatory acts are felonious crimes within the meaning of the Penal Code. The exercise of demo­cratic rights within the meaning of the Constitution is not an incitement to boycott. Whoever has been convicted of such a crime is disqualified from holding public office or a leading position in economic or cultural life. He also loses the right to vote and to stand for election.” See United States Department of State, Documents on Germany 1944–1985, Department of State Publication 9446, 278–306. 78. ​For instance, Victor Klemperer. See Victor Klemperer, Ich ­will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. Tagebücher 1942–1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-­Verlag, 1995), 369. 79. Kuczynski, Ein linientreuer Dissident, 47. 80. ​Kantorowicz, Deutsches Tagebuch, 353,77. ­After he fled the GDR, Kantorowicz fashioned himself as a long-­time opponent of repressive aspects of the regime, and he may have rewritten his diary, which he published ­after his flight, to sustain this narrative. See Josie McLellan, “The Politics of Communist Biography: Alfred Kantorowicz and the Spanish Civil War,” German History 22, no. 4 (2004): 536–562; Michael Rohrwasser, Stalinismus und die Renegaten: Die Literatur der Exkommunisten (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 118. 81. ​Interview with Sophie Marum in Wroblewsky, Thora und Trabant, 28; Winter, Memoirs, 304. 82. ​Winter, Memoirs, 303. 83. ​Jonathan Kaufman, A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Eu­rope (New York: Viking, 1997), 121. 84. ​Hermann Axen, Ich war ein Diener der Partei: Autobiographische Gespräche mit Harald Neubert (Berlin: Edition Ost, 1996), 116, 117. 85. ​Herf, Divided Memory, 120. 86. ​Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 4. 87. ​Klemperer, So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen, 353, 354. 88. ​Marion A. Kaplan, “Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities, and Community,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (2002): 18, 19. 89. ​Klemperer, So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen, 504. 90. ​See for instance, Alexander Abusch, Mit offenem Visier: Memoiren (Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1984); Rothschild, Memoirs 1880–1947; Friedrich Karl Kaul, Es Wird Zeit, Dass Du Nach Hause Kommst (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 1959), and also Max Paul Friedman, “The Cold War Politics of Exile, Return, and the Search for a Usable Past in Friedrich Karl Kaul’s Es Wird Zeit, Dass Du Nach Hause Kommst,” German Life & Letters 58 (2005): 55. 91. ​Alexander Abusch, Der Deckname (Berlin: Dietz, 1981), 17. 92. ​See Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-­Jewish Jew,” in The Non-­Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed.  Tamara Deutscher (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 31; see also Silverman, “Beyond Antisemitism,” 36.

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93. ​Silverman, “Beyond Antisemitism.” 94. ​Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 138. 95. ​See Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, 138; Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt, 159; Interview

with Ruth Benario in Bornemann and Peck, Sojourners, 37–60. 96. ​Walter Besser in Herzberg, Überleben heißt Erinnern, 268. 97. ​David Shneer, “Eberhard Rebling . . .”; see also chapter 8. 98. ​See chapter 8. 99. ​See chapter 8. 100. ​See Nathan Steinberger, Berlin, Moskau, Kolyma und zurück: Ein biographisches Gespräch über Stalinismus und Antisemitismus mit Barbara Broggini (Berlin, 1996), 103–104. 101. ​Alfred Kantorowicz to Marta Feuchtwanger, 12/24/1958, Institute für Zeitgeschichte, Nachlass Alfred Kantorowicz, F 230/1. 102. ​Deutscher, “Who Is a Jew?” 51.

7 • BEING JEWISH IN SOVIET BIROBIDZHAN Between Stigma and Cynicism A G ATA M A K S I M O W S K A

Anthropologists have extensively discussed subjective responses to both the Soviet state system and Soviet ideologies embedded throughout the institutions of that system over the past three de­cades.1 ­There is also a vast body of lit­er­a­ture on the l­egal and social framework provided by the Soviet state for its Jewish citizens and the influence of that framework on their identity.2 The aim of this chapter is to provide insight into the special nature of the Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR) as an ideological and social construction that ­shaped an experience that was, when compared to other parts of the Soviet Union, uniquely Jewish. Established in 1934, the JAR is often regarded as a mere epiphenomenon of Soviet socioeconomic policy and as a failed experiment in creating a Soviet Jewish homeland. Scholars usually focus on the first years of its existence and the ideological background to its creation. Its presence in Soviet propaganda, lit­er­a­ture, and communication directed to audiences abroad has also been a subject of research.3 Most of the published works on Birobidzhan, the administrative center of the JAR, including Weinberg’s comprehensive book,4 focus on the rise and fall of a certain utopian idea of Birobidzhan, imaginative yet unachievable, as demonstrated by the region’s history. Few authors have focused on the characteristics of the lived experience of Jews who inhabited the region. The small Jewish community, which at the settlement’s peak in the postwar years reached 30,000 (almost one-­third of the JAR’s population),5 seemed to have many obvious similarities with Jews in other regions of the Soviet Union. This chapter shows not only how Jewish life in this small region mirrored the situation of Soviet Jewry in general but also how its context made Jewish experience and trajectories of Jewish self-­identification ­there slightly dif­fer­ent from t­ hose in the rest of the Soviet Union. 131

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My main thesis is that two contradictory social forces that once ­shaped Jewish everyday life in the Soviet Union—­the pressure to acculture and the constant rejection fed by antisemitism—­affected Jews in Birobidzhan differently from elsewhere in the country. Experiencing the pressure to abandon one’s Jewishness while being labeled by the nominal “Jewishness” of the region created a context, which was not immediately apparent, for the development of a particularly cynical stance ­toward one’s own identity and the place one lived. This cynicism, which allowed Jews to detach themselves from the “stigma,” can reasonably be regarded both as an act of internal re­sis­tance to the widespread defamatory opinions about the region and its inhabitants and as a strategy to build a sense of community for individuals who shared the same fate. My interpretation owes a g­ reat deal to Zvi Gitelman’s notion of “passive Jewish identity” and his e­ arlier analy­sis of the acculturation and assimilation of Soviet Jews.6 Gitelman pre­sents two main external f­actors shaping Jewish identification in the Soviet Union in the absence of traditional Jewish institutions: (1) the official indication of Jewishness as one of the Soviet “nationalities” (ethnicities) in personal identification documents and (2) antisemitism. According to Gitelman, Soviet Jews ­were a “community of fate” rather than a  “community of faith.” Positive associations with Jewishness embodied in a sense of kinship and connection to other Jews, together with imposed criteria of identification, replaced faith as the main basis of Jewishness and contributed to the sense of passive Jewish identity. In a country where assimilation was never fully pos­si­ble for t­ hose whose identity was officially assigned by the state and was negatively enforced by antisemitism, acculturation—or, as Gitelman calls it, “Russianization”7—­offered only a delusional hope of ac­cep­tance by the broader society. Even ­those who identified with Rus­sian high culture and language still had to strug­gle with their fixed, provisional Jewishness and ­were seen as “naturally,” congenitally dif­fer­ent. I build on this perspective in considering phenomena that ­were also characteristic of other parts of the USSR but also go beyond it when discussing the impact that the special context of the “Jewish” national unit had on Jewish self-­ identification. I use the notion of mimicry to describe how the identification practices of acculturation and maintaining a “passive Jewish identity” in Birobidzhan co-­occurred with a par­tic­ul­ar form of a cynical local discourse of ­those who ­were conscious of the acculturation trap and preferred to play with Rus­sian cultural tropes by imperfectly copying them. In this chapter, I investigate t­ hese questions from an anthropological perspective. ­After presenting the resemblances and differences between Jews living in the JAR and ­those in the rest of the Soviet Union, I conclude by discussing the specificity of Birobidzhan regarding the question of identity. The chapter is based on ethnographic sources, particularly self-­narratives. I focus on the post-­Stalin years, a period largely of po­liti­cal stabilization in the JAR; my conclusions are based on biographical interviews gathered during my ethnographic research in the region



Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan 133

from 2008 to 2010 with subjects who, for the most part, w ­ ere born between 1930 and 1948 and reached adulthood only a­ fter Stalin’s death in March 1953.

Resemblances The postwar years in the JAR stood in sharp contrast with its ­earlier years, which ­were characterized by a dramatic series of events: the very difficult first years of settlement in the 1920s and 1930s, the Stalinist purges of 1937–1938, World War II, and, last but not least, the “black years” of 1948 to 1953 that took their toll not only on the po­liti­cal elite (many of whom w ­ ere tried and sentenced during the so-­called Birobidzhan Affair) but also on many members of the local intelligent­sia who ­were writing in Yiddish.8 Despite its cessation in the post-­Stalin period, the direct repression of just a few years before was remembered acutely by many p­ eople. The Stalinist persecutions that swept the Soviet Union from 1948 to 1953 practically obliterated Jewish communal life in Birobidzhan. Although the religious community, officially registered in 1946, was the only one recognized by the Soviet authorities in the Far East, it was u­ nder strict supervision by local party bodies. Initially this supervision was even for the sake of the community, ­because some of its members had ­family ties with local Soviet officials.9 Soon, however, the favorable situation the community had hitherto enjoyed changed radically. Several antireligious mea­sures implemented in the city reduced the size of the congregation. Workers in local factories w ­ ere denied leave on holidays even as impor­tant as Yom Kippur. According to Kotlerman, the number of p­ eople attending the synagogue on the Passover dropped down from the initial 300 to about forty in the 1950s.10 Many ­people resigned their membership, and the income of the community thus decreased. From that point onward, the synagogue was rarely open. The atmosphere in which religious Jews lived in the 1950s is reflected in the following two passages from interviews I conducted: This oblast’ was so Jewish [put ironically] that you needed to hide your Jewishness in one way or another. Why did one need to hide all this in the oblast’? If ­there had been no reason, they ­wouldn’t have been hiding it, right? Yes, this was nominally a Jewish region, in which they [the authorities] did every­thing pos­si­ble to poison all this Jewishness. . . . ​My grandpa had to conceal the fact that he went to synagogue once a year. They ­were wearing fake skullcaps—­Uzbek tubeteikas—­, . . . ​[and] pretending they ­were souvenirs.11 They did not allow us to pray. Th ­ ere was a militia man ­here. If believers ­were simply gathering, in a flat or something, he would immediately come and shoo them all away. I saw with my own eyes this militia guy push an old graybeard, over eighty. And this old man was sent flying down the stairs from the first floor. They [members of the congregation] took him home, and a week or two l­ ater he died.12

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In addition, the small congregation survived a fire in the late 1950s. ­After moving to a new building, the synagogue continued to exist ­under the constant threat of being dissolved. It usually consisted of a ­little more than twenty members, the number required by Soviet law to be registered. This was much the same as in other regions of the Soviet Union.13 Gradually, traditional rituals and observances vanished, although some retained Jewish ele­ments but ­were not actually performed in accordance with tradition. It is known that in the 1950s some community leaders performed certain functions of a burial society (chevra kadisha). Several funerals conducted according to Jewish tradition ­were mentioned by my interviewees, although ­there was no separate Jewish cemetery. Some ­women even remember sewing burial clothes (tachrichim). The following passage describes a Birobidzhan’s ­family attempt to maintain at least some traditions: When my dad was ­dying he woke all of us in the night and said: “I am ­going to the other world. But I ask one t­ hing of you. Do not bury me as a Communist; bury me as a Jew.” And I ­hadn’t known, but it turned out that he had his tallith and tefillin sewed into a duvet. All this was inside the duvet. And we buried him as a Jew.14

In 1967, the congregation consisted of forty-­three ­people, of whom the youn­ gest was sixty-­three and the eldest eighty-­four years old.15 By the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the JAR, in 1984, the synagogue was kept open only as evidence that Judaism was not being oppressed by the Soviet regime.16 Some Birobidzhan Jews, while not attending synagogue regularly, continued to engage in Jewish practices at home, which they referred to as “traditionally Jewish”: baking or frying matzah, lighting Sabbath candles, keeping the Yom Kippur fast, giving Hanukkah gelt, and reading the Torah. One of my interviewees described a custom from his childhood: ­ ere was a time of the year when my grandparents used to give me Hanukkah Th gelt. I was very much looking forward to this Jewish holiday when they gave gifts, but in fact I did not know what Hanukkah gelt meant. Only recently did I learn that Hanukkah has a historical meaning. I did not know; we ­were not taught this at school, nor could we read about it in the newspapers.17

Despite the religious repression, some traditions w ­ ere carried on, at least in part. Sometimes, they ­were kept by p­ eople who had ­limited knowledge of what was traditionally Jewish. The form of ­these rituals often combined Jewish tradition with facets of everyday Soviet life, adjusting traditions to make them fit into what was pos­si­ble. A need to maintain something Jewish in circumstances where keeping kosher was impossible broadened the category of what is Jewish. Anna Shternshis’s concept of “kosher pork” may well be applied h­ ere.18 “Birobidzhan



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schnitzel,” known to be in­ven­ted by a Jewish cook, functioned as a local Jewish dish along with the classic gefilte fish, despite the obvious fact that it was made of non-kosher meat (including pork). ­These traditions ­were carried on primarily by older members of families, sometimes even in secret and out of sight of the rest of the ­family, or they ­were performed without mentioning that they ­were part of Judaism, as in the following story: They observed Yom Kippur, for example, but they d­ idn’t say so. It was like this: “My d­ aughter, we are in a hurry ­today so we are not g­ oing to have breakfast.” At lunchtime, they telephoned home: “Please, get your s­ ister something to eat, because we cannot come home for lunch.” I accepted that without question, b­ ecause they ­were busy ­people. . . . . And also, my mum would bake matzah. But I did not know the word “matzah.” We only knew “kulich” [a traditional Rus­sian holiday bread] for Easter. And my mum was saying that this is kulich, but a dif­fer­ent, Jewish one. She never said “matzah.” But we had broth with matzah.19

When asked about Jewish tradition, many in­for­mants also mentioned vari­ous dishes made by their m ­ others or grand­mothers, such as tzimmes, strudel, kugel, broth with mandelekh or matzebrai, gefilte fish, and kreplach. Some recalled their elders using separate utensils for dairy and meat products. ­Others remember parents ­going to buy a chicken “somewhere,” “to somebody,” prob­ably from the last shochet, who is said to have died in 1963.20 Jewish secular culture was, in turn, reduced to rarely held theatrical and musical per­for­mances presented as pure entertainment: no serious attempt was made to carry on Soviet Yiddish culture, which had been seriously harmed by the purges against Soviet Yiddish intelligent­sia from 1948 to 1953. Within the paradigm of kul’turnost’ (culturedness),21 ­these per­for­mances w ­ ere mainly aimed at satisfying the popu­lar sense of what “culture” was and how cultured persons should behave. Their goal was also to provide residents with an or­ga­nized, ready-­made way to spend their ­free time. The ideological meaning of leisure was very impor­tant: no sphere of life was f­ree from the influence of socialist directives. The dominant motifs of mass culture ­were expressed through the cele­bration of events that gained their significance from the mythologized Communist universe and its calendar. The new secular holidays w ­ ere celebrated in the form of a prazdnik—an occasion not only for f­amily and other gatherings but also for shows, marches, parades, and concerts. My interviewees recall the predominant Soviet discourse on holidays: All culture was Communist. On TV we used to watch only two t­ hings: [programs or films about] the ­Great Patriotic War and the Revolution. According to the TV, no other events ever existed. In the w ­ hole history of humanity t­here ­were only ­these two events.22

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­ eople did not know what Passover is, did not know what Rosh Hashanah is, did P not know what Hanukkah is. We w ­ ere supposed to consider ourselves one society with the same traditions—­mostly Soviet ones: May  1 [International Workers’ Day], November  7th  [October Revolution Day], New Year’s Day, and March  8 [International ­Women’s Day].23

One of the biggest prazdnik cele­brations in Birobidzhan occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the JAR. ­There was a g­ rand show at the stadium, with many concerts and art per­for­mances during which soldiers, athletes, c­ hildren, and ­others ­were directed to create one big pliable body—­creating living images conveying a propagandist message. This anniversary was a time for new signage, when all the plaques in the city w ­ ere replaced with ones in the Yiddish language; for example, a “Shukh fabrik” plaque appeared on the wall of a shoe factory. Yiddish plaques ­were part of the prazdnik and ­were meant to make vis­i­ble the region’s nominal specialness. In general, however, Jewish themes rarely appeared in arts per­for­mances in Birobidzhan. One of my interviewees mentions just a few of them, which played a very small part in the cultural life that was dominated by Rus­sian popu­lar ­music: Sometimes a bizarre man would sing something in Yiddish at a concert. But we ­were too embarrassed to sing in Yiddish. . . . ​­There was this band—­Tsayt. Tsayt was not Jewish. Only afterward did we understand that it was a Jewish name. They played vari­ous kinds of popu­lar m ­ usic. Of course, they played Jewish ­music too—­ once in an eve­ning and that was it. They played Rus­sian ­music and only sometimes did they add one or two [ Jewish] songs. “Tumbalalaika”24 or some other one.25

The role of Jewish culture in Birobidzhan reflected what Gitelman identified as characteristic of the entire period of de-­Stalinization: “Soviet Yiddish culture, though officially revived, was l­ imited to vestigial organs, such as [the literary magazine] Sovetish Heymland [Soviet Homeland], and some amateur theaters.”26 In Birobidzhan, a Jewish amateur theater was established in 1965, sixteen years ­after the Kaganovich Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater was shut down in 1949. Its or­ga­nizer, and first director, was Mikhail Bengelsdorf. He was succeeded by Berta Shilman, a student of the ­great actor and artistic director Solomon (Shloyme) Mi­khoels.27 The troupe consisted of thirty actors, mostly from the older generation. Some performed Rus­sian and Yiddish songs at the cinema before screenings. The theater closed in the mid-1980s, a­ fter most of the actors had died or ­were no longer able to perform. Much like the Kaganovich Theater, this one also functioned as a symbol of Jewishness. As in other places in the Soviet Union, ­going to this theater was a demonstration of being Jewish.28 The theater in Yiddish became a “new tradition”—­one of few cultural institutions left for Jews to identify with. My interviewees seemed to be very attached to the “Jewishness” of Birobidzhan Jewish theaters. They frequently referred to theatrical per­for­mances when talking



Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan 137

of being Jewish in Soviet times. Both Yiddish theaters are recalled with nostalgia. Still, the Soviet version of Yiddish culture, especially Soviet Yiddish folklore and what remains of Jewish cuisine, is for many p­ eople more familiar, more convincing, and more appealing than Jewish religious tradition. The Jewish amateur theater’s repertoire in the 1960s and 1970s mainly focused on the shtetl of the distant past.29 The plays it performed reflected a larger phenomenon, as described by Igor Krupnik: the socialist culture created for Jews operated with “safe” themes like scenes from the plays and novels of Sholem Aleichem and by referring broadly to the legacy of the shtetl.30 Jewishness as reduced to musical and theatrical folklore seemed to be thematically detached from the real experience of the ­people of Birobidzhan, despite being the only cultural offerings that w ­ ere somehow connected to Jewishness. Yet, ­these per­for­mances still managed to evoke a sense of solidarity, emotional responses, and mutual understanding for their viewers, who shared a similar fate. The rarely played “Tumbalalaika” became a symbol of Jewish culture to be protected. The following story, told by a singer from Birobidzhan, illustrates the role a Jewish popu­lar song could play in evoking collective, yet hidden, emotions: When I was a child, speaking Yiddish was forbidden. ­People did not talk aloud about being Jewish. . . . ​But my mum used to sing me songs and I listened to this beautiful, melodic language. And I learned t­ hese songs by heart. I remember one concert. Though Jewish songs ­weren’t heard from the stage, this one concert I ­will remember forever. It was a concert to entertain ­people ­after a typical socialist competition between factories in the region. When we came, they asked us what we ­were ­going to perform. And I said “Tumbalalaika.” You can guess their reaction. . . . ​ “Well, maybe something dif­fer­ent?” I answered: “­Either ‘Tumbalalaika’ or nothing.” They fearfully let me go on stage. ­There w ­ ere KGB agents in the audience and other impor­tant figures. But I said: “I am g­ oing to perform Jewish songs.” I remember how big the hall was. Of course, I was terrified on the inside. But when I came on stage and when they said that I was g­ oing to perform a Jewish folksong, it was a solemn and joyful moment for me. A ­little victory for the Jewish nation! And when I started singing, every­body stared at me. . . . . ­Later, Jews approached me backstage, speaking in low voices: “Thank you very much.” And I answered: “Why so quietly? You should speak loudly! They w ­ ere all in tears of gratitude. I felt like I had torn down this ­whole “curtain.”31

The trauma of being silenced by being deprived of one’s own language was a common experience not only in Stalinist times but also many years ­later for the ­whole Jewish population in the USSR. By 1959, 76.4 ­percent of the Jews of the country considered Rus­sian their m ­ other tongue.32 In Birobidzhan, a­ fter the closing of the last school that taught in Yiddish and the intentional burning of thousands of Jewish books in a local library from 1949 to 1953, it became harmful to one’s c­ areer or safety to speak Yiddish. Reduced to a secret language in families, it

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soon became detached from its role as a cultural transmitter and instead divided the generations. Census data shows that 17.2 ­percent of Birobidzhan Jews in 1970 considered Yiddish to be their first language, but by 1979 this proportion decreased to 14.2 ­percent, while 83.3 ­percent declared Rus­sian as their m ­ other tongue.33 For some time, Yiddish was alive in parks, among the el­derly chatting on benches. They ­were the only ones f­ ree from surveillance. But when they w ­ ere gone, Yiddish was gone too. Among the Jews of Birobidzhan, parents w ­ ere the main actors embodying and transmitting cultural vio­lence by projecting their feelings of fear and shame related to their Jewishness. By not speaking Yiddish to their ­children, parents thought they ­were protecting their ­children from inheriting their language, as if they w ­ ere protecting them from their own mistaken way of being. The lesson they conveyed was that nothing positive could come from Yiddish: the language was a burden to be relieved of, a stigma to be erased. They learned to be fluent in Rus­sian and Rus­ sian culture and taught the same to their ­children. Some of my interviewees shared how Yiddish, and indeed their Jewishness, was hidden from them: My parents, like other parents, ­were in fear. They did not want us to know this language [Yiddish]. ­People w ­ ere afraid. They w ­ ere afraid of their own Jewishness.34 My grandparents ­were hiding Yiddish from me as well as they could, ­because they wished me well. One wanted to protect every­thing one had, to keep it secretly inside oneself.35 Do you want to know how we learned that our f­ ather was Jewish? One day, while he was working in the forest, my ­brother went to bring him lunch. He approached the place and ­there was another worker ­there, from Amurzet, also a Jew. And they ­were talking. My b­ rother ran home whispering: “Our d­ addy just spoke the Jewish language.” So even in families, they did not speak about this, even to their ­children.36

And then t­here was the Birobidzhaner Shtern—­the Yiddish newspaper that used to be displayed all over the world as proof of Soviet re­spect for the Jewish citizens of the USSR and of the development of Yiddish culture in the JAR. Yet, the newspaper was said to have had no specifically Jewish content37 that would have satisfied the needs of its local readers. Although some Yiddish writers, like Boris Miller and Itsik Bronfman, ­were on the editorial board, and ­there was a literary column on Sundays, my interviewees who can read Yiddish say the Birobidzhan Shtern used to be an almost exact copy of the local newspaper, the ­Birobidzhanskaya Zvezda.38 Especially during the anti-­Zionist campaign ­after the  Six-­Day War in 1967, the Birobidzhan Shtern reprinted anti-­Zionist articles from the Rus­sian press—­accompanied by a remarkable number of letters to the editor in which readers shared their opinions on how good life in Birobidzhan was for Jews and condemned Zionism.39



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Radio news broadcasts in Yiddish began in 1935, but by the 1970s the only news in Yiddish ­were short bulletins, “Es redt Birobidzhan” (Birobidzhan Calling). One interviewee told me, “For the radio news we would take articles from Pravda or Izvestia and translate them into Yiddish. It was very Soviet style.”40 Although some arts programs w ­ ere broadcast on Saturdays and Sundays,41 unsurprisingly the topics centered on Sholem Aleichem’s prose, accompanied by folksongs. As did Jews living in other parts of the Soviet Union, the Jews in Birobidzhan also experienced pressures to acculturate, if not yet to assimilate.42 They w ­ ere denied the right to develop a positive Jewish identity and encouraged instead to identify with Soviet—­that is, Russian—­culture. Yet, the “Jewish identity” that was assigned to the subjects was defined in fully “national” terms through their official classification, which functioned as an instrument to create social divisions and thereby hinder the Jews’ assimilation to the Rus­sian majority. Official discrimination and grassroots antisemitism on the basis of the nationality assigned in the fifth paragraph of their internal passports exacerbated Jews’ sense of estrangement. As a result of this unresolved tension, the Jews of Birobidzhan, like ­those in the rest of the Soviet Union, experienced a split identity, an internal cognitive dissonance. Acculturated yet not bonded with their own culture, they w ­ ere legally and socially recognized as the Other in Soviet society. The inherited national (that is, ethnic) category with which Birobidzhan Jews had to live was far from neutral in its consequences. The Soviet system created its own internal hierarchy of nations. The “internationalism” touted as an ideal for socialist and eventually Communist society was never applied in practice but survived only in the official discourse. Indeed, in the name of the equality of nations, ­people of dif­fer­ent ethnic origins ­were required to shed what made them ethnically par­tic­u­lar and at the same time w ­ ere kept bound to their fixed national identifications. Looking at the hierarchy of ethnic groups in the USSR in relation to the order of administrative units, as Krupnik explains, we see that the Rus­sians ­were at the top, followed by the fourteen titular nationalities of the other ­union republics, then the twenty-­nine nationalities with autonomous republics, and lastly the ethnic groups with autonomous regions and areas: “Jews, according to this categorization, ­were ranked along with other p­ eoples of autonomous provinces somewhere between the 44th and the 50th position, among some hundred Soviet nations. When judged by their population share, Jews formed the seventh largest Soviet nation in 1926 and 1939, the eleventh in 1959 and the sixteenth in 1979.”43 The size and importance of one’s assigned administrative unit had significant consequences, especially for t­hose nationalities whose role and population ­were small. Such ethnic groups had, for example, few representatives in the Supreme Soviet of Nationalities and ­were infrequently mentioned in encyclopedias, other reference books, and exhibitions. In addition to being marginalized when compared to the other nations of the Soviet Union, Jews ­were also harshly victimized by the quota system at universities. Rejection based on one’s passport or identity card was an officially legitimized way for state officials and universities

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to express antisemitic attitudes. The Jews of Birobidzhan ­were certainly not excluded from such mistreatment. Consider t­hese excerpts from interviews I ­conducted, which illustrate Birobidzhan Jews’ experience of being “invalids of the fifth category.”44 I graduated from the University in Khabarovsk. My colleagues went on to do doctoral studies. They kept asking me why I d­ idn’t [continue my formal education], and I fi­nally replied that I did not need to. A friend told me ­after his rejection: “You ­were right not to try. They ­don’t accept Jews.”45 My ­uncle went to the western USSR to find a job. He was a good specialist. They told him: “We need specialists, come [for an interview], and bring your passport.” He brought the passport and they told him bluntly: “We are sorry but in the fifth paragraph of your passport it says ‘Jewish.’ We do not need Jews ­here.”46

For Soviet Jews, and in this re­spect Birobidzhan was no exception, assimilation was pos­si­ble only for the next generation born of mixed marriages, t­hose who could fi­nally be recognized as Rus­sians. Other Soviet Jews, who did not want to be caught between a rock and a hard place, took up the strug­gle to emigrate. In the end, for many, emigration proved to be the only pos­si­ble way to have their Jewish identity fully acknowledged.

How Was the JAR Dif­fer­ent for Jews? As we have seen, the life of Jews in Birobidzhan mirrored that in the Soviet Union in general. But t­ here w ­ ere also distinctive features of their everyday life that w ­ ere related to the region’s unique history. Birobidzhan may be thought of as being more “Jewish” than the other parts of the USSR, but mostly in terms of a socialist modernist plan or even a topos, rather than as a place of real “autonomy.” One has only to look at the Bauhaus architect Hannes Meyer’s ambitious urban plans of 1933–1934 for the Jewish socialist city of Birobidzhan that ­were never carried out. The creation of the JAR reflected the Soviet drive to strengthen the southeastern border of the vast post-­tsarist empire, socioeco­nom­ically transform the Jewish population, and reinforce Soviet power through colonial methods of territorial division and assigning subjects to po­liti­cally ordered geo­graph­ic­ al units.47 The modernist concept of creating the “new Jew” through agricultural colonization was implemented by the Soviet government both in response to the real social and economic prob­lems of the Jewish population and as a biopo­liti­cal proj­ect to transform an ethnic group (and ­human bodies being part of it) into one that could follow the expected social changes.48 An even clearer example of this modernist phenomenon is the interest that the 1920s Soviet eugenics movement had in productivization as a way to affect h­ uman heredity, resulting in the ge­ne­tic transfor-



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mation of Jewish bodies.49 Like many transformative endeavors, this took place against the ­will and the needs of individuals, who lacked the power resist it. James Scott’s definition of “high modernism”—­a totalizing discourse built on gigantic plans born of the magnified imaginings of modernism, a belief in scientific and technological pro­gress, and the possibility of rationally designing the social order—­could usefully be applied ­here: the state was an instrument to satisfy this hubristic imposition of schemes onto a society treated as an object that was scientifically (statistically) defined.50 Of course, the proj­ect itself was promoted by the Soviet authorities by means of consciously applied national rhe­toric. Not only productivization—as a way of creating the new h­ uman being, the new Jew for the new times—­but also the idea of building Jewish nationhood on the land ­were widely deployed. But the messages ­were inconsistent. For example, in 1926 the high-­ranking Soviet politician Mikhail Kalinin said, “The Jewish ­people now face the g­ reat task of preserving their nationality. For this purpose, a large segment of Jewish population must transform itself into a compact farming population,”51 Yet, two years l­ ater, Semyon Dimanstein, the head of the Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land (OZET), stated, “We need a compact Jewish settlement not for any kind of nationalist purposes, from which we are far removed, but for the sake of concrete goals which are connected with the general upbuilding of socialism in our country.”52 The Jewish audience from abroad was given yet another narrative. Leftist organ­izations and individual activists, especially from the United States, Canada and Argentina, ­were seduced by the victorious story of the Jewish proletarian state into generously supporting it with financial and in-­kind assistance.53 In addition, ICOR (Organ­ization for Jewish Colonization in Rus­sia), Ambidjan (American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidzhan), and the Argentinian Jewish organ­ ization PROCOR (Society to Assist the Productivization of the Eco­nom­ically Ruined Jewish Masses in the Soviet Union) also sent volunteers to Birobidzhan. But although the fund­rais­ing was very successful and many leftist activists from abroad w ­ ere enchanted by the imaginative idea of building a Jewish socialist republic, few ­were keen to move t­ here.54 Despite Birobidzhan’s very favorable popularity overseas, the situation on the ground was worse than in other places in the Soviet Union ­because of the region’s peripheral status, l­imited institutional capacity, distance from impor­tant cultural centers, and lack of an educational culture and infrastructure. Its harsh climate and poor-­quality housing resulted in a constant fluctuation of the population from the time it was founded. Jews constituted 8.8 ­percent of the total Birobidzhan population in 1959 (14,269 ­people), but from 1959 to 1970 their numbers declined by 16 ­percent, a disproportionate decrease considering that the Jewish population in the entire Soviet Union dropped by only 5.14 ­percent during ­those years.55 The impossibility of leading a traditional Jewish life, followed by the repression of Yiddish secular culture, proved that the “Birobidzhan proj­ect” was

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unconvincing and unreliable.56 ­After the period of antisemitic purges, Birobidzhan remained nothing more than con­ve­nient propaganda, mainly for foreign Jewish audiences.57 Efforts to ensure the region’s validity as a center for Jewish life caused uniquely absurd situations, as in the establishment in 1978 of the Birobidzhan Jewish Chamber M ­ usic Theater (KEMT), whose Moscow-­based artists usually performed outside the region, despite being officially based in Birobidzhan. KEMT clearly did not serve the needs of Birobidzhan’s inhabitants. The theater’s “as if ” existence not only confirmed the region’s ephemeral character but may also have worsened the situation for Soviet Jews as a ­whole, ­because promoting the allegedly Jewish character of Birobidzhan impeded Jewish activities elsewhere and provided a justification for not d­ oing more for Jewish culture. KEMT served not only as a rationale for not supporting Jewish culture in the big Soviet centers of the Diaspora like Moscow and Kiev but also was a response to Soviet Jews’ growing interest in the pro-­emigration movement and Israeli culture and to international pressure for observing the rights of Soviet Jews.58 For Moscow artists, being from Birobidzhan could have been perceived as embarrassing. Birobidzhan was a metonymy for the negative ste­reo­type of Jewishness as being a source of stigma and so something that should be rejected. This offered an additional challenge for Jews in Birobidzhan who ­were trying to cope with Soviet antisemitism. They rejected the artificial character of Birobidzhan. It did not help that its caricatured “Jewishness” had been assigned to them against their ­will: When you w ­ ere outside the region and you admitted that you w ­ ere from h­ ere, you ­were immediately called a zhid [k-­ke].59 Our city was called “Slytown” [khitryigorod, Khitrograd]. On the train the conductors laughingly announced that we ­were now passing through Slytown.60 When I was on a business trip I never used to say that I was from Birobidzhan. I  introduced myself instead as being from Khabarovsk. I was afraid. . . . ​I was embarrassed.61

Thus, Birobidzhan was not only a showcase of “Jewishness” in the Soviet Union but also embodied long-­standing threads of popu­lar antisemitism. The Jews of Birobidzhan had no opportunity to influence the “Jewish culture” assigned to the region from above but instead had to live with the antisemitic badge of being k-­kes from Slytown. Despite its propaganda touting the equality of all nations, the Soviet system not only failed to fight popu­lar antisemitism but even enabled its survival in everyday interpersonal relations. This kind of antisemitism was of course more vis­i­ble during the state-­driven campaigns and purges against the Jews but persisted considerably beyond that time.



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Being Jewish in Birobidzhan Birobidzhan Jews responded to the dual stigma of being negatively ste­reo­typed as “Jews” and “Jews from Birobidzhan” by reworking their own sense of self. The local Jewish population consisted mainly of settlers who had no previous attachment to the region, and the Soviet secular settlement proj­ect certainly did not help them develop such ties. They ­were faced with the region’s artificial character, given only ­limited access to Jewish institutions and culture, and discouraged from speaking Yiddish. Antisemitism made the official classification on the basis of nationality and residence a nightmare for many. The JAR proj­ect epitomized the hy­poc­risy of the state, which theoretically offered the “equality of nations” and promoted internationalism: The Communist regime made far-­reaching, formal concessions to the non-­Russian nationalities in the name of national self-­determination and equality, but, at the same time, it emptied ­those concessions of real po­liti­cal substance in the name of socialist internationalism and Bolshevik centralism. Russification, condemned by the new regime as doctrinally reactionary, nonetheless retained its de facto legitimacy as the concrete expression of international proletarian solidarity.62

Given such circumstances, Jews in Birobidzhan ­were quite prone to acculturation. Like many other Soviet Jews, they used the Rus­sian language in their everyday lives and treated immersion in Rus­sian culture as something normal and taken for granted. Despite paying the price of rejecting their own “otherness,” however, the awaited equality never arrived: the differences they ­were saddled with ­were irremovable. Such a situation could only result in partial ac­cep­tance of the ste­reo­type imposed by the mainstream on this minority and further projecting ­these negative traits onto some other part of their own community. This reproducing of the most negative ele­ments of the ste­reo­type by assigning them to the “new Other” within their own group, a be­hav­ior described by Sander Gilman as self-­hatred,63 is well illustrated by examples of distancing from one’s own parents by not speaking Yiddish. For ­those who believed they would succeed in becoming “Rus­sians,” Yiddish was a marker of something parochial, not modern, not sufficiently civilized. This self-­denial may also have motivated changing one’s “nationality” from Jewish to Rus­sian in ­every identity document or asking one’s ­father to change his name to have a “Rus­sian” patronymic. Yet in Birobidzhan itself, where the region’s Jewishness already provided some unchangeable point of reference for its inhabitants, Jews w ­ ere not as concerned with altering their identity for local purposes. Changing identity markers, such as a first name, patronymic, surname, or nationality in official documents, was an efficient strategy mainly outside the region, where one could hope for assimilation and increased chances of getting a good education.64 As the following example shows, this strategy indeed was effective in other parts of the Soviet Union:

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My relative went to Kharkov to apply to university to study aerospace engineering. But ­because he was “listed as a Jew he could not pass the entrance exams, despite his knowledge. He came back [to Birobidzhan], and his parents paid to get a new, “Rus­sian” passport for him. He retook the exams and as, Semen Anatolyevich, immediately passed and was praised for being knowledgeable and talented.65

Such markers as names w ­ ere far less impor­tant in Birobidzhan, where ­people generally knew one another. As one of my interviewees put it, “We, the local ­people, know each other. Even if you change your name, what­ever you change, we still know you are Jewish.”66 In Birobidzhan, the most frequent reason to change one’s official identity was to look more Rus­sian. Many Birobidzhan Jews admitted ­doing so ­because they said that it was expected of them. Frequently, however, they maintained a sense of Jewishness internally or within the f­ amily. Factories, kolkhozes, and other workplaces welcomed ­those who exhibited a willingness to be like o­ thers and to reject an “unaesthetic” identity marker. In many cases, even though coworkers knew that a given person was Jewish, he or she would use a Rus­sian name in conversations ostensibly to simplify pronunciation. Names ­were often changed to similar-­ sounding ones; for example, Israel to Ilya and Chaya to Raya. But for whom w ­ ere ­these names easier to pronounce? The answer is the majority, who w ­ ere colonizing the common discourse with their language. In the end, every­body knew that only non-­Russian names w ­ ere “hard to pronounce” and should therefore dis­appear. As an interviewee said, “In official documents and on the door of her office, for example, a ­woman is listed as ‘Irina Meyerovna’ while every­body addresses her as ‘Irina Markovna.’ It is just to make it shorter and easier to pronounce.”67 In fact, Jews experienced pressure to eliminate all ele­ments incongruous with the aesthetics of the Soviet lingua franca. “Too Jewish” meant funny sounding, exotic, and old-­fashioned. “My Jewish name is Tauba,” an interviewee told me, “but they called me Tania. We all have Jewish names. But we all used to introduce ourselves with Rus­sian names, ­because p­ eople ­were laughing at us.”68 Similarly, another interviewee remarked, “I was always embarrassed by my patronymic. My older ­sister changed the patronymic for herself so as not to cause embarrassment if we visited her grave and saw the Jewish name on the monument.”69 A sense of inadequacy was accompanied by idealizing the culture and language of the dominant group. In practice, this took the form of concealing any indications of one’s own culture. Jews felt that, even in what was supposedly their own region, being visibly Jewish was seen as being “demonstrative” or rude: We ­were embarrassed about our language. We knew that Rus­sian was said to be the most beautiful one. Every­body knew Rus­sian. With knowledge of the Rus­sian language you could go anywhere. With the Jewish language you c­ ouldn’t do the same. It is clear h­ ere that if a hundred Jews met and t­here was even one [non-­Jewish] Rus­sian among them they would not speak Yiddish—­out of re­spect for the Rus­



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sian nation. We do not display our language; we do not require that every­body knows Yiddish. We know Rus­sian and we can do without Yiddish.70

In the region, where Yiddish was meant to be the titular language and even when Jews formed a majority in a given group, Rus­sian was still the lingua franca, the language of the Soviet p­ eople. What got hidden in giving Rus­sian this superior position was the vio­lence used to establish its dominance. Choosing Rus­sian was very practical, but rejecting Yiddish was a form of forced self-­denial. Rus­sianness in Birobidzhan was not, however, only an ideal model to be imitated; it was also something susceptible to questioning. The example provided by David Shneer and Olga Gersherson regarding a “Jewish” (that is, Yiddish) accent in Rus­sian is relevant h­ ere. The authors use the notion of “Accented Jews” to describe the Soviet Jewish identity of secularized individuals who despite the pro­cess of acculturation, felt attached to some sort of “post-­Yiddish cultural heritage,” demonstrated through specific features, such as “Odessan humor,” speaking with an accent and use of Jewish codes in the discourse. Their approach challenges the simplified model of assimilation of Soviet Jews meant as a direct shift from religion to atheism and/or from Jewishness to Rus­sianness.71 In Birobidzhan, having an accent while speaking Rus­sian signaled the difference of ­those who did not acculturate sufficiently. But this difference also nurtured one’s unique identity; for example, as an interviewer shared, “Every­body ­here speaks with a Yiddish accent. In addition, this accent is typical only of Birobidzhan. ­There are unique words, a dialect of Rus­sian. At first it was characteristic of Jews’ speech but over time Rus­sians started speaking it too.”72 This unique way of speaking Rus­sian may well resemble colonial “mimicry,” as described by Homi K. Bhabha, a critical theorist and leading figure in postcolonial studies. He argues that mimicry is a colonial phenomenon that expresses a desire to transform the colonized Other to become a “subject of difference,” who is almost the same as the colonizer but without ever fully achieving the desired state.73 Alexei Yurchak, who has analyzed the performativity of public acts of support for the Soviet regime, offers valuable insight into mimicry be­hav­ior in the USSR in general.74 He pre­sents examples of citizens repeating slogans and statements of the authoritative discourse in public—­acting “as if ” they ­really believe in ­these ideological slogans while privately considering them to be untrue. Rather than being an example of false consciousness, this cynical be­hav­ior of living with a distasteful ideology would, Yurchak suggests (­after Peter Sloterdijk), best be called “enlightened false consciousness” (“they know very well what they are ­doing, but still do it”). What is impor­tant, Yurchak stresses, is that ­there is not necessarily a contradiction between what ­people think and what they do, as in dissimulation or wearing a mask. True, acting “as if ” does involve a mask, but the mask is not external to the consciousness of the au­then­tic subject. Acts and utterances performed by the person form them as a subject. Mimicry of hegemonic norms and cultural patterns is inevitable, happening all the time as part of the subjectification and identification pro­cess. “Normal Soviet p­ eople” constantly produced themselves

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by performing repeated acts and speeches, by imitating the ideal. It seems that choosing a mask, behaving “as if,” was not only an expression of cynical distance from the acceptable acquired identity but also a way of performing a “neither fish nor fowl” identity, understandable in the context of the broader Soviet real­ity. It is crucial ­here to note that mimicry in Bhabha’s sense enables some way of undermining the colonizer’s status. It serves the purpose of imitation but at the same time always stresses the difference between the imitated and the imitating, which is necessary for mimicry to work. For the colonized, mimicry produces only the “effect of identity,” not an “identity” that is the same as the colonizers. This hint of similarity, being “as if,” provides an opportunity to ­those who are imitating to mark their presence; that is, the denied Otherness is pre­sent in the copied version of the image of ­those who dominate. The work of imitation hollows out the ideal image of the intact value of being superior. Through this “slippage,” the image of the hegemonic group becomes permanently distorted. Having an imperfect, “as if ” Rus­sian identity was highly typical of the p­ eople of Birobidzhan. Being inevitably defined as Birobidzhanian/Jewish and si­mul­ta­ neously feeling pressure to acculturate to Rus­sianness resulted in practices of imperfect imitation of the identity of the hegemonic group. This cynical “as if ” identification game enabled, at the very least, a partial local undermining of the imperative to acculturate and a questioning of the ideal of “Rus­sianness.”75 Interestingly, imperfect repetitions of Rus­sian identity by Jews also affected identifications of ­those Rus­sians who lived on the empire’s periphery: they adapted themselves not to the culture of Pushkin but to its local “Jewified” version. “Many Rus­sians who have been living ­here their ­whole lives,” an interviewee remarked, “entered this Jewish life. In the beginning ­there was a lot of Jewishness ­here: Jewish schools, Yiddish at the markets, Jewish cuisine. And this left an imprint on the Rus­sians. Sometimes you talk to someone and you realize that he somehow got Jewified.”76 The expression “to get Jewified” (obeevreet’) describes a pro­cess contrary to acculturation. Many of my Rus­sian interviewees talk about being immersed in Jewishness or being positively influenced by it. ­Here is what one person shared with me: “They say I am more Jewish than Rus­sian. We lived close to the Jews. We cooked Jewish dishes, gefilte fish, mandelekh [­little almond-­shaped croutons]. They ­didn’t call me Rayechka, but Rakhilechka, a Jewish name. In the factory, every­body thought I was Jewish. I spoke Yiddish, I sang Yiddish, I had a Yiddish accent.”77 In Birobidzhan they say that e­ very Rus­sian is a l­ittle Jewish, and e­ very Jew is a ­little Rus­sian. The cultural identities of both the majority and the minority t­ here ­were always a l­ ittle blurred and open to distortion. The Jews of the region ­were no longer Jewish, but nor w ­ ere they Rus­sian, and they knew that being both Rus­sian and Jewish was not pos­si­ble. Local Jewishness was something connected to the unique character of the region, as was local Rus­sianness. The special nature of Birobidzhan lay in this additional layer of ambiguity. If the artificially Jewish character of the region was upsetting for many Soviet Jews, Birobidzhan was also



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understood as confirming the cynical identification game in the USSR, the “as if ” identities. This “as if ” Jewish homeland was semantically so weak that it was open to all kinds of interpretation. Birobidzhan Jews used the stigmatized region for their internal purposes and subverted its meaning by developing a sense of local patriotism, arguing for the uniqueness of local Jewishness and pride in the region’s unusual atmosphere. “­Here,” one of the Birobidzhan Jews told me, “­there was always something mythical and ­there was a sense of a small town. It was like Monaco; a city in and of itself. ­Here, as in Odessa, you can allow yourself to use idioms, to tell self-­ironic jokes. ­There is an aura that exists ­here.”78

notes 1. ​Caroline Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collec-

tive Farm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Alexei Yurchak, Every­thing Was Forever, ­until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005); Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Rus­sia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 2. ​Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry since the Second World War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Yaacov Ro’i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in Rus­sia and the Soviet Union (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995); Yaacov Ro’i and Avi Beker, eds., Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union (New York: NYU Press, 1991); Zvi Gitelman and Yaacov Ro’i, Revolution, Repression, and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Zvi Gitelman, A ­Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Rus­sia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Pre­sent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popu­lar Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 3. ​For Birobidzhan as a theme in the “cultural diplomacy” of Soviet propagandists, see Gennady Estraikh’s chapter 9 in this volume. 4. ​Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928–1996 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 5. ​Artur Patek, Birobidżan: Sowiecka ziemia obiecana? Żydowski Obwód Autonomiczny w ZSRR (Kraków: Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Historia Iagellonica,” 1997). 6. ​Zvi Gitelman, Assimilation, Acculturation and National Consciousness among Soviet Jews (New York: Synagogue Council of Amer­ic­ a, 1973); Gitelman, “The Evolution of Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union,” in Ro’i and Beker, Jewish Culture and Identity, 7–8; Gitelman, A ­Century of Ambivalence, 269. 7. ​Gitelman, Assimilation, Acculturation and National Consciousness, 43. 8. ​Robert Weinberg, “Purge and Politics in the Periphery: Birobidzhan in 1937,” Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (1993): 13–27; Weinberg, “Jews into Peasants? Solving the Jewish Question in Birobidzhan,” in Ro’i, Jews and Jewish Life in Rus­sia and the Soviet Union, 87–102; Ber Kotlerman, “The Prewar Period of the Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater, 1934–1941,” Jews in Eastern Eu­rope 1, no. 44 (2001): 29–59; Solomon Schwarz, “Birobidzhan: An Experiment in Jewish Colonization,” in Rus­sian Jewry, 1917–1967, ed. Jacob Frumkin, Gregor Aronson, Alexis Goldenweiser, and Joseph Lewitan (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 342–395. 9. ​Ber Kotlerman, “The Old Birobidzhan Synagogue and City Planning in the Mid-1980s: The Last Confrontation,” in Mizrekh: Jewish Studies in the Far East, 2: Religion–­Philosophy–­Identity (2002): 110–111.

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10. ​Ber Kotlerman, “If ­There Had Been No Synagogue ­There, They Would Have Had to Invent

It: The Case of the Birobidzhan ‘Religious Community of the Judaic Creed’ on the Threshold of Perestroika,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 42, no. 2 (2012): 87–97. 11. ​Interview no. 111, with R.E.L, female, Birobidzhan, December 12, 2008. 12. ​Interview no. 23, with R.Kh.L, female, Birobidzhan, October 18, 2008. 13. ​Altshuler, Religion and Jewish identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964. 14. ​Interview no. 15, with L.A.G, male, Birobidzhan, October 14, 2008. 15. ​Aba Vinokur, “Ugasanie drevney very,” Nauka i religiya, no. 1 (1967): 41–43, document cited in Benjamin Pinḳus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 383. 16. ​Kotlerman, “The Old Birobidzhan Synagogue,” 118–120. 17. ​Interview no. 124, with Y.A.Sh, male, Birobidzhan, August 20, 2009. 18. ​Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher, xiii–­x iv. 19. ​Interview no. 146, with I.B.L., female, Birobidzhan, September 8, 2009. 20. ​Kotlerman “The Old Birobidzhan Synagogue,” 113. 21. ​See Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Pro­cess,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 210–230. 22. ​Interview no. 20, with D.B.K., male, Birobidzhan, October 17, 2008. 23. ​Interview no. 157, with E.B.V., male, Birobidzhan, December 17, 2010. 24. ​A popu­lar Jewish love song performed in Yiddish and Rus­sian. 25. ​Interview no. 80, with R.I.A., female, Birobidzhan, November 22, 2008. 26. ​Gitelman, “The Evolution of Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union,” 15. 27. ​Patek, Birobidżan, Sowiecka ziemia obiecana? 60. 28. ​Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher, 184. 29. ​Lukasz Hirszowicz, “Birobidzhan ­after Forty Years,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 4, no. 2 (1974): 44. 30. ​Igor Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies ­toward Jews: A Legacy Reassessed,” in Ro’i, Jews and Jewish Life in Rus­sia and the Soviet Union, 79. 31. ​Interview no. 76, with N.V.G., Birobidzhan, November 19, 2008. 32. ​Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 18. 33. ​Hirszowicz, “Birobidzhan a­ fter Forty Years,” 40; and “Birobidzhan: B ­ ehind the Façade,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 18, no. 1 (1988): 71–75, ­here 71. 34. ​Interview no. 92, with E.M.C., female, Birobidzhan, December 1, 2008. 35. ​Interview no. 111, with R.E.L., female, Birobidzhan, December 12, 2008. 36. ​Interview no. 110, with T.V.K., female, Birobidzhan, December 11, 2008. 37. ​Schwarz, “Birobidzhan: An Experiment in Jewish Colonization,” 391. 38. ​Hirszowicz, “Birobidzhan ­after Forty Years,” 43; see also chapter 9. 39. ​“Birobidzhan ­after Forty Years,” 42. 40. ​Interview no. 5, with A.M.S, female, Birobidzhan, October 7, 2008. 41. ​Hirszowicz, “Birobidzhan ­after Forty Years,” 40. 42. ​Gitelman, Assimilation, Acculturation and National Consciousness. 43. ​Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies t­ oward Jews,” 75–76. 44. ​This was a popu­lar, ironic term for p ­ eople facing discrimination on the basis of the fifth paragraph in the internal passports, stating their nationality/ethnicity. See Zvi Valeriy Cherviakov, Zvi Gitelman, and Vladimir Shapiro, “E Pluribus Unum? Post-­Soviet Jewish Identities and Their Implications for Communal Reconstruction,” in Jewish Life ­after the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman, Musya Glants, and Marshall Goldman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 69. 45. ​Interview no. 4, with R.I.L, male, Birobidzhan, October 6, 2008. 46. ​Interview no. 147, with E.A.K. male, Birobidzhan, September 14, 2009.



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47. ​For more on the motivation of the Soviet authorities to reinforce the borders by means of

Jewish colonization in the Rus­sian Far East, see Chimen Abramsky, “The Biro-­Bidzhan Proj­ect, 1927–1959,” in The Jews in Soviet Rus­sia since 1917, 3rd ed., ed. Lionel Kochan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 70. The colonial logic of linking the territorial division of the Soviet empire with the ethnic groups who should inhabit territories assigned to them is well explained in Yuri Slezkine, “The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, 313–347. For more on the modernist solution to the socioeconomic prob­lems of Jews in the Soviet Union, see David Shneer, “The Weakness of the Birobidzhan Idea,” Jews in Eastern Eu­rope 3, no. 49 (2002): 5–30. 48. ​See Jonathan L. Dekel-­Chen, “ ‘New’ Jews of the Agricultural Kind: A Case of Soviet Interwar Propaganda,” Rus­sian Review 66, no. 3 (2007): 424–450. 49. ​See Robert Weinberg, “Biology and the Jewish Question ­after the Revolution: One Soviet Approach to the Productivization of Jewish ­Labor,” Jewish History 21, nos. 3–4 (2007): 413–428. 50. ​James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the ­Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 51. ​Abramsky, “The Biro-­Bidzhan Proj­ect,” 69. 52. ​Salo W. Baron, The Rus­sian Jew ­under Tsars and Soviets, enlarged 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1976), 194. 53. ​Henry Felix Srebrnik, Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924–1951, vol. 2 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2008); and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Proj­ect, 1924–1951 (Boston: American Studies Press, 2010). 54. ​Abramsky, “The Biro-­Bidzhan Proj­ect,” 72. 55. ​Hirszowicz, “Birobidzhan ­after Forty Years,” 39. 56. ​Shneer, “The Weakness of the Birobidzhan Idea,” 29–30. 57. ​See chapter 9. 58. ​Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies t­ oward Jews,” 79–82. 59. ​The word zhid, in contrast to the neutral evrei, is a derogatory Rus­sian term for a Jew. Interview no. 108, with L. F., female, Birobidzhan, December 9, 2008. 60. ​Interview no. 115, with B.M.K. male, Birobidzhan, December 14, 2008. 61. ​Interview no 86, with C. S. Ch, female, Birobidzhan, November 26, 2008. 62. ​Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 2. 63. ​Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-­Hatred: Anti-­Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 2–6. 64. ​For more on Khrushchev’s policy of “affirmative action” and nationality quotas in higher education as a tool of discrimination, see Slezkine, The Jewish ­Century (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2011), 337; Theodore H. Friedgut, “Nationalities Policy, the Soviet Regime, the Jews, and Emigration,” in Gitelman et al., Jewish Life a­ fter the USSR, 31; Baron, The Rus­sian Jew ­under Tsars and Soviets, 307–308. 65. ​Interview no. 51, with B.N.M, female, Birobidzhan, November 5, 2008. 66. ​Interview no. 140, with M.P.S, male, Birobidzhan, September 1, 2009. 67. ​Interview no. 40 with V.A.C., male, Birobidzhan, October 30, 2008. 68. ​Interview no. 105, with T. E, female, Birobidzhan, December 12, 2008. 69. ​Interview no. 40, with V.A.C., male, Birobidzhan, October 10, 2008. 70. ​Interview no. 16, with Y.S.B., male, Birobidzhan, October 15, 2008. 71. ​Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, “Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 ( January 2011): 129–146, ­here 136–139. 72. ​Interview no. 111, with R.E.L, female, Birobidzhan, December 12, 2008. 73. ​Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86.

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74. ​Yurchak, Every­thing Was Forever, 16–20. 75. ​­Here, “game” is not something playful, but rather as in Butler’s theory of performativity.

See Vikki Bell, “Mimesis as Cultural Survival: Judith Butler and Anti-­Semitism,” Theory Culture Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 133–161. 76. ​Interview no. 58, with V.A.G, male, Birobidzhan, November 10, 2018. 77. ​Interview no. 50, with R.A.Kh., female, Birobidzhan, November 5, 2008. 78. ​Interview no. 17, with S.A.K, male, Birobidzhan, October 16, 2008.

TR ANSNATIONALISM

part 3

8 • AN ALTERNATIVE WORLD Jews in the German Demo­cratic Republic, Their Transnational Networks, and a Global Jewish Communist Community D AV I D S H N E E R

For many years, scholars generally concurred that Jews in the German Demo­cratic Republic (GDR) ­were fools, especially ­those who stayed in the country ­after the 1952–1953 purge of its Jewish leadership around the Slánský Trial in Czecho­slo­va­kia. First, they chose to live in the country that had orchestrated the genocide of Eu­ro­pean Jews. Second, even if they w ­ ere still attached to German culture and wanted to live in German-­speaking lands, ­these Jews chose to live on the “wrong” side of the German border. ­Until August 1961, when the GDR government built the Berlin Wall, almost anyone could leave (generally referred to as “flee”) the GDR via the four-­power occupied city of Berlin to the “­free” West. This historiography tended to damn most vehemently the heads of the GDR’s Jewish communities, who not only stayed but also led this “tiny remnant” of a Jewish community. More unfortunately, scholars suggested that these post-1961 leaders unwittingly or, even worse, knowingly served as a propaganda front for an antisemitic state that had purged itself of its genuine Jewish leadership in 1953 and preserved the “showpiece” Jewish communities as a means of state control over that small community.1 This Cold War approach to Jewish communities and Jewish individuals in the GDR emphasized Communist state ideology and power, which is only one approach of many. And it came at the expense of ­those individuals who had to make difficult decisions about living in an increasingly oppressive state. Some ­were forced to or chose to leave the country for the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) or other points in the cap­i­tal­ist West. O ­ thers stayed and became more passionately committed to the success of an antifascist state in the heart of formerly fascist Eu­rope. Another group of Jews in the GDR simply lived their lives in places they had long called home. 153

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In the past ten years, the historiography of Jews in the GDR and in Communist Eu­rope in general has begun to explore dif­fer­ent questions about the experiences of ­those Jews living ­behind the “Iron Curtain.” Scholars have started to see this group of Jews living in Communist states as active agents shaping the course of their lives, not just as propaganda props of the state, and as integral co-­creators of  Communist antifascism. Moreover, despite the dwindling numbers of Jews ­registered with GDR Jewish communities—­for example, t­ here ­were 1,500 registered GDR Jews in the 1950s, which declined to approximately 400 registered in the 1980s), ­there ­were many more Jews not registered with the official GDR communities.2 This has led scholars to look beyond the official Jewish communities and explore the diversity of the Communist Jewish experience.3 At the same time, scholarship about Jews in Communist countries in general, and the GDR in par­tic­ul­ar, still maintains a Cold War approach to this history. Although we have gained a more nuanced understanding of the Cold War experience for Jews living “­under Communism,” we have not paid enough attention to seeing nuance in the global Jewish community during the Cold War, especially in the non-­Communist world and its relationship to Jews in the Communist world. Except for a few scholars who focus on international Jewish Communist networks, Jews not living in Communist states mostly see Jews living in the Communist world ­after World War II, the Nazi genocide of Eu­ro­pean Jews, and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 as e­ ither oppressed by the Communist regime (and therefore in need of liberation) or as propaganda props of the regime not to be trusted.4 This assumes that all Jews not living ­under Communism w ­ ere anti-­Communist. I make two assumptions in this chapter about the Jewish community in Communist Eu­rope. First, even a­ fter the postwar purges of Communist Jews from the leadership of GDR Jewish institutions in 1952–1953, ­there still existed a global Communist Jewish community.5 Before World War II, communicating usually through Yiddish, this community played a central role in shaping modern Jewish life as it advocated for a Marxist approach to injustice and for the liberation of all ­peoples, including Jews, from structural systems of domination like fascism and colonialism. ­After World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States each attempted to reshape the postwar, decolonizing world. In the United States and other cap­it­ al­ist socie­ties, t­ hese fears led to a harsh reaction against Communists. In the USSR and other Communist socie­ties, the opposite occurred as paranoia about contacts with the cap­i­tal­ist West reigned. Nonetheless, this global Jewish community, as beleaguered and downtrodden as it might have been, found po­liti­cal and cultural space in the GDR in general, and in East Berlin in par­tic­ul­ar, to nurture a vision of the world that had existed from before the Nazi genocide of the Jews in which one could be both universally h­ uman and particularly Jewish.6 GDR’s Jews inserted Jewish culture and memories of the war into the GDR’s memorial culture, thereby ensuring that Jewish memories of the war ­were invoked in the state’s public antifascist culture. As the frontline of



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the Cold War, Berlin provided unique opportunities for creative cultural identities and communities precisely b­ ecause it was on the frontier of Communism and capitalism and had a complicated relationship with its Jewish past. Second, the GDR and most Communist countries in Eastern and East Central Eu­rope did not follow the Soviet Union but crafted their own relationships with their own Jewish populations. In other words, the model we have of ­these countries serving as Soviet satellites is simply not true, certainly as it relates to state Communism’s relationship with Jewish populations and Jewish culture. In 1948– 1949, the entire state-­sponsored apparatus of Soviet Yiddish culture was shut down, and in 1952, the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee—­the face of Soviet Jewry to the wider world—­was convicted in a secret trial of nationalism and treason and then nearly all its members ­were executed. In 1948, on the contrary, the Romanian State Yiddish Theater was founded, and one year l­ater a state Yiddish theater was founded in Poland ­under the direction of Ida Kaminska. In 1952, in the GDR, ­there ­were Kristallnacht commemorations and state-­sponsored Yiddish concerts.7 By examining both this global Communist Jewish world and the fact that Jewish culture received state support in Eu­ro­pean Communist countries, I reveal a previously hidden network of global Communist Jews who crisscrossed borders both ­behind and beyond the so-­called Iron Curtain.

Defining Cold War Jewish Antifascism Jews in the GDR and the transnational Communist Jewish community, like Jewish communities in liberal cap­it­ al­ist countries that emerged in the postwar period, ­were reeling from the experience of the Nazi genocide of Eu­ro­pean Jewry. Most Jews around the world remembered the genocide of Eu­ro­pean Jewry as a specifically Jewish experience. This nadir of Jewish history was followed by the establishment of the State of Israel, an apotheosis of two thousand years of Jewish exile, and a newfound societal ac­cep­tance and decline in antisemitism in the postwar Judeo-­Christian United States. The transnational Communist Jewish community did not see the founding of the State of Israel as the telos of Jewish history, even if immediately before World War II most German Jews w ­ ere in ­favor of Zionism.8 Rather, it saw the experience of Jews during World War II and memories of fascist vio­lence inspiring present-­ day anticolonial movements. Whereas hegemonic global Jewry’s man­tra of “Never again” meant that never again would Jews be murdered as Jews (and therefore that the State of Israel was the best insurance policy against genocide), when the global Communist Jewish community uttered “Never again,” it applied that pledge to all oppressed, colonized ­peoples around the world, including Jews. This does not mean that Communist Jews w ­ ere anti-­Zionist, although their definition of Zionism differed radically from the global Jewish consensus that emerged in the Cold War and built its raison d’étre on the Nazi genocide. (­There was, and still is, an

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Israeli Communist Party Maki [now Hadash] that split apart in 1965 over the question of the Soviet Union’s increasingly anti-­Zionist politics.) This alternative vision of the GDR as a global node of Communist Jewish community should not mask the fact that the repercussions of the 1952 Slánský Affair drove half of the Jews in the GDR from its borders and that the country also served as ground zero of the Cold War, especially ­after 1961, with its barbed-­wire fence and ugly concrete wall becoming the symbol of that war.9 But that truth coexisted with another one: during the nearly forty-­year period from the purges to tearing down the wall in 1989, the city played host to international conferences, festivals, and a variety of other gatherings designed to bring together voices from around the world to proclaim that the fight against fascism was not over. (The East German press followed the fates of Communist Jews Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who ­were found guilty of treason in the United States from their sentencing to their execution in June 1953. In ­doing so, it also emphasized their Jewishness and antisemitism as ­factors in their persecution, not just their Communism.10 East German municipalities even named streets ­after the Communist Jewish ­couple.) So too, on a smaller scale, Communist Jews from around the world came to the GDR to meet one another and build face-­to-­face community with other Communist Jewish communities at a time when Jewish communal institutions in their home “cap­it­al­ist” countries had isolated them. Even if they did not identify as Jews—­either ­because their Communist identity caused them to resist seeing themselves through ethnic or religious categories or ­because, before World War II, German Jews had seen themselves as Germans of the Jewish faith—­the rest of the world saw them as such. As historian Hendrik Niether writes, “Despite their communist outlook [and the fact that] only a few of them ­were in contact with the religious Community, [ Jews who ­were communists] ­were still identified as Jews by state and party leaders, East German society, and Jews abroad.”11 What bound this transnational Communist Jewish community together was a po­liti­cal fervor that fascism was not dead and that they, with their par­tic­u­lar Jewish experience and white skin, had privileged access to speak out against it. This communal experience of what I call “Cold War Jewish antifascism,” which persisted long ­after the state-­sponsored Communist persecution of its own Communist Jewish leadership in the early 1950s, manifested itself in antifascist holidays through which the GDR defined its official state calendar. Although t­hese ­were marked as universal holidays to commemorate fascist atrocities, ­these live events became global sites of antifascist Jewish community during the Cold War. The GDR memorial calendar was full of dates marking tragedies or triumphs that had taken place against Hitlerite fascism.12 In this chapter, I provide two examples of how Jewish leaders rendered Communist antifascism Jewish. Then I show how Jews in the GDR used t­ hese times and spaces of antifascist commemoration sites or, in the words of Pierre Nora, lieux de memoire (realms or sites of memory), to foster the global Communist Jewish community.13



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Making GDR Antifascist Ideology Jewish Newly liberated Germany made the second Sunday of September into a national Gedenktag für die Opfer des Faschismus (Memorial Day for Victims of Fascism), its key temporal marker commemorating Nazi atrocities. For the GDR, it would remain the key time on the annual calendar for remembering fascism and commemorating Nazi atrocities; in West Germany, for Cold War reasons, it faded from public memory b­ ecause it was seen as “too Communist.”14 The first event took place in 1945, and the month of September was chosen b­ ecause the commemoration fell on the one-­year anniversary of a paroxysm of vio­lence that occurred “in late August and the first days of September of last year [1944],” when “many prestigious fighters against the Hitler system ­were murdered.”15 Although Jews who had survived in hiding in Berlin ­were part of the 1945 Memorial Day events, Jewish memories ­were not prominently on display for the ­simple reason that ­there ­were not many Jews alive in Berlin at the time. Postwar Germany, especially but not exclusively on Soviet-­occupied territory, was not initially aiming to foster a specifically Jewish victim narrative. In its early days, posters with the red triangle for po­liti­cal prisoners, most of whom w ­ ere Communists, w ­ ere prominently displayed. But by 1946, many Jews, mostly from Poland, had fled the Soviet Union to return to Poland. ­There, they discovered that their hometowns w ­ ere filled with ghosts and lingering antisemitism, and they then left Poland for Germany, including Berlin. A few stayed and joined the Berlin Jewish Community and incorporated the memories of their murdered loved ones into broader commemorative ceremonies. At the 1947 Memorial Day ceremony in Leipzig, one of the speeches included a statement about “the indescribable suffering of our Jewish citizens, who ­were driven to their deaths by a discredited race theory.”16 In September 1948, the flag of the new State of Israel was hung proudly at Berlin’s Memorial Day rally. By the early 1950s, Jews in the GDR gathered for special Memorial Day ceremonies to commemorate their loved ones killed during the war but held t­ hese at Jewish spaces like synagogues or cemeteries, such as Berlin’s Weissensee cemetery. Rabbi Martin Riesenburger—­often referred to as the “red rabbi” who was the official chief rabbi of the GDR from 1945 ­until his death in 1965—­gave sermons; cantors sang El Mole Rachamim, a traditional Jewish prayer recited at funerals or memorial ceremonies, to commemorate the “6 million dead ­brothers and s­ isters”; and singers performed Yiddish-­language antifascist songs from before or during the war itself.17 Occasionally, state leaders who oversaw the Jewish community, such as Hans Seigewasser, state secretary of church affairs, the body supervising the Jewish Communities of the GDR, participated.18 In the 1950s, the GDR film com­pany DEFA made several antifascist documentaries about concentration camps and other fascist crimes. When they w ­ ere shown in public, they w ­ ere often accompanied by Yiddish songs or speeches made by Jewish leaders about Jewish

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losses in the past and the ever-­present danger of antisemitism in the pre­sent.19 In other words, GDR’s Memorial Day was a Communist holiday that was rendered Jewish in its lived experience. This was also the case with the GDR’s commemoration of the November 1938 Reichskristallnacht. That holiday commemorated fascist atrocities specifically against Jews. On November 9, 1952. Berlin’s Jewish Community—­still united in a city already divided between Soviet and Western occupation powers—­hosted an event commemorating Reichskristallnacht in cooperation with the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Union of Victims of Nazism) and the Berlin branch of the Nationale Front des demokratischen Deutschland (National Front for a Demo­cratic Germany).20 No other day on the memorial calendar held such meaning in the lives of German Jews, even t­hose who w ­ ere Communist; yet, clearly its meaning had expanded, via antifascist ideology, to include non-­Jews, who ­were part of ­those two organ­izations. The 1952 event at the Haus Vaterland, located on the dividing line between East and West Berlin, featured speakers from each sponsoring organ­ization, including Rabbi Riesenburger. In addition, Lin Jaldati, the recently relocated Dutch Communist Yiddish-­singing Auschwitz survivor, performed a few songs from her emerging repertoire, including Mordechai Gebirtik’s 1938 “S’brent” (It Is Burning), about the infamous Przytyk pogrom in Poland that took place in 1936, and “Zog nit keymol” (Never Say), a 1943 hymn by activist Hirsch Glik that became the Eu­ro­pean Jewish anthem a­ fter the war u­ ntil the State of Israel was born. By the early 1950s, Jews in the GDR had made the state’s antifascist ideology do memorial work for its community, encompassing both the officially registered GDR Jews and Communist Jews not registered with the Community. Next, I show how ­these same Jews used that memorial space and time to create community with Communist Jews from around the world, both t­ hose living in neighboring Communist countries and t­hose who did not but w ­ ere committed to a universal antifascism that included Jews as one ­people among many.

The Musical Rituals of Cold War Jewish Antifascism In 1957, the State Yiddish Theater in Warsaw came to Berlin as invited guests of the inaugural Berliner Festtage, an annual cultural festival that East Berlin established to compete with West Berlin’s Berliner Festwochen. Having a Polish Yiddish theater at the inaugural Berlin Festtage, an event meant to highlight how the GDR defended culture from its de­cadent degradation in the West, suggested the importance of Jewish and specifically Yiddish culture in GDR antifascism. ­Under the leadership of Ida Kaminska, the troupe performed Glikl of Hameln Demands Justice, a historical play by Max Bauman and adapted for stage by Kaminska, who also played Glikl.21 A packed h­ ouse saw the Yiddish production, and the East German press reviewed the show. Neues Deutschland emphasized



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that this was a historic event: for the first time since World War II, a Polish state theater of any kind produced plays in Germany. B ­ ecause it was in Yiddish, it would have been intelligible to many members of the German-­speaking audience. The Kaminska Theater appeared once more at the Berliner Festtage in 1966, again performing Glikl.22 The year 1963 was an impor­tant one on the global Jewish memorial calendar ­because it coincided with two events: the twentieth anniversary of April  1943’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht. Like Jews around the world, Jews in the GDR commemorated ­these events with special programs: they just understood what was being remembered and how that memory was to inform con­temporary actions differently. On April 22, 1963, Jaldati gave a concert, “Jiddische Lieder und Gedichte” (Yiddish Songs and Poetry), at the Babylon Theater on Rosa Luxemburg Platz in the heart of East Berlin.23 The concert was cosponsored by the Committee for ­Antifascist Re­sis­tance Fighters in the GDR (formerly the VVN, but in its new state-­sponsored version, “fighters” replaced “victims”) The Jewish Community of Greater Berlin and the House of Polish Culture in Berlin, a new institution on Friedrichstrasse created to build cultural relations between Poland and the GDR, also cosponsored the event.24 Jaldati’s Yiddish concert at the first major East German commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was thus presented si­mul­ta­ neously through socialist, Jewish, and Polish memories of Nazi atrocities. A global Communist Jewish community that transcended national bound­aries would be created when thirty-­five Jews from the GDR made a pilgrimage to Warsaw to pay homage to the ghetto fighters.25 For the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Association of East German Jewish Communities, with support from Seigewasser, the state secretary of church affairs, convinced the postal ser­vice to produce a commemorative postage stamp.26 As with most other nation-­states, producing stamps was a common way the GDR commemorated moments in history that it wanted to signify as impor­tant. The GDR Postal Ser­vice had produced commemorative postage stamps for the concentration camps of Buchenwald in 1956, 1957, and 1958; Ravensbrück in 1957; and Sachsenhausen in 1961.27 In t­ hose cases, the camps w ­ ere commemorated as sites of fascist atrocities against po­liti­cal opponents ( Jews w ­ ere not mentioned explic­itly but w ­ ere included). But in this case, GDR Jewish Communities wanted specific recognition of Jews’ suffering ­under fascism and the current state’s overcoming of its fascist, antisemitic past. Through much negotiation, the Association succeeded in making the GDR the first country in the world to issue a commemorative stamp on Reichskristallnacht.28 The stamp depicts a bright-­red fire enveloping a black synagogue. (­There was a debate about which synagogue would be portrayed.) Below the synagogue, black barbed wire is “strangling” a yellow Star of David badge with the word “Jude” on it, which the Nazis forced Jews to wear in the ghettos. Framing the entire stamp are the words “Niemals wieder” (Never Again) on the left and “Kristallnacht” on

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the right. Thus, the black, red, and yellow colors of the GDR w ­ ere incorporated into the stamp seamlessly. In addition, when it went through the mail, the post office stamped over it the words “Zum Mahnung an die ‘Kristallnacht.’ ” The German word Mahnung is often translated as “memory” in this context or “To the Memory of Kristallnacht.” It, however, also means “warning,” as in letzte Mahnung, the last warning or final notice. This combined sense of both a reminder in the pre­sent about the past and a warning in the pre­sent about the ­future appears frequently in German antifascist discourse. A postage stamp is a symbolic way to build community but lacks the face-­to-­ face interactions that are the backbone of creating solidarity. And so, the Association also or­ga­nized a weekend of events to bring p­ eople together to remember Reichskristallnacht, centering around an international gathering. Four representatives each from the Jewish Communities of Hungary, Czecho­slo­va­kia, and Poland; two representatives each from Jewish Communities in ­England, France, Italy, and Belgium; and one each from the Jewish Communities of Sweden, Holland, and  Israel attended.29 Beginning on Friday eve­ning in Berlin’s Friedentempel (Peace ­Temple) on Rykestrasse, Gerald Götting, the general secretary of the Christian Demo­cratic Union, gave a speech about the horrors that began for German Jews on Kristallnacht twenty-­five years ­earlier.30 On Monday, November 11, Dresden’s Hygiene Museum hosted a who’s who of Jews from the GDR from Riesenburger to Jaldati, as well as state leadership from the GDR, including Seigewasser. He spoke about the fact that fascism had been wiped out in the GDR but not unfortunately in West Germany, which was still harboring former SS men and other high-­ranking Nazis.31 As the “red rabbi,” Riesenburger’s words to the assembled audience, both foreign and domestic, ­were quite power­ful: “We Jews always have a home wherever we have a home in the hearts of men. Our home is ­here, in the GDR, where the brown past has been completely overcome.”32 (­W hether or not the “brown past” had truly been overcome was a dif­fer­ent m ­ atter.) The Monday event also featured musical per­for­mances by three groups. First was the Budapest Lewandowski Choir, named for the ­great composer of synagogue ­music, Louis Lewandowski, who had been ­music director at the Neue Synagoge in Berlin. The choir had been formed just one year e­ arlier in Budapest u­ nder the leadership of organist Andor Izsák and Cantor Marlon Lorand.33 Izsák would l­ater move to Hannover, West Germany, in the 1980s to start a Jewish ­music group t­ here. The Lewandowski choir had also appeared at the Friday eve­ning event in Berlin, where it sang “Moorsoldaten,” a popu­lar German antifascist song from the 1930s. A retyped article from a local GDR newspaper, Die Union, described the per­for­ mance and mentioned “Hungarian guests” who performed with the Budapest Opera, who ­were in attendance that eve­ning as well accompanying the choir.34 On stage following the Lewandowski Choir, the Dresdner Staatskapelle performed the ­music of Ludwig von Beethoven, a German composer to whom both



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Germanies traced their postfascist legacies.35 The Staatskapelle was one of the oldest orchestras in the world and at the time was u­ nder the direction of Rudolf Neuhaus. It was an odd choice for a Reichskristallnacht event at which Riesenburger claimed an overcoming of the fascist past, ­because Neuhaus had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1937, one year before Reichskristallnacht took place and only left it in 1945.36 He was not the only antisemitic conductor in the Staatskapelle’s history: it both Richard Wagner, a German composer and leading nineteenth-­century German antisemite who wrote “Jewry in M ­ usic,” and Richard Strauss, who was appointed head of the Nazi Reichsmusikkammer (Reich ­Music Union) in November 1933, both led the orchestra. Yet that was not the most striking irony: Neuhaus shared the stage with Jaldati, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-­Belsen, who had just testified in a summer 1963 trial-­in-­absentia against Hans-­Maria Globke, state minister for the West German government and author of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws; her husband Eberhard Rebling, then head of the Hanns Eisler Conservatory and a member of the Volkskammer, the East German parliament, testified along with her. At the same Reichskristallnacht commemoration, the ­couple performed songs heard in the concentration camps, as well as “Moorsoldaten.” In my interview with Jaldati’s ­daughter, Jalda Rebling, she describes her m ­ other as falling into a depression when she learned she had to share the stage with former Nazis like Neuhaus. Who knows how the largely Jewish audience felt when Neuhaus, the former Nazi, conducted the orchestra at a Kristallnacht commemoration? Perhaps Jaldati’s sentiment was more widely shared.37

Lieux de Memoire for the Global Communist Jewish Community The sites of Nazi concentration camps on East German soil did not become memorials ­until the 1950s, ­because Soviet occupation forces ­were using them as camps to incarcerate suspected Nazis and o­ thers ­until 1950. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen had been transformed into memorial spaces (Mahn-­und Gedenkstätte) at which rituals and commemorations took place.38 International events occurred at each one’s ­grand opening: on GDR’s Memorial Day of the given year for Buchenwald (September 14, 1958) and Ravensbrück (September 12, 1959) and on the anniversary of Sachsenhausen’s liberation (April 30, 1961). P ­ eople gathered from across Eu­rope (Ravensbrück’s opening was attended by delegates from eigh­teen countries) to commemorate the atrocities that took place during the war. Even Eleanor Roo­se­velt, the former First Lady of the United States and by that time a leader in the U.S. peace movement, was invited to Ravensbrück’s ­grand opening, although she did not attend.39 ­There is no mention in the GDR press of a Jewish presence at the late 1950s ­grand openings of ­either the Buchenwald or Ravensbrück’s Memorials. However, Yiddish antifascist concerts invoking ­these concentration camp memorials ­were

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held before packed audiences, both Jewish and not. On April 11, 1959, just a few months before the formal opening of the memorial site itself, Jaldati did a concert called the “Programm zur Eröffnung der Ravensbrück Ausstellung” (Program for the Opening of a Ravensbrück Exhibition). It featured Yiddish and German antifascist commemorative ­music—­songs using minor key melodies that ­were sung in concentration camps and marches that suggested vigilance in the pre­sent with an eye ­toward con­temporary manifestations of fascism. Antifascist Yiddish m ­ usic thus mixed with German antifascist m ­ usic like “Moorsoldaten,” described as a “song from the Börgermoor concentration camp.”40 ­There was a more overt Jewish presence at the 1961 g­ rand opening of the Sachsenhausen Memorial. This camp had something that neither Buchenwald nor Ravensbrück had—­a Jewish cemetery. This suggests that for Jewish antifascist memory to take place in the GDR, a ceremony invoking Jewish memories needed to take place in marked Jewish space. The press mentioned and took photos of this Jewish presence—­specifically, the appearance of Rabbi Riesenburger, who along with Christian leaders, gave a speech at the nearby Jewish cemetery in Oranienburg. ­There, he invoked the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem that had opened less than two weeks ­earlier, calling on the world to hold accountable all of ­those “beasts who murdered millions of Jewish ­children.”41 In 1964 the Association of East German Jewish Communities or­ga­nized a three-­day trip to Prague, Czecho­slo­va­kia’s capital; Lidice, a village that the Nazis wiped out as in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich; and Terezín, the site of the concentration camp Theresienstadt.42 We can see in this choice of sites that the tour functioned like a Jewish antifascist pilgrimage of World War II death sites. Long before “March of the Living,” which emerged in the late 1980s and continues into the twenty-­first c­ entury, made Eastern Eu­rope and the death camps pilgrimage sites for Jews from around the world, local Jews ­were visiting them in their own backyards.43 The Cold War-­era Communist Jewish pilgrimages to concentration camps in Eastern Eu­rope, however, served radically dif­fer­ent purposes. Where the “March of the Living” holds up Poland as the site of Jewish death and Israel as the place of rebirth or tkuma, Communist Jewish visits to concentration camps embedded the pilgrimage in a universalist approach to fascist vio­lence. Jewish suffering at the hands of fascists during the war was bound up with the suffering of all.44 The Jewish Community of Halle and Karl Marx Stadt (Chemnitz) also or­ga­ nized its own three-­day pilgrimages using the same itinerary one year ­later.45 The trip brought together seventy-­five p­ eople from the GDR, Poland, and Czecho­slo­ va­kia.46 Although Terezín had been transformed into a Czechoslovak memorial site dedicated to po­liti­cal victims of fascism, this tour visited the memorial to the crematorium at the Jewish cemetery ­there. In Prague, the tour group visited with members of the Jewish Community. In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II, known in the GDR as the “liberation from Hitler fascism,” Dresden’s Jewish Community cele-



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brated with a city tour of Jewish sites for foreign guests. ­Those invited w ­ ere noted Eu­ro­pean and Israeli Jews, including Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor for the Adolf Eichmann trial that had taken place just three years ­earlier, and Georges Aronstein, a leading voice for h­ uman rights in Eu­rope.47 It is not clear w ­ hether they accepted the invitation, but the very fact of the invitation indicates that GDR’s Jews saw it as a useful gesture to reach out across the global Jewish world to build connections with other Jews committed to prosecuting fascists and bringing about peace. The guests’ presence at the event would have been a coup for the state, which was constantly combating charges of state-­sponsored antisemitism wielded at it by the Western press, and for the GDR’s Jewish Communities, which would have seen their presence as an impor­tant sign of recognition. That same year, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Theresienstadt, representatives from the Jewish Communities of East Berlin, Prague, and Vienna toured Bohemia, participating in a similar pilgrimage as in the 1964 trip. In Prague, they met with an Israeli mission to Czecho­slo­va­kia and in the eve­ ning heard a talk from a Theresienstadt survivor, who spoke about neofascism and antisemitism in West Germany.48 In 1968, the thirtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht saw an even bigger showing of international visitors, as well as impor­tant Christian leaders across the GDR. Instead of the Staatskapelle, with its potential taint of a fascist past, the Dresdner Philharmonie—­under the direction of Kurt Masur, an up-­and-­coming conductor from Lower Silesia who went on to conduct the New York Philharmonic and the Israeli Philharmonic—­performed at the commemorative event.49 If the GDR served as the node of Cold War Jewish antifascism, Hungary served as a primary node of Judaism in the Communist Jewish world for at least two reasons. First, it had the largest Jewish community in Communist Eu­rope outside the Soviet Union. But even more impor­tant than sheer numbers was the fact that Budapest maintained the only rabbinic seminary in Communist Eu­rope, the Budapest Rabbinic Seminar, which gave it cachet among Jewish communities throughout the Communist world interested in traditional Judaism as a religious system. Jewish communities from across Communist Eu­rope sent their promising students to Budapest to become rabbis. In 1966, the Czech Jewish Community sent eighteen-­year-­old Ervin Salamon from Košice to Budapest to become a rabbi for Prague’s Jewish community. One year ­later, another young Jewish man from Košice was sent to the seminary to train as a rabbi.50 In at least one case, the GDR state—­not the GDR Jewish Community—­sent a Jew to Budapest to train to become a rabbi at the seminary and financially supported his studies.51 To emphasize how Communist Jewish Communities across Eastern and East Central Eu­rope w ­ ere networked (and potentially in opposition to Jewish communities in the cap­i­tal­ist West), in March 1963, the GDR newspaper Neue Zeit ran a feature about the Budapest Jewish Community and its leadership: it focuses first on “the largest synagogue in the world, built by a Viennese architect in the 50s of

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the previous ­century with 4,500 seats,” called the Dohány Street Synagogue. The feature quickly shifts back in time to World War II when “race delusions of the fascist conquerors and their Hungarian collaborators” forced Jews into a ghetto. The article then narrates the story of the con­temporary Budapest Jewish Community ­under the leadership of the chief cantor of the Dohány, Marlon Lorand. The article closes with a comment that defined much of the transnational Communist Jewish community: “Hungarian Jewry expects, ­after the horrors of the past, a happy f­uture. To that end, it actively participates in the building of socialism.”52 ­After Riesenburger’s death in 1965, Ödön Singer, chief rabbi of Hungary, also served as rabbi of the GDR for four years, and Budapest cantor László Lugosi served Leipzig and Dresden for more than twenty years.53 In 1968, performers from across Germany and Hungary came together in the Berlin Friedenstempel to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Reichskristallnacht. Singing “Es brennt” (It Is Burning)—­the same Mordechai Gebirtig’s S’brent of Jaldati’s repertoire but in German—­were two cantors, one from Leipzig and the other from Budapest; the Budapest cantor also performed the El mole rachamim.54

Transnational Communist Jewish Community-­ Building beyond the Iron Curtain Jews from beyond the Communist world visited GDR’s Jewish Communities as well, yet it was only representatives of leftist Jewish communities who came and built a global Communist Jewish community. From Hanns Eisler, who composed the country’s national anthem, to his b­ rother Gerhard, the writer Anna Seghers, and many o­ thers, German-­speaking Jews returned to the Soviet Occupation Zone in the years immediately ­after the war to rebuild the country on antifascist terms. In some cases, they stayed; in ­others, they left not long a­ fter their return.55 My par­tic­u­lar focus is on how the GDR became home to a global Communist Jewish community through the lens of ­music. In addition to Eisler, five musicologists oversaw most of the GDR’s ­music institutions. All but one was Jewish (and the last one, Eberhard Rebling, was married to and accompanied Jaldati, the Dutch Jewish Yiddish-­singing Auschwitz survivor).56 Canadian Communist folk singer Perry Friedman ended up in the GDR by happenstance. Raised in a Communist Jewish ­house­hold, Friedman wanted to make a living as a folk singer, which he was not able to do in Canada. So, he left for Eu­rope in 1958. ­After a 1959 per­for­mance in ­England, Friedman arrived just in time to perform at a large May 1 cele­bration in East Berlin. Although he arrived as a leftist musician rather than as a Jew, his network in the GDR included many Jewish Communists, including t­ hose with whom he performed like Jaldati. Friedman recalled his first hootenanny in the GDR as a raucous eve­ning at the Klub der Jugend und Sportler; during t­ hese two hours of singing in a tiny space, “the barrier between artist and audience fell.”57 Friedman, the Canadian Jewish folk banjo player, helped Jaldati, who built her ­career as a formal stage performer



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in the GDR, get back to her roots singing in less formal environments. They performed for the Freie Deutsche Jugend (the GDR’s national youth movement) in small clubs, went to factories bringing m ­ usic to industrial workers, and sang in  schools. Jaldati built a bridge between the informal, countercultural sixties-­ style folk ­music, imported to East Germany from North Amer­i­ca, and the more formal, state-­oriented antifascist m ­ usic, both classical and folk, of the GDR. And it was not a coincidence that both she and Friedman ­were Jewish. Friedman married an East German w ­ oman and stayed in the country for twelve years. In February  1970, he and Jaldati ­were involved in the production of the ­Festival des politischen Liedes (Festival of Po­liti­cal Song), an annual international gathering that brought leftist performers from around the world to East Berlin. Friedman left the GDR in April 1971, but before he left, Rebling hosted an event for him at the Hanns Eisler Conservatory, of which he served as director. At that event, every­one performed ­music in Friedman’s honor that claimed to be a “weapon against imperialism, war, and race terror.”58 ­After Friedman returned home to Canada in 1971, he and his Canadian musical collaborator, l­abor playwright Jack Winter, cofounded Cabaret Canada in 1972. The pair wrote original po­liti­cal cabaret material in the form of songs, poems, and monologues and performed as a team on radio (Canadian Broadcast Com­pany, CBC), tele­vi­sion (CBCH, CTV, CITY-­T V), and on concert stages in Canada’s three largest cities: Vancouver, Montreal, AND Toronto. They also brought their cabaret to East Berlin. In summer 1973, Friedman brought a team, including Winter, to East Berlin for three months to perform Cabaret Canada and to conduct interviews with artists like Jaldati and Rebling for a CBC radio documentary on artistic life ­behind the Iron Curtain.59 In an essay published in Friedman’s 2004 posthumous biography, Winter reminisced about his professional relationship with his collaborator. In an early passage, Winter remarks about Friedman: “[This] fellow Jew had been born a mere 500 miles away from the town of my birth in central Saskatchewan! W ­ ere I to consult the rec­ords of the Baron de Hirsch, that nineteenth ­century middle-­European utopian philanthropist who plucked Perry’s and my grandparents out of pogroms in Rus­sia and Romania and deposited them into the unforgiving hinterlands of North and South Amer­ic­ a, perhaps I’d find we w ­ ere cousins”?60 Jewishness tied ­these two Canadian leftists together, and each one ended up settling in Eu­rope in the latter half of the 1970s—­Friedman in the GDR ­until his death in 1995, Winter in ­England. In 1979 Jaldati and Rebling toured Canada ­under the auspices of the United Jewish ­People’s Order (UJPO), a nonpartisan but socialist-­inspired Jewish organ­ ization committed to universal princi­ples of peace and justice for all. The UJPO formed in 1944 a­ fter the Toronto L ­ abour League joined with s­ ister organ­izations in major Canadian cities. Most of its leaders ­were Communists.61 It was expelled from the Canadian Jewish Congress in the 1951 for fears that the UJPO was spying for the Soviet Union.62 This organ­ization hosted the East German Yiddish musical

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c­ ouple for a series of concerts commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1979. Jaldati recalls her concert in Montreal as one of the few times since the immediate postwar period that she could speak Yiddish from the stage to an audience of Yiddish speakers, who had landed on Canadian soil in the postwar period.63 In July 1978, at the week-­long Hanns Eisler ­music festival in East Berlin, Rebling and Jaldati met Irma and Mordecai Bauman. Born in New York and trained at Julliard, Mordecai spent his early years singing in the Catskills for a mostly Jewish clientele. He was a long-­time musician and educator, whose taste spanned a wide spectrum from J. S. Bach to Hanns Eisler. During World War II, he was active in the United Ser­vices Organ­ization (USO), an organ­ization that provides support to the U.S. military. He also performed for Jewish Community Centers across the eastern seaboard, and along with Irma, he established the Indian Hill Arts Workshop in Stockbridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, a summer residential arts program.64 At the same time, he was also a member of the Communist Party USA and involved in a wide array of its activities. Rebling suggested that the Baumans should or­ga­nize a concert tour for the Jaldati–­Rebling ­family, which sought a “progressive Jewish organ­ization” to host the ensemble’s per­for­mances in the United States. A sponsoring host organ­ization was necessary for GDR citizens to get permission to leave the country if they ­were not on official GDR business. Irma and Mordy visited Leipzig in 1981 where they saw Jaldati and Rebling perform. That same year, Rebling wrote to them about attempting to go to Israel, but “it would be impossible at the moment to go to Israel as citizens of the GDR,” ­because of the “terrible po­liti­cal situation,” referring to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. The f­ amily was able to visit Israel in 1983, but the U.S, tour only came together in 1986.65 Yet the Rebling ­family’s American tour was anything but an official visit. Irma and Mordy approached the GDR mission in New York to see if it would help publicize the ­couple’s visit, not the other way around. (Usually Jaldati and Rebling ­were sent on official government business and had their expenses covered.) In March, Irma wrote that they hoped to raise enough money to give each member of the ­family $50 a day for food and other expenses; accommodations would be home hospitality provided by progressive Jews in New York. This was no luxury tour like the ­couple had experienced in their three-­month adventure to Indonesia, North ­Korea, and China in 1965 with days of swimming in h­ otel pools and eve­ nings filled with giving and ­going to concerts. Their American adventure was a way to build musical relationships within the global Communist Jewish community, which was marginalized from most mainstream Jewish communities outside of socialist countries. They gave concerts at Hebrew Union College in New York and at the Long Island Jewish Community Center, as well as in Western Mas­sa­chu­setts—at Stockbridge, where Indian Hill was located, and in Amherst at the new National Yiddish Book Center. They concluded their tour in Washington, DC, where they performed



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at a suburban Jewish Community Center to a “crowd” of ten, and at the GDR Embassy, with which the United States then had formal diplomatic relations. Of course, the GDR took advantage of the ­couple’s and the Baumans’ hard work: Neues Deutschland publicized the ­family’s visit to the United States.66 So did the New York Times. A freelance reporter interviewed the ­family, attended the eve­ ning concert in the GDR Embassy in Washington, DC, and then wrote a celebratory article about the ­family’s “love affair” with Yiddish folk ­music: “The audience of about 70 sang along and clapped to the ­music, and some wept.”67 However, the American press was not as sympathetic, especially the American Jewish press, which had a­ dopted a Cold War approach to Jews living in Communist countries. For American Jews who w ­ ere not sympathetic to Communism, being a Jew living ­behind the Iron Curtain voluntarily was tantamount to being a traitor to the ­people, particularly at a time when American Jewish institutions ­were organ­izing their successful campaign to “­free Soviet Jews.” The Washington Jewish Week’s reporter, Henry Srebnik, who ­later became a scholar of North American Jewish Communism, treated them first and foremost as diplomats of the GDR: “They consider themselves shlichim [emissaries] for their country, no doubt about it. When a reporter shows them a few somewhat negative newspaper clippings analyzing the situation of Jews in Communist East Germany, they dismiss them as biased and untrue.”68 Importantly it was an American Jewish newspaper, and not the New York Times, that treated their visit as a po­liti­cal rather than cultural one. Yiddish culture could overcome the Iron Curtain for non-­Jewish audiences, but not for Jewish ones. Back in the GDR, especially a­ fter it was formally recognized as a nation by much of the world in 1973, the Reisebüro der DDR (GDR travel agency) or­ga­ nized tours for thousands of foreigners visiting Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück. Most of ­these visitors came from other Communist countries like the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Czecho­slo­va­kia; they used camp memorials as antifascist pilgrimage sites. But tourist-­pilgrims also came from France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Austria, generally ­under the auspices of the GDR Committee for Antifascist Re­sis­tance Fighters, the organ­ization that replaced the VVN. Statistics from 1983 count nearly one million visitors to all three camps in the GDR, about 40 ­percent of them foreign. Not surprisingly, the statistics only track the nation of origin and not religious or ethnic background.69 The camps on GDR soil served as sites of memory for ­people from across Eu­rope who ­were looking for a place in which to reflect on the fascist past and so remain vigilant against neofascism in the pre­sent.70 ­After receiving a special invitation from the GDR Committee for Antifascist Re­sis­tance Fighters in 1974, an Israeli del­e­ga­tion visited the GDR, a surprising turn of events given the lack of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the fact that the GDR served as a training ground for the Palestine Liberation Organ­ization, an organ­ization that most of the world considered a terrorist organ­ization at the time.71 Otto Funke—­the head of the GDR Committee for

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Antifascist Re­sis­tance Fighters—­greeted the Israeli del­e­ga­tion in East Berlin before their tour of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück.72 In his letter following the visit, Abraham Neumann, head of the Israeli del­e­ga­tion who had once said that the GDR was an “anti-­fascist bulwark,” wrote, “It’s clear a­ fter our many visits that one must distinguish between the Israeli government circles, who lead a politics of conquest and annexation, and the forces for peace in Israel, which fight against t­ hese politics.”73 Neumann returned to East Berlin a year l­ ater for GDR Memorial Day, in September  1975, to participate in the International Federation of Re­sis­tance Fighters.74 In 1978, the Association of East German Jewish Communities commemorated the fortieth anniversary of Reichskristallnacht with events that w ­ ere even bigger and more international than t­hose for the thirtieth anniversary: they lasted for five days and involved del­e­ga­tions from across the Communist world. For the first time, the Soviet Union sent representatives to the commemoration.75 In honor of the anniversary, the Museum for German History put on a special exhibition “Judenverfolgung in den Jahren 1933–1945” (Persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1945); and the eve­ning program featured the chief rabbi of Budapest, Laszlo Salgo, and the head of the East Berlin Jewish Community, Peter Kirchner. Helmut Aris, head of the Dresden-based Association of Jewish Communities of the GDR, tried to bring the Esther Rokhel Kaminska State ­Jewish Theater for the events. (It is unclear w ­ hether they came.) Representatives from ten Jewish Communities across Eu­rope attended the fortieth anniversary commemorations, including Lionel Kopelowitz from E ­ ngland, who ­later went on to become president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Sweden sent Leo Rosenblüth, a Holocaust survivor, who had met Jaldati in Sweden in 1946, when she was on tour to Jewish displaced persons camps throughout Eu­rope.76 Reichskristallnacht commemorations continued to get bigger and on a more international scale. At the fiftieth anniversary in 1988, Erich Honecker, head of the SED, made an appearance, as did an American del­e­ga­tion in the waning days of the GDR.

Conclusion Jews in the GDR w ­ ere integrated into transnational and global networks that helped them maintain a sense of Jewish community through Communist networks. Their sense of global Jewish community did not come about through Zionism’s triumph with a Jewish nation-­state—­which in the postwar period was the dominant ideology that bound global Jews together in the wake of the Holocaust. Th ­ ese other Jews created community through an older Communist tradition of Jewish universalism that had been popu­lar before World War II, primarily but not exclusively through Yiddish culture. In ­doing so, Jews in the GDR made state-­sponsored antifascism work not only for them but also for isolated Communist Jews around the world seeking a community. They si­mul­ta­neously inserted



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Jewish culture and memories of the war into the GDR’s memorial culture by ensuring that Jewish voices—­whether singing Yiddish songs at memorials to fascist atrocities, commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or hosting events to remember Reichskristallnacht—­were always audible and vis­i­ble in the state’s official antifascism. Jews in the GDR parted ways with Jews in the Soviet Union in their ability to make war­time commemorations explic­itly Jewish with state support. To be sure, public Jewish commemorations only happened in marked Jewish spaces like synagogues and cemeteries in the GDR, Czecho­slo­va­kia, and elsewhere, but they did happen and with state support. In addition, Jews in the GDR made that country a place of contact between Jewish Communities in Communist countries and Communist and fellow traveler Jews in non-­Communist countries during the Cold War. By revealing this alternative world during the Cold War, I hope to encourage ­future scholarship to move beyond Cold War paradigms regnant in the study of state Communism and to take a more nuanced approach in thinking about how ­people of all kinds built relationships for themselves ­behind and beyond the not so iron curtain.

Acknowl­edgments My thanks to Kateřina Čapková, Stephan Stach, and Kamil Kijek for organ­izing the conference from which this chapter comes and especially for their close reading of the manuscript in preparation for publication.

notes 1. ​Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memories: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Mario Kessler, Die SED und die Juden—­zwischen Repression und Toleranz, Politische Entwicklungen bis 1967 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995); Lothar Mertens, Davidstern unter Hammer und Zirkel. Die jüdischen Gemeinden in der SBZ/DDR und ihre Behandlung durch Partei und Staat, 1945–1990 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997). 2. ​Compared with 15,000 registered Jews in West Germany in 1950, ten times the number of Jews in the GDR: this is why scholars tend to focus on Jews in the postwar era on West Germany, not on East Germany. 3. ​Robert Willingham, Jews in Leipzig, Germany u ­ nder Nazism, Communism, and Democracy (Lewison: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011); Hendrik Niether, Leipziger Juden und die DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013). 4. ​Niether, Leipziger Juden, 16. For an example of a scholar exploring global Jewish Communist networks, see Gennady Estraikh, “Professing Leninist Yidishkayt: The Decline of American Yiddish Communism,” American Jewish History 96, no. 1 (March 2010): 33–60; and “Metamorphoses of Morgn Frayhayt,” in Yiddish and the Left, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), 144–166. 5. ​See Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), especially chapters 5 (“The Adoption of Liberal Anticommunism”) and 7 (“The Anticommunist Campaign in the Jewish Community”); Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern Amer­ic­ a (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000).

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6. ​This echoes Herf ’s argument that both postwar Germanies ­were resurrection of Weimar-­era

German politics: Herf, Divided Memories. 7. ​For scholars who argue that GDR’s antifascist war­time memory erased Jews, see Thomas Schmidt, “ ’Unsere Geschichte’? Probleme der Holocaust-­Darstellung unter DDR-­Bedingungen: Peter Edel, Fred Wander, Jurek Becker (Teil I),” Monatshefte 98, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 83–109. 8. ​Willingham, Jews in Leipzig, 61. 9. ​Herf, Divided Memory; Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-­East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2003). On Berlin’s Jewish Community in the immediate postwar period, see Robin Ostow, Jews in Con­temporary East Germany: The ­Children of Moses in the Land of Marx (New York: Palgrave, 1989). 10. ​See, for example, Wilhelm Scherte, “Ihr Leben muss erhalten bleiben,” Berliner Zeitung, November 2, 1952, 2. 11. ​Niether, Leipziger Juden, 13. 12. ​David Shneer, “Yiddish M ­ usic and East German Antifascism: Lin Jaldati, Post-­Holocaust Jewish Culture and the Cold War,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 60, no. 1 (2015): 207–234; and “Eberhard Rebling, Lin Jaldati, and Yiddish ­Music in East Germany,” in Dislocated Memories: Jews, ­Music, and Postwar German Culture, ed. Tina Frühauf and Lily Hirsch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 161–186. 13. ​Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). See also James Young, Textures of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 14. ​Peter Monteath, “A Day to Remember: East Germany’s Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism,” German History, 26, no. 2 (2008): 195–212. 15. ​“Alljährliche Gedenktag für die Opfer des Faschismus,” Berliner Zeitung, September 1, 1945, 2. 16. ​Niether, Leipziger Juden, 103. 17. ​Monteath, “A Day to Remember,” 195–218. On Yiddish per­for­mances, see for example “Zum Tag der Opfer des Faschismus,” Berliner Zeitung, September 4, 1959. See Centrum Judaicum Archiv (CJA), Berlin, 5A1/697 and “Tag der ‘Opfer des Faschismus, 9 September 1962.” 18. ​“Feierstunde für OdF,” Berliner Zeitung, September 15, 1964, 8. 19. ​See for example “Gegen die Judenmörder,” Berliner Zeitung March 1, 1956, 1. 20. ​On the VNN and its relationship to Kristallnacht commemorations, see Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO-­BArch), Berlin, DY55/V278/2/139. As the tenth anniversary commemoration, the 1948 commemoration was larger than normal; see pp. 11–12 of the file. 21. ​“ ’Glikl Hameln fordert gerechtigkeit’ Gastspiel des Warschauer Jüdischen Staatstheathers,” Berliner Zeitung, October 4, 1957, 3. Abraham Pisarek’s photo­graphs of the Berlin production can be found at http://­www​.­deutschefotothek​.­de​/­documents​/­obj​/­71417132 (accessed February 5, 2018). For more on Glikl, see Michael Steinlauf, “The Kaminskas: Pillars of the Eastern Eu­ro­pean Yiddish Stage.” Paper presented at the conference, “­Women, the City, and Yiddish Theater,” YIVO and Columbia University, July 7, 2016. 22. ​Rainer Kerndl, “Echtes Volkstheater: Ida Kaminska und die Ihren vermittelten zwei starke Schauspielerlebnisse,” Neues Deutschland, October 11, 1966, 7. 23. ​The Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration was widely covered. See, among ­others, Werner Kolmar, “Polen ehrt die Ghetto-­Kämpfer,“ Neues Deutschland, April 20, 1963, 5. “Jiddische Lieder,” Neue Zeit, April 24, 1963; and “Gedenkveranstaltung zum Ghettoaufstand,” Neues Deutschland, April 25, 1963. 24. ​Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Lin Jaldati Archiv, file 73, invitation to “Jiddische Lieder und Gedichte” (an eve­ning of Yiddish songs and poetry commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw). The Polish Cultural House still exists ­under a slightly altered name at the same address. Although East German radio hosted Jaldati for a show in



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commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1962, the 1963 program was the first live per­ for­mance. “Zirkusträume und klingende Ostereier,” Neue Zeit, April 26, 1962. 25. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, p. 169. 26. ​SAPMO—­BArch, DM3/5522. In addition, see CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, “Gedenk-­Veranstaltung anlässlich des 25. Jahrestages der Kristallnacht,” November 11, 1963, pp. 1–3. 27. ​SAPMO—­BArch, DM3/4078 (Ravensbrück); DM3/4170 (Sachsenhausen; DM3/4100 and DM3/4096 (Buchenwald). 28. ​Other countries followed l­ater, such as Austria, which issued a stamp for the fortieth anniversary in 1978; Israel; and West Germany. 29. ​For the archival rec­ord of the event, see CJA, Berlin, 5B1/217. See also CJA, Berlin, 5B1/187, p. 6; “Tote mahnen,” Berliner Zeitung, November 12, 1963, 1. 30. ​“Blumen für die Opfer der Kristallnacht,” Neues Deutschland, November 9, 1963, 8. 31. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, “Gedenk-­Veranstaltung anlässlich des 25. Jahrestages der Kristallnacht,” November 11, 1963, pp. 1–3. 32. ​“Landesrabbiner Dr. Martin Riesenburger, ‘Unser Heimat ist hier in der DDR,’ ” Neue Zeit, November 13, 1963, 2. 33. ​See http://­www​.­chorverbaende​.d ­ e​/­en​/­modfestivals​/­musica​-­sacra​-­international​/­project​ -­choir​-­2016​/­workshops​.­html (accessed April 29, 2017). 34. ​“Lewandowski—­Chor wirkte mit,” Die Union 267, November  16, 1963, as found in CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, p. 294. 35. ​David Daniels, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 36. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, pp. 1–3, 280–1; CJA, Berlin, 5B1/209, pp. 20–22. 37. ​Interview with Jalda Rebling, May 12, 2017. 38. ​On Buchenwald’s inauguration, see “Gedenktag des ganzen Volkes: Aufruf zur Einweihung der Gedenkstätte in Buchenwald am 14. September, 1958,” Neues Deutschland, September  9, 1958, 4. On Sachsenhausen’s opening event, see “Sachsenhausen-­Komitee konstituierte sich: Walter Ulbricht übernahm Präsidentschaft—­Einweihung der Gedenkstätte am 23. April,” Neue Zeit, October 11, 1960, 2. For more information about the design of the memorials, see Herbert Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” American Historical Review (2010): 53–89; Susanne zur Nieden, “Erste Initiativen für Mahnmale in Oranienburg und Sachsenhausen,” in Von der Erinnerung zum Monument, ed. Günter Morsch (Berlin: Hentrich, 1996), 125–132; Thomas Fox, Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999). 39. ​“Eleanor Roo­se­velt eingeladen,” Berliner Zeitung, September 6, 1959, 2. 40. ​Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Lin Jaldati Archiv, file 72, “Programm zur Eröffnung der Ravensbrück Ausstellung.” 41. ​“Mensch sein, heißt Bruder und Mitmensch sein: Sachsenhausen-­Gottesdieste mit D. Grüber, D. Niemöller, Weihbischof Bengsch, und Landesrabbiner Riesenburger,” Neue Zeit, April 25, 1961, 3. 42. ​Peter Hallama, Nationale Helden und Jüdische Opfer: Tschechische Repräsentationen des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2015). 43. ​Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2005), especially chapter 2, “Encounters with Ghosts: Youth Tourism and the Diaspora Business.” See also Shaul Kellner, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York: NYU Press, 2010). 44. ​On GDR concentration camps as antifascist pilgrimage sites, see Insa Eschebach, “Soil, Ashes, Commemoration: Pro­cesses of Sacralization at the Ravensbrück Former Concentration Camp,” History&Memory 23, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 131–156. For a more traditional Cold War understanding of Communist nation-­states suppressing Jewish memory, see Jeffrey

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Blutinger, “An Incon­ve­nient Past: Post-­Communist Holocaust Memorialization,” Shofar 29, no. 1 (2010): 73–94. 45. ​On the Jewish Community of Halle, see CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, pp. 651–653. On Karl-­Marx-­ Stadt, see CJA, Berlin, 5B1/187, p. 36. 46. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/209. 47. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/181, p. 41. 48. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/186, pp. 412–413. 49. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/219, p. 18. 50. ​Rudolf Iltis, “Czecho­slo­va­kia: Retrospect and Prospect,” Eu­ro­pean Judaism 3, no. 1 (Summer 1968): 24–29; Bernard Franaszczuk, “Czech Jewry ­Today,” Eu­ro­pean Judaism 5, no. 10 (1970): 23–26. 51. ​In this case, we see the ambivalent relationship that Jewish communities in Communist Eu­rope had with state power. In 1967, the GDR state sent Wilfried Fink, a member of the Leipzig Jewish Community, to study at the Budapest Rabbinic Seminary. Although the Budapest seminary welcomed him and the head of the seminary, Rabbi Ödön Singer, taught him, none of the GDR’s Jewish Communities saw him as suitable material to serve as a rabbi, ­because his ­father was not Jewish. Being pulled between his desire to serve Jewish functions and the Jewish community’s rejection of his Jewish credentials, Fink committed suicide in 1970. See Niether, Leipziger Juden, 155–158, for this incredible story. 52. ​H.  L., “Jüdische Gesänge in fünf Sprachen: Gespräch mit dem Budapester Kantor und Chorleiter Marton Lorand,” Neue Zeit, March 24, 1963, 4. 53. ​Niether, Leipziger Juden, 154–155. 54. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/219, pp. 73–74, 140. 55. ​Irmela von der Lühe, Axel Schildt, and Stefanie Schüler-­Springorum, eds.,“Auch in Deutschland waren wir nicht wirklich zu Hause”: Jüdische Remigration nach 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008); Moshe Zuckermann, ed., Zwischen Politik und Kultur: Juden in der DDR (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002). See esp. Wolfgang Herzberg, “Der Schauspieler Gerry Wolf, Ein Beispiel kollektiver Erfahrungsgeschichte jüdische-­deutscher Remingranten, vol. 1, 69–82; Frank Schneider, “Remigranten in der DDR,” in Musik in der Emigration, 1933–1945, ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994), 249–259; Daniel Siemens, “Elusive Security in the GDR: Remigrants from the West at the Faculty of Journalism in Leipzig,” Central Eu­rope, 11, no. 1 (2013): 24–45. 56. ​David Shneer, Lin Jaldati: Trümmerfrau der Seele (Berlin: Hentrich&Hentrich, 2014). They ­were Nathan Notowicz, who spent the war in the Netherlands; Georg Knepler and Ernst Hermann Meyer, who w ­ ere in E ­ ngland; and Harry Goldschmidt, who was in Switzerland. The only non-­Jew, Eberhard Rebling, who survived in the Netherlands in the under­ground a­ fter being drafted by the Wehrmacht, was married to and accompanied Jaldati, one of the GDR’s leading Yiddish singers. 57. ​Perry Friedman, “Wenn die Neugier nicht wär”: Ein Kanadier in der DDR (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2004), 67. On the Hootenanny clubs, especially the most well known, the Oktober Klub, see Günther Mayer, “Popu­lar M ­ usic in the GDR,” Journal of Popu­lar Culture 18, no.  3 (Winter 1984): 154–155. See also David Robb, “The GDR Singebewegung: Metamorphosis and Legacy,” Monatshefte 92, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 199–216. 58. ​“Perry Friedman verabschiedet,” Neues Deutschland, March 30, 1971, 2. 59. ​McMaster University Library, Jack Winter Papers, box 31, RC0035, “Cabaret Canada.” Friedman also performed at the Festival des politischen Liedes in 1973. 60. ​Friedman, “Wenn die Neugier nicht wär,” which appeared in En­glish as Jack Winter, “Perry and Other Voices,” TRAC/RATC Theatre Research in Canada/Recherche theatrales au Canada, 25, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Fall 2004), https://­journals​.­lib​.­unb​.­ca​/­index​.­php​/­tric​/­article​/­view​/­4654​/­5518. 61. ​Ester Reiter, “Secular ‘Yiddishkait’: Left Politics, Culture, and Community,” Labour/Le Travail 49 (Spring 2002): 128. The group had split with the socialists, who formed the Jewish ­Labour Committee in 1926.



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62. ​Henry Srebnik, Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist

Movement, 1924–1951 (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2008), 219. The UJPO was not readmitted to the CJC ­until 1995. And in 2011, the UJA and CJC dissociated themselves from the UJPO and its Winchevsky Centre for inviting an anti-­Zionist Holocaust survivor. See Frances Kraft, “UJA, CJC Sever Ties with Winchevsky Centre,” Canadian Jewish News, February  10, 2011, http://­www​.­cjnews​.­com​/­news​/­uja​-­cjc​-­sever​-­ties​-­w inchevsky​-­centre (accessed May 1, 2017). 63. ​For more on Montreal’s Yiddish-­speaking community, see Rebecca Margolis, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Cultural Life in Montreal, 1905–1945 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2011) and “Remaining Alive in Silence? Melekh Ravitch as Yiddish Catalyst,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 46, no. 2 (2016): 192–209. 64. ​Irma and Mordecai Bauman, From Our ­Angle of Repose (New York: n.p., 2006), 83–87. 65. ​Tamiment Library and Robert Wagner ­Labor Archives, New York University, Mordecai Bauman Collection (TAM222), box 3, folder 7, “Letters from Eberhard Rebling and Lin Jaldati to Irma and Mordecai Bauman,” (Letters to/from Lin Jaldati and Eberhard Rebling, 1970s–1980s). 66. ​“Lin Jaldati gastiert in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Neues Deutschland, 41 (259), November 3, 1986, 4. 67. ​“A ­Family’s Love Affair with Yiddish Folk M ­ usic,” New York Times, November 30, 1986, 95. 68. ​Henry Srebnik, “East German Musical ­Family Keeps Yiddish Heritage Alive,” Washington Jewish Week, November 27, 1986. 69. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/254, p. 70. 70. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/254, p. 173. 71. ​Angelika Timm, “The Burdened Relationship between the GDR and the State of Israel,” Israel Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 22–49. 72. ​“Herzliche Begegnung mit Del­e­ga­tion aus Israel,” Neues Deutschland, May 7, 1974, 2. 73. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/254, pp. 269–270. He made the statement about the GDR being an antifascist bulwark at the Sixth Congress of International Federation of Re­sis­tance Fighters in Venice in 1969. “Anerkennung der DDR auf FIR-­Kongress gefordert,” Neues Deutschland, November 16, 1969, 1. 74. ​“In einer Front mit allen Friedenskräften wirken: Notiert während der Beratungen von antifaschistischen Widerstandkämpfern aus 23  Ländern,” Neues Deutschland, September  13, 1975, 3. 75. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/220, p. 65. 76. ​CJA, Berlin, 5B1/220, pp. 198–200.

9 • SOVIET YIDDISH CULTUR AL DIPLOM AC Y IN THE POST-­S TALINIST 1950S GEN N A DY ESTR A I KH

From the end of the 1940s onward, Soviet Jews faced a new real­ity, in which the identifier of their ethnic origin, known as the “fifth point” (item number five in personnel departments’ questionnaires), could, and often would, constrain their educational and c­ areer opportunities. Gennady Kostyrchenko, whose archival research has shed light on many aspects of Soviet Jewish history, traces the origin of the policy of discriminating against Jews to the Personnel Department established at the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1939.1 Staffed by young, predominantly Rus­sian and other Slavic functionaries, this department worked to correct the “abnormal composition of the leading cadres,” as Nikita Khrushchev would boast in the 1950s before the Communist leadership of Poland.2 Serhy Yekelchyk, a historian of Ukraine, also points to 1939 as the year when the Soviet regime in many ways lost its ethnic blindness.3 The second half of 1942 and especially 1943 saw numerous dismissals of Jews from leading positions in the domains of culture and propaganda.4 In the words of Mikhail Romm, a prominent Soviet film director, “­Until the year 1943, as we know, we had no ­antisemitism. . . . ​Somehow, we managed without.”5 Vasily Grossman described this change of the status of Jews through the prism of thoughts and feelings of Viktor Shtrum, the protagonist of his novel Life and Fate: Never, before the war, had Viktor thought about the fact that he was a Jew, that his ­mother was a Jew. Never had his m ­ other spoken to him about it—­neither during his childhood, nor during his years as a student. Never while he was at Moscow University had one student, professor or seminar-­leader even mentioned it. Never before the war, ­either at the Institute or at the Acad­emy of Sciences had he ever heard conversations about it . . . 174



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Point Five. This had been so s­ imple and insignificant before the war; now, however, it was acquiring a par­tic­u­lar resonance.6

The fundamental change in Soviet nationalities policy did not go unnoticed by foreign observers: it became an oft-­discussed issue in the Jewish and general media of the 1950s, which carried incomparably more information, as well as a good deal of misinformation, about Soviet Jews than did the Soviet media of the period. The issue also appeared on the agenda of American and other Western politicians. Even Communist activists in the West expressed their concerns about the realities of Soviet Jewish life. Soviet policy makers found it necessary to ­counter the charges of antisemitism as absurd and groundless and never forgot to  supply the foreign media with information about events, publications, and other activities that could be presented as achievements in the field of Yiddish culture, effectively the only form of Jewish culture recognized in the Soviet Union. Foreign audiences had received this kind of information in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, then Yiddish culture was sponsored by the state primarily for the domestic market—as part of programs aimed at solving the social prob­lems of the Jewish population—­and only secondarily for making a favorable impression abroad. In the 1950s and l­ater, however, Soviet policy t­oward Jews was reactive rather than proactive: foreign audiences w ­ ere, as a rule, the main targets for publicizing ­vari­ous Yiddish cultural proj­ects, and such proj­ects would obtain the authorities’ consent solely or mainly for the purposes of cultural diplomacy or—­more accurately—­cultural counterpropaganda, aimed at rebuffing accusations of anti-­ Jewish bigotry. The term “cultural diplomacy” was introduced by Robert  H. Thayer, special assistant to the U.S. secretary of state, in a speech he delivered in August 1959, several weeks ­after Richard Nixon, then vice president in the Eisenhower administration, opened the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow, a landmark event in Soviet–­Western relations of the time.7 This chapter shows how the Soviet propaganda apparatus came to engage in Yiddish cultural diplomacy and how its ­doing so helped breathe some life into the Yiddish cultural landscape left in ruins ­after the devastation wrought in the last years of Stalin’s rule.

Birobidzhan: A Lodestar of Soviet Ideologists In material prepared by Soviet propaganda masters, Birobidzhan appeared as a theme of special importance. The Birobidzhan proj­ect, launched in 1928 with the main objective of “normalization” of Jews in the ethnic-­territorial structure of the  Soviet Union, failed to develop into an autonomous republic (similar, for instance, to the Tatar one) as initially projected. Instead, the Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR), with its administrative center in the town of Birobidzhan, remained stuck on one of the lowest rungs in the hierarchy of territorial units. (“Birobidzhan,”

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also spelled “Birobidjan” or “Biro-­Bidjan,” has often defined the entire JAR.) The campaign of building national autonomy in a remote corner of Rus­sia plainly did not appeal to the vast majority of Soviet Jew. Statistics collected in 1959 found as few as 14,269 locals who designated themselves as Jewish (8.8% of the JAR’s population and 0.7% of Soviet Jewry), of whom 5,597 claimed Yiddish as their first language.8 Still, Soviet ideologists used the JAR as a justification for treating—at least officially—­only the Jews living ­there as a community, whereas in all other parts of the country Jews w ­ ere looked at as “any other Soviet citizen.” In any case, this was the explanation given, in substance, to a Canadian Communist del­e­ga­tion in August  1956 during a conversation with top Soviet functionaries, including Khrushchev.9 No doubt, the Canadians found this reasoning confusing, especially ­because in 1950 Soviet authorities informed foreign Communists that the JAR no longer required nor wanted any outside help, which led to the closure of pro-­ Birobidzhan support groups, including the Ambijan (American Society of Friends of Biro-­Bidjan).10 ­After the devastation left by the late Stalinist purges, the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern, established in 1930 at the height of the construction of a Jewish region in Rus­sia’s Far East, remained the only Yiddish publication in the Soviet Union. Local functionaries’ attempt to turn the Birobidzhaner shtern into a weekly supplement to its much more widely read Russian-­language ­sister publication, Birobidzhanskaia zvezda, whose title had the same meaning of “Birobidzhan Star,” did not get the go-­ahead from the central party apparatus, even though the circulation of the Yiddish paper had declined to virtual nothing in 1949–1950.11 The purge of the region’s top administrative and cultural figures and the closing down of Jewish institutions, including the Birobidzhan State Yiddish Theater, made ­people wary of being associated with anything markedly Jewish. It was no secret that most Yiddish books at the regional library had been destroyed and that even a­ fter Stalin’s death, as late as 1956 and 1957, local censors continued to ferret out and remove titles deemed harmful for Soviet society.12 For all that, Moscow policy makers found it useful to allow foreign observers to visit Birobidzhan. That seems to have been the Kremlin’s answer to the information, circulated in the West, that the JAR had already completely lost its Jewish status. Thus, the American Jewish Year Book, issued annually by the influential American Jewish Committee, reported in its 1954 volume, “Nothing had been heard for years about Jewish life in the Jewish Autonomous Province of Birobidjan in Eastern Siberia; ­there w ­ ere rumors that the territory had been transformed into a district of slave l­abor camps.”13 A CIA information report dated May 1954 stated, “Non-­Jews and Jews alike realize that the Jewish Autonomous Oblast [region] was neither Jewish, nor autonomous, nor an oblast.”14 The Yiddish writer Buzi (Boris) Miller, the former editor of the Birobidzhaner shtern, as well as the majority of the surviving victims of the Stalinist repression that had destroyed the institutional and ­human infrastructure of Soviet Jewish cultural life, still remained incarcerated in l­ abor camps when, in the spring of 1954,



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Harrison E. Salisbury, the first correspondent of the New York Times permanently accredited in post–­World War II Moscow, got permission to travel to eastern areas of Rus­sia with a stopover in Birobidzhan. In one of his articles titled “Rus­sia Re-­ Viewed” (the series received the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting), Salisbury stated, inter alia, that the Birobidzhaner shtern came out three times a week and had a circulation of one thousand copies.15 He was misinformed. In real­ ity, less than half that number of copies of the paper w ­ ere printed, but not necessarily sold, at the time.16 Salisbury’s visit was—­like all foreigners’ visits—­meticulously orchestrated, and the results show clearly in his report: Never during question periods, which uniformly occurred when this correspondent was escorted through schools, factories or other institutions, ­were questions asked about Jews abroad, Israel, Zionism or other ­matters of Jewish interest. Officials said this reflected a lack of interest on the part of Jews in such ­matters.17

This is reminiscent of the Soviet anecdote circulating at the time in which foreign tourists would be told that “lack of demand” was the reason, for instance, why black caviar was unavailable in stores. In June  1956, Yosef Avidar, the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, and his wife, Yemima Tchernovitz, ­were able to spend a ­couple of days in Birobidzhan. Writing in a style of a tourist observing the life of a lost tribe, Tchernovitz, a Hebrew ­children’s author, recorded in her diary how she and her husband visited the editorial office of the Yiddish newspaper, where “a young man with curly hair and a repulsive face received” them “quite coldly. He seemed as if his tongue, hands and legs ­were tied, afraid to utter a word.” In her view, the Birobidzhaner shtern represented “the remnant of what had perhaps once been a Yiddish newspaper, but now was a pitiful copy of the local Rus­sian paper, which itself was a copy of Pravda.”18 Indeed, Soviet journalists had to be, in Khrushchev’s words, “not only the loyal helpers of the party, but literally the apprentices of the party,” fulfilling the function of “the most trusted transmission ­belt,” taking decisions of the party and carry­ing them “to the very midst of the p­ eople.”19 Although leading writers of central Soviet periodicals could make their “transmission ­belt” journalism more or less readable, provincial newspapers filled their pages with reprints and dull articles describing achievements of local factories and collective farms. The Birobidzhaner shtern was in a particularly disadvantaged position, having to draw on a very small pool of ­people able to work as Yiddish journalists. In the summer of 1956, Birobidzhan functionaries, fearful of any foreign contacts, found out to their dismay that Birobidzhaner shtern articles had been referred to in non-­Soviet media. In an alarming letter sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, they pointed to the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Folks-­shtime (­People’s Voice) as the source of the information leak. In fact, the editors of the Folks-­shtime, Soviet Communists before moving to Poland a­ fter World War II, had taken on the mission of acting as Soviet counterpropagandists and had partly

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turned their newspaper into a quasi-­surrogate Soviet publication.20 To refute the claims that the Birobidzhan area was no longer considered a Jewish region, they reproduced in full the title page of the Birobidzhan newspaper and the postmark bearing the official stamp of the JAR.21 As early as August 1955, Naum Korchminsky, editor of the Birobidzhaner shtern, received a letter from his Warsaw counterpart, asking for copies of the paper.22 It seems, however, it took many months for ­those copies to arrive: undoubtedly, Korchminsky, a seasoned local functionary, would not start sending them without getting the permission of the region’s top brass, who, most prob­ably, had, in their turn, secured consent from Moscow. Moscow strategists of cultural diplomacy reassured Birobidzhan officials about the f­uture of the newspaper and about its appearances in foreign media by instructing them to expand their contacts with “progressive Jewish newspapers” and to enhance the quality of the publication. In 1956, the Birobidzhaner shtern began coming out three times a week with double the number of pages, from two to four. New equipment mechanized its typesetting, which was previously done by hand.23 ­These changes, however, did not lead to improvement in the content of the newspaper: obviously, the staff journalists simply could not jump above their heads. On his Moscow visit in 1958, Chaim (Henri) Sloves, a French Communist Yiddish writer, went to the Lenin Library (now the Rus­sian State Library), where the Periodicals Department provided access to readers to recent issues of several Yiddish newspapers—­the Birobidzhaner shtern and foreign Communist papers. Sloves’s notes mention Di naye prese (New Press, Paris), Morgn-­frayhayt (Morning-­ Freedom, New York), and Fray Yisroel (­Free Israel, Tel Aviv). In contrast to the foreign newspapers that ­were worn from being read over and over, the issues of the Birobidzhaner shtern looked completely untouched.24 Nonetheless, the Birobidzhaner shtern continued to pop up in the propaganda material prepared for sympathetic foreign audiences. The person responsible for this was Semen (Solomon/Shloyme) Ra­bino­vich, a veteran Soviet Yiddish journalist who, a­ fter serving several years in the gulag, worked in the Soviet Information Bureau, or Sovinformburo (from 1961, the Novosti Press Agency), the parent organ­ization of the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee that was liquidated in November 1948. His articles recycled journalistic portraits of happy Birobidzhan Jewish residents working at vari­ous factories and organ­izations.25 The Sovinformburo also was the official channel for sending journalistic and literary material abroad. On July  23, 1956, Boris Polevoy, who was a leading figure in the Soviet Writers Union and was responsible for its international contacts, wrote this to Paul (Peysekh) Novick, editor of the Morgn-­frayhayt: Your intention to attract Soviet Jewish writers to collaborate in your newspaper seems in­ter­est­ing and promising to me. To ­those I know personally I ­will tell of your request. But the Writers Union, according to its status is unable to or­ga­nize articles for any Soviet or foreign publications. For this ­there is a special literary agency, in Sovinformburo which is regularly organ­izing articles for dif­fer­ent publications.26



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In an ­earlier letter to the Writers Union, dated June 6, 1956, Novick wrote that the Morgn-­frayhayt had reprinted from the Folks-­shtime an article by Itshok Katsnelson, a veteran of Soviet Yiddish journalism, but that it would like to obtain material directly from the Soviet Union. Novick, who had met Yiddish literati during his visits to the Soviet Union in 1932, 1936, and 1946, listed Shmuel Halkin, Emanuel Kazakevich (who by that time had reinvented himself as a Russian-­ language novelist), Moyshe Broderson, and Noah Lurie as writers well known to the readers of his newspaper. Novick lamented that his circle of friends of the Soviet Union w ­ ere “deeply disturbed. Our readers are asking: now that the Soviet Union is returning to Leninist norms and reviving the Leninist national policy, when ­will Jewish culture be rehabilitated to the position it occupied prior to November 1948?” On September 11, 1956, and then on November 12 and December 21 of the same year, Novick complained to Aleksei Surkov, head of the Soviet Writers Union, that the paper still had not received any such articles.27 Ultimately, Semen Ra­bino­vich, in addition to working at the Sovinformburo, began to act as the Moscow correspondent of the Morgn-­frayhayt. According to a CIA memorandum, Novick, who once again visited the Soviet Union, met with Ra­bino­vich in Moscow; a collaboration was born, and from February 17, 1959, to January 6, 1960, Ra­bino­vich submitted eigh­teen articles for the New York newspaper.28 Mordechai Gutman of Kfar-­Saba, Israel, wrote in his letter published in the New York Times that Ra­bino­vich’s praise of Soviet life was “hardly admissible testimony,” ­because the Moscow journalist was “a man shattered by the Soviet Secret Police, tortured in its slave ­labor camps and fearful of further persecution.” Gutman knew Ra­bino­vich “extremely well” from when they ­were both incarcerated in a camp near the coal-­mining town of Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle.29 U ­ ntil the early 1970s, the Morgn-­frayhayt from time to time published Ra­bino­vich’s and other Soviet journalists’ Birobidzhan-­related propaganda fiction. Then Novick de­cided that the articles describing Jewish life in Birobidzhan lacked so much credibility that he simply could not use them anymore.30 Most prob­ably, Ra­bino­vich served as the contact between the New York newspaper and Soviet Yiddish writers, whose texts appeared in the New York Communist daily. For Yiddish writers, publications in the foreign Communist press became an impor­tant source of income, given that the Sovinformburo paid them honoraria for ­these texts.31 It seems, though, that some articles, especially ­those that authors sent directly to the newspapers, did not bring any financial gains. One of the authors, Zalman Wendroff, asked Novick to send him, as a substitute for royalties, a suit or at least a c­ ouple of white shirts and a tie.32

Yiddish Heard but Not Read The aforementioned Zalman Wendroff, an octogenarian, was regarded as the doyen among ­those seventy or so members of the Soviet Writers Union who continued to use Yiddish as the language of their literary production even a­ fter the

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period of repression, during which many of them had experienced prison and hard ­labor camps. In his se­nior role, Wendroff chaired a meeting between several Yiddish writers and a group of foreign delegates to the Moscow Youth Festival in the summer of 1957. The festival, which aimed to show the world that post-­Stalinist society was open to international contacts, generated additional worries for Soviet ideologues. They found it particularly disappointing to see that Soviet Jews demonstrated enthusiasm for Israel in their meetings with the two hundred delegates selected to represent the Jewish state.33 As a young man, Wendroff lived in Britain and the United States and was a person seasoned in the domain of cultural diplomacy: in the 1920s to 1940s he wrote for Western Yiddish periodicals, most notably as the Moscow correspondent for the right-­socialist New York daily Forverts (Forward) and of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Even though his numerous contacts with abroad had been allowed and even encouraged by the authorities, they also, when the “right moment” came, provided fodder for his arrest and incarceration in the early 1950s. ­Later in the de­cade, however, Wendroff ’s former contacts and his fluency in En­glish came to be seen as useful. The remarkable meeting that he chaired during the Moscow Youth Festival was a byproduct of an ­earlier meeting with a group of Soviet writers at which Aleksei Surkov was forced to admit openly his failure not to invite any Yiddish colleagues. As a result, he promised to convene a separate round-­table conference for delegates who ­were interested in Yiddish lit­er­a­ture. Among t­hose who came to the hastily or­ga­nized gathering, conducted in Yiddish, w ­ ere left-­wing activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, France, and Poland, as well as journalists and writers from ­England, Israel, and Germany. Addressing the meeting, Wendroff declared that, regardless of what had taken place in the days of Stalin’s terror, Jewish cultural life in the country had not been completely uprooted, and a memorandum on Yiddish lit­er­a­ture, prepared by the Writers Union, would be submitted to the Communist Party’s Central Committee.34 To all appearances, Wendroff was referring to a proposal for the revival of Yiddish that had been crafted by a commission, with the Rus­sian writer Vasilii Azhaev (chairman) and the Yiddish poets Samuel (Shmuel) Halkin and Aron Vergelis among its members.35 This memorandum, titled “Mea­sures to Publish Works by Yiddish Writers” (Meropriiatiia po izdaniiu proizvedenii evreiskikh pisatelei), suggested a broad program of book production in Yiddish, Rus­sian, and Ukrainian to include, first and foremost, multivolume editions of the literary legacy of the five leading Soviet authors—­David Bergelson, Itsik Fefer, David Hofstein, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish—­ spuriously accused of anti-­Soviet activities and executed on August 12, 1952.36 The veteran Yiddish literary critic Naum (Nokhem) Oyslender, the keynote speaker at the meeting, focused the audience’s attention on the “miracle” of Soviet Yiddish lit­er­at­ ure’s transformation “from rejected lit­er­a­ture to g­ reat lit­er­a­ture” (fun oys-­literatur tsu groys-­literatur). To all appearance it was a popu­lar catchphrase among Soviet Yiddish writers; Chaim Suller, business man­ag­er of the Morgn-­



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frayhayt, heard it from them in July 1956.37 Oyslender revealed the “secret” of his fellow writers’ post-­comatose creative survival: the opportunity to be translated into Rus­sian became a power­ful incentive for them to continue writing in Yiddish. He saw the roots of this phenomenon in a 1909 letter by Sholem Aleichem, in which the Yiddish writer had expressed his dream of becoming “a drop in the ocean of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture.” Oyslender conceded, though, that without outlets for publishing their works in the original this stimulus would eventually dis­appear. The last speaker was the poet Zinovy (Ziama) Teleisin, who ended on a note of hope: “The day ­will come, when Yiddish books ­will appear again in Rus­sia, and we ­shall be able to dispatch them to Jewish communities all over the world.”38 Meanwhile, publications in Yiddish remained only a hope. Party ideologists gave the green light to the plan, according to which Yiddish writers could continue to work in their language, but with an impor­tant condition: their prose and poetry could appear in print only in translation—­mainly in Rus­sian but also Ukrainian, Belorus­sian, and other languages of the Soviet ­peoples. It seems that this plan had been conceived in the late 1930s, but according to the literary historian Chone Shmeruk (Szmeruk), the annexation in 1939 and 1940 of new territories along the western borders, densely populated by Yiddish-­speaking Jews, “saved Soviet Yiddish lit­er­a­ture temporarily and staved off the eventual termination of Yiddish publishing till ­after the end of the war.”39 A del­e­ga­tion of British Communists who visited the Soviet Union in October 1956 noted that among ordinary Jews of the older generation, such as the two thousand who gathered in the Leningrad Synagogue to celebrate the festival of Simchat Torah, “the non-­existence of a Yiddish paper was regarded as a deprivation and an injustice.” The del­e­ga­tion met with the member of the Communist Party’s Presidium (­later Politburo) Mikhail Suslov, who—­known ­under the sinister nickname of the “gray cardinal” of the Kremlin—­served Stalin, Khrushchev, and ­later Brezhnev as a watchful guardian of party ideology. In their long conversation with him, the British guests “raised clearly and specifically” the question of the reinstitution of the Yiddish press. “The answer came back equally clearly and unequivocally: ­Unless ­there is a specific demand for them from Soviet Jewry, no, ­these ­things ­will not be reinstituted” (emphasis in the original).40 In other words, Suslov resorted to the usual trick of Soviet propaganda, similar to the explanation for the absence of black caviar: (ostensibly) no demand, but (­really) no supply. Professor Hyman Levy, a member of the eight-­man del­e­ga­tion and soon to be a sharp critic of Soviet policy t­ oward Jews, asked why the Jews did not want to have Yiddish publications, to which Suslov replied that Yiddish had fallen into disuse among them: ­ ecause the vast majority of them have completely integrated into the Rus­sian life; B many are members of the Party, and they have no interest what­ever in preserving a distinct culture; many do not know any Yiddish themselves. It would be as useless to publish a Yiddish journal for the 500,000 Jews in Moscow [an exaggerated

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figure—­the 1959 census revealed about 240,000 Moscow Jewish residents—­G.E.] as to issue in Paris a publication in the Basque language.41

Obviously unimpressed by what they saw and heard during the trip, the del­e­ga­ tion nevertheless tried to see a good side to the Soviet strategy (formulated by Suslov) of dealing with Yiddish culture. The government was against any development of Yiddish culture for one only reason: it expected “that the Jewish ­people in the Soviet Union ­will become completely absorbed and that this is being speeded up by full and complete freedom and equality.”42 Meanwhile, the post-­Stalinist 1950s became the years when, as a headline in an American Jewish newspaper stated, Yiddish was heard but not read. In the Jewish cultural vacuum, Yiddish concert groups did not have to strug­gle for audiences: in  1957, the Soviet Ministry of Culture reported about Yiddish concerts with three million tickets sold. About four thousand Jewish shows and concerts, mostly in Yiddish, w ­ ere performed in the second half of the 1950s; the foreign press stressed that they w ­ ere given in overfilled halls before greatly appreciative audiences. Although the audience was predominantly gray haired, Sloves was surprised to see relatively young ­people, some of them army officers, at a Moscow Yiddish concert in 1958.43 To all appearances, t­ here w ­ ere influential apparatchiks who considered Suslov’s approach to Yiddish culture to be counterproductive. In July 1956, Surkov received Chaim Suller, business man­ag­er of Morgn-­frayhayt, and reassured him that the Writers Union had prepared a detailed program for reviving Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union by establishing a publishing ­house, a newspaper, and a theater and by convening an all-­union conference of Yiddish writers. Suller also had meetings with Yiddish writers. It was their first contact in years with a foreign visitor. They w ­ ere astounded when he told them “that in all the U.S., with its over 5 million Jews, ­there ­wasn’t even one decent, permanent Yiddish theatre; that a Yiddish book is a ‘best-­seller’ at 1,500 copies.” In the meantime, the nature of the questions asked by the writers revealed to Suller “an isolation from the Jewish world. Only a ­couple of the writers, t­ hose who read foreign Yiddish papers in the library, or who received the Folks-­shtime from Poland, showed some familiarity with Jewish cultural affairs outside the country.”44 In August 1956, Chaim (Henry) Shoshkes, a staff writer of the New York Yiddish newspaper Tog-­Morgn-­Zhurnal (Day-­Morning Journal), learned about the same package of proj­ects during his three-­hour-­long conversation with Aleksei Surkov; the poets Aron Vergelis, Shmuel Halkin, and Yakov Shternberg; Peretz Markish’s ­widow Esther Markish-­Lazebnikova; the literary critic Israel Serebriani; and the theater critic Isaiah Liubomirsky. Shoshkes got word that a Yiddish periodical would be launched in a few weeks’ time and that recruitment of its staff was underway. He also brought to New York information that the Writers Union was ready to invest a very significant share of its net profits in the revival of Yiddish lit­er­a­ture. In September t­here w ­ ere more rumors about the reopening of the



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­Yiddish publishing ­house Der Emes (Truth), which had been closed in November 1948, and of a conference of Yiddish writers scheduled for January 1957. On September 14, 1956, the Secretariat of the Central Committee gave a green light to the decision of the Writers Union to publish, from 1957 onward, Yiddish books and a literary quarterly with a print run of 5,000. This proj­ect was, however, soon shelved, and the Morgn-­frayhayt informed its readers that—­because of a divergence of views among Soviet officials—­the Kremlin had reneged on promises to revive Yiddish cultural activities.45 On January 31, 1957, poet Aron Vergelis and Elena Romanova, a functionary of the Writers Union, shared with Boris Polevoy their frustration. During their meetings with foreign guests, they had spoken about a number of Yiddish-­related proj­ ects, feeding the visitors with the information they had received from the leaders of the Writers Union. Now they did not know what they could write in response to the letters that kept arriving from abroad. Nor did they accept invitations, such as one from the left-­wing Argentinian Jewish Cultural Association (YKUF), which asked Vergelis and Halkin to participate in their sixth national congress scheduled to take place in Buenos Aires. Vergelis and Romanova argued that their lack of contacts and information had a damaging effect on progressive foreign Jewish organ­izations and contributed to the rise of a new wave of anti-­Soviet propaganda.46 In turn, Polevoy, “who in 1955–1957 seemed to have become a kind of cultural plenipotentiary,”47 wrote to the Central Committee, complaining that he and his colleagues in the Writers Union found themselves in an embarrassing position: they had promised to revive Yiddish cultural activities but ­were unable to reply to inquiries of foreign activists, ­because ­there was no clarity with regard to the decision taken by the Soviet leadership. Polevoy obliquely criticizes the policy makers through the words of Louis Aragon, a highly respected figure in the Soviet Union: One can say that each and ­every Western writer who comes to visit [the Soviet Union] in some form reveals an interest to this question. It is well known that this issue was one of the reasons for Howard Fast’s leaving the [American Communist] party and his ­later [ideological] transformation. The delay with solving this question hinders the return to the circle of our friends of Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, makes unstable the position of Vercors [ Jean Bruller]. The En­glish writer Doris Lessing, who left the Communist party, writes about the same issue. The list of names is endless, even in the domain of lit­er­a­ture only. The other day we had an in-­depth conversation with Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, who are visiting the Soviet Union [in May 1957]. They ­were and remain loyal friends of the Soviet Union, who did not dither even in the sharpest moments in the end of the last year [the Soviet military suppression of the uprising against communism in Hungary]. “It’s hard to understand, why you persist in this issue,”—­said Aragon. “Among ­people who know ­little about the Soviet Union this immediately ­causes suspicion;

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they question your internationalism. What­ever is the quality of Yiddish lit­er­a­ture and what­ever is one’s attitude to it, we have to admit that it is being published in ­every country of the Western world that has a Jewish population. No arguments can prove convincingly that Yiddish lit­er­a­ture or Yiddish culture are not needed in your country, which has written on its banner the slogan of internationalism. Given the fact that, as a rule, Yiddish newspapers published in vari­ous countries are being read all over the world, this prob­lem constantly has an international resonance; it turns into an unhealing sore, which your enemies w ­ ill never stop to disturb. It w ­ ill be your Achilles heel, which they w ­ ill attack. On the contrary, if you establish a Yiddish newspaper, a Yiddish almanac, publish a series of books by Yiddish writers, which ­will also find distribution all over the world, in ­every country, you’ll be able to use all ­these for disseminating your ideas, your facts, and your arguments. Why are you depriving yourselves of this possibility?”

­ fter quoting and thereby endorsing Aragon’s call for showing more po­liti­cal acuA men in dealing with Yiddish lit­er­a­ture (even if Aragon had clearly considered it subpar), Polevoy added that Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union was particularly impor­tant for foreign writers and journalists of Jewish origin: No doubt, for them ­we’ll never find a sufficiently convincing reasoning for not having Jewish culture and arts in our country. I think that the situation has become so sharp in the recent months that it can seriously undermine the prestige of our culture in the West and that this issue is ripe for a serious and urgent consideration.48

Polevoy knew that the reputation of the Soviet Union was suffering abroad from his experience of acting as a mouthpiece for spreading disinformation among foreign Jewish activists. Howard Fast would not forgive Polevoy (whom he hitherto considered a friend) for lying to him, telling him that “the Yiddish writer, [Leyb] Kvitko, was alive and well and living in your apartment h­ ouse as your neighbor, when he was among ­those executed and long since dead.”49 Even though the executions of the leading figures in the Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee had entered the public discourse in the West, any official mention of them remained taboo in the Soviet Union u­ ntil December  1989: only then did the authorities acknowledge that a secret trial followed by the executions did take place in 1952.50 The Moscow Youth Festival ended on August 11, 1957. On the next day, which was the fifth anniversary of ­those executions, some of the participants in the meeting chaired by Wendroff visited w ­ idows of the murdered Yiddish writers Markish, Kvitko, and Bergelson. At the apartment of the Bergelson ­family, the writer’s ­widow Tsipa (Tsilya) Bergelson asked her visitors to convey this message to world Jewry: “We are the heirs of our beloved fallen David Bergelson. We have been and remain Soviet patriots.”51 A year e­ arlier, Chaim Shoshkes had recorded her outrage about his suggestion that her husband was a “secret Jew”:



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My husband profoundly believed in the righ­teousness of the communist regime! He remained loyal to it till his last breath . . . ​By calling him a “Marrano” p­ eople imply that he only played the role of a devoted and convinced Soviet citizen, that he was not genuine. . . . ​In a sense, this interpretation justifies the deeds of ­those ­people who murdered him and his colleagues. . . . ​I consider this as an injustice.52

Bergelson, who ­until 1934 had lived outside the Soviet Union, had the highest name recognition of the murdered writers among foreign Yiddish readers. It is illuminating that in June 1957, when large numbers of American Jewish activists previously committed to the Communist Morgn-­frayhayt transferred their allegiance to their former archenemy, the social and cultural Jewish l­abor fraternal order, the Workmen’s Circle, they established a separate orga­nizational unit within it that they called the “Bergelson Branch.”53 The Forverts, a ­sister organ­ ization of the Workmen’s Circle, which, in the words of Aron Vergelis, was an “arch-­reactionary anti-­Soviet Yiddish newspaper,” opened its pages to “literary renegades”—­the former Polish Yiddish writers who had survived World War II as refugees in the Soviet Union but ­later, ­after emigrating, began “to throw mud on their shelter country.” Vergelis did not (and could not) mention that some of ­those “renegades” had suffered arrest, prison, and many years in forced l­abor camps.54 As early as 1956, Aron Vergelis appeared as the Yiddish frontman at the Writers Union and was increasingly mentioned in Soviet and foreign publications. It is strange then that he did not take part in the meeting with foreign delegates to the Moscow Youth Festival; perhaps he was not in the city at the time. In the propagandist onslaught on Israel during and ­after the Suez War, Vergelis wrote a poem, translated into Rus­sian by Alexander Bezymenski, in which he sent a message to the Israeli ­people that the Jewish nation, which used to be oppressed, should not be an instrument of oppression of other p­ eoples.55 In July 1956, his article in Jewish Life, the American forum for English-­speaking Jewish leftists, presented a rosy picture of the lives of Soviet Yiddish writers. According to Vergelis, Yiddish creative activity was continuing, and publications of new and old works w ­ ere planned. On September 6, 1956, Vergelis orchestrated a meeting of editors of French and Canadian Yiddish newspapers with a group of Yiddish writers. In March 1958 a French Communist del­e­ga­tion discussed Soviet Yiddish literary ­matters with a group of Rus­sian writers. Again, Vergelis gave an introductory talk, arguing for a renewal of Yiddish publishing in the country.56 In the fall of 1959, Joel Cang, foreign editor of the London Jewish Chronicle, visited Moscow and approached the Writers Union with a request to arrange a meeting with Halkin and Wendroff. Like o­ thers before him, he was unsuccessful: ­because of vari­ous “reasons” the two writers ­were not available to be interviewed. Instead, Elena Romanova, “the charming and highly cultured English-­speaking” deputy chair of the Foreign Commission at the Writers Union, arranged for Cang to meet with Vergelis. According to Cang, Vergelis, who belonged to the younger

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generation of Yiddish authors, was “a poet of quality” and was “rapidly gaining fame.” A product of Birobidzhan Yiddish schooling and a veteran of World War II, he lived in Moscow, where “he assumed the unenviable role of the trusted spokesman on ­matters affecting Yiddish culture in Rus­sia ­today.”57 He would play this role ­until the end of the 1980s.

Sholem Aleichem In 1958, Birobidzhan reappeared shortly as a hot issue in the Western press ­after Khrushchev’s off-­the-­cuff disparaging remarks about the Jews’ failure to make this proj­ect successful; it made the news again in early 1959, when the press paid much attention to rumors (most prob­ably spurious) of a Soviet plan for a mass relocation of Jews to the JAR.58 In January 1959, the topic of imminent expulsions and the general conditions of Soviet Jewish life ­were discussed in virtually all meetings and public appearances during the U.S. visit of Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy chair of the Council of Ministers. His reconnaissance-­in-­force before Khrushchev’s historical visit to the United States in September 1959 unexpectedly played an impor­tant role in the Soviet Union’s understanding of the international public relations value of Jewish culture.59 It had become clear that the strategy of Suslov and his like—of speeding up assimilation of Jews by silencing Yiddish lit­er­a­ture and journalism—­was damaging the image of the Soviet Union even among circles of Western Communists. The meetings held during Mikoyan’s visit led to a rapid change in the Soviet leadership’s view on reviving Yiddish publishing. The first Yiddish book in the post-­Stalinist period, a collection of stories by Sholem Aleihem, came out with remarkable speed: all the stages of preparing a manuscript for publication, which usually took five or six months, w ­ ere completed in a bit more than two weeks, just in time for the book to appear in Moscow bookstores for the one hundredth birthday of the classic Yiddish writer, on March 2, 1959, printed on high-­quality paper and bound in an attractive dust jacket.60 The London Jewish Chronicle wrote that “the Soviet authorities have taken unpre­ce­dented pains to give the event the widest publicity, especially abroad. Bookshops in Israel and the United States w ­ ere informed by cable that the Sholem Aleichem volume in Yiddish, of which 30,000 copies have been printed, would be supplied to them for sale shortly.”61 For instance, in Chicago the book could be purchased at the recently opened store owned by Rose who specialized in selling Rus­sian books.62 Sholem Aleichem occupied a place of honor in the Soviet literary canon. In Birobidzhan, the local library was named ­after him in 1940, the year of its opening. Sholem Aleichem Street appeared on the town’s map six years ­later, in May 1946, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the writer’s death. The toponymic commemoration of the classic Yiddish writer exemplified two phenomena in Soviet Jewish life. First, as early as the 1930s, propaganda masters had made Sholem Aleichem—­ his life and work—­ideologically suitable for Soviet cultural consumption.63 Sec-



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ond, following the January 1946 decree of the Rus­sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’s government, “On Mea­sures to Strengthen the F ­ uture Development of the Jewish Autonomous Region,” Birobidzhan functionaries hoped, as it turned out in vain, to revive the campaign of building a strong Jewish polity in the region. In this climate, it seemed appropriate to have a “Jewish” thoroughfare, even if Sholem Aleichem had nothing to do with this part of the world.64 The library and the street w ­ ere not renamed during the purges, which followed several years ­later. In 1959, two local Yiddish journalists asserted that, had Sholem Aleichem still been alive, his love of ­people would coin “bright and elated words about the new, happy life of his brethren in the brotherly f­amily of Soviet p­ eoples in the entire country, including Birobidzhan.”65 Isaac Bashevis Singer gave this explanation for the motivations for keeping this classic Yiddish writer in the Soviet canon: Among Sholem Aleichem’s characters, t­ here are neither villains nor saints. . . . . The worries and difficulties connected with making a living, generally overlooked or ignored in world lit­er­a­ture, is his main topic. This is perhaps the reason for the Marxists’ special fondness for his work. Despite all the twists and turns of Soviet attitudes ­towards writers, he has always remained kosher.66

In fact, Singer missed the point. To occupy a place in the Soviet literary canon, the Yiddish writer had to be seen as more than a harmless humorist: he had to be  a sharp critic of exploiters. This was exactly what Alexander Fadeev, then head of the Writers Union, emphasized in 1939, during the cele­bration of Sholem Aleichem’s eightieth birthday: “Sholem Aleichem found scathing words, full of disdain and sarcasm, aimed at the bourgeoisie and plutocracy.”67 In 1956 numerous cultural events ­were dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of his death.68 In March, a literary gala marking the anniversary took place at the Central House of Writers—­a nineteenth-­century art nouveau mansion that ­housed the headquarters of the Writers Union.69 The literary part of the event was followed by a concert. During the break, viewers ­were able to purchase the April issue of the Russian-­language Polish magazine Pol’sha (Poland), which contained an article on the Warsaw Yiddish theater. A tele­gram conveying greetings from the Social-­Cultural Union of Jews in Poland and the presence of the Birobidzhan writer Buzi Miller, recently liberated from the gulag, underlined the international and all-­union significance of the event. Communist periodicals in the West wrote that, on September 9, 1956, the special commission appointed by the Ministry of Culture of the Rus­sian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic had submitted for approval a detailed proj­ect for the reestablishment of a Yiddish state theater in Moscow. Reflecting the spirit of the times, it was suggested that the new theater be named ­after Sholem Aleichem.70 This plan, however, never got off the ground. In 1956 three collections of Sholem Aleichem’s stories translated into Rus­sian ­were published in Moscow with a total print run of 475,000 copies. ­After that,

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Soviet publishing ­houses printed scores of Sholem Aleichem’s writings in translation into vari­ous languages. In the mid-1960s, forty-­two Ukrainian translations came out with a total print run of more than 700,000 copies.71 By that time, the combined list of all books by Sholem Aleichem published in the Soviet Union included more than five hundred titles in twenty languages with a total print run of over six million copies.72 Yet, ­after the 1959 volume, no other of his books appeared in the Soviet Union in Yiddish. Rather, his prose became “a drop in the ocean of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture.” In 1959, the centenary cele­brations of Sholem Aleichem’s birthday reached their climax on April 2, when the main event took place in the Moscow Hall of Trade Unions. Rus­sian writers, such as Surkov, Polevoy, and Azhaev, ­were central figures in the gala event, whereas Yiddish writers appeared as a literary garnish: Noah Lurie spoke in Yiddish about Sholem Aleikhem, and Halkin and Vergelis recited their poems. Th ­ ere ­were also American guests: Paul Novick and the African American bass singer Paul Robeson, who sang several Yiddish songs. Among the performers w ­ ere young singers Nehama Lifshitz (or Lifshitsaite in Lithuanian), age thirty-­one, and Emil Gorovets (or Horoverts in Yiddish), who was thirty-­five years old. In 1958, Lifshitz, who had graduated from the Vilnius M ­ usic Acad­emy, was one of three singers who won the first place at an all-­Soviet competition of variety artists. Gorovets had studied at the theater school, which ­until the fall of 1948 existed at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Still, some functionaries chose to abstain from participating in celebrating Sholem Aleichem’s centenary. For instance, party officials of the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro) banned a literary gala that had been or­ga­nized by the local branch of the Writers Union. When a Dnipropetrovsk Jewish resident wrote to complain to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he lost his job as a history teacher and could not continue freelancing for newspapers published in the city.73 Such episodes, however, usually remained invisible to foreign observers. In 1959, the Foreign Language Publishing House distributed an En­glish translation of Sholem Aleichem’s The Bewitched Tailor. Central, regional, and professional periodicals published articles about Sholem Aleichem. A six-­volume collection of his works, translated into Rus­sian, was issued in 225,000 copies from 1959 to 1961. The Ministry of Communications issued a postage stamp with his portrait.74 Boris Sandler, a Yiddish writer of the post–­World War II generation, recalled how a street in his Bessarabian hometown of ­Belts was named ­after Sholem Aleichem in 1959.75 A group of Yiddish artists w ­ ere also sent abroad, where they had some impact on foreign audiences. According to Mikhail Aleksandrovich—­a Latvian Conservatory-­educated singer whose recordings sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union—­French Communists requested that Khrushchev send some artists to France. In addition to Aleksandrovich, the group included his younger colleagues, Lifshitz and Gorovets, and two veteran performers who ­were Meritorious



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Artists of the Rus­sian Republic: Naum Valter, a pianist, and Emanuel Kalinka, a declaiming actor (whose Yiddish, in Aleksandrovich’s words, was rather rusty). Boris Vladimirski, director of the All-­Union Studio of Gramophone Rec­ords, headed this cultural del­e­ga­tion. A few days before their departure, they ­were summoned to the Central Committee to be instructed how to behave abroad: to avoid excessive contacts with foreigners, to restrain themselves from openly admiring what they w ­ ere ­going to see during the tour, to walk only in a group, and to dispel the myth that Yiddish culture had been annihilated in the Soviet Union.76 Lifshitz began to be seen as a symbol of the Jewish cultural awakening in the Soviet Union. She also appeared in Vienna in May 1959 and in Paris, Brussels, and Antwerp in February 1960.77 (Ultimately, Lifshitz, Aleksandrovich, and Horoverts emigrated from the Soviet Union.) On January  14, 1960, Vergelis’s article in Literaturnaia Gazeta described the cele­brations of Sholem Aleichem’s centenary in Moscow, Paris, and Tel Aviv. Clearly, Vergelis was au courant with the foreign non-­Communist Yiddish press, which was normally inaccessible to his fellow writers. Predictably, he judged the Moscow gatherings and publications to be the grandest. The anniversary gala occasion in Paris, or­ga­nized by the progressive Jewish organ­ization “Union,” also became a significant event thanks to the per­for­mances of Soviet Yiddish actors: “When the Soviet artists Aleksandrovich, Kaminka, Lifshitsaite, Valter and Gorovets appeared on the stage, t­ here was no end to the rejoicing. The working Jews sitting in the audience acclaimed this manifestation of cultural exchange between the countries.” Vergelis, meanwhile, ridiculed the jubilee eve­ning in the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv, where ­there w ­ ere no representatives of Yiddish lit­er­a­ture; he scorned the “efforts . . . ​made to unite artificially Sholem Aleichem’s’ centenary with the 25th anniversary of the poet H. N. Bialik’s death.” Vergelis quoted Mordechai Tsanin, editor of the Tel Aviv daily Di letste nayes (Latest News): “It would have been pos­si­ble, on the ­whole, to forget that Sholem Aleichem had ever lived in this world, if not [for] Moscow’s decision to mark his centenary.”78 The publication of the Sholem Aleichem volume opened a new—­and the last—­page in the history of Yiddish publishing in the Soviet Union. The publishing ­house Khudozhestvennaia literatura (Belles-­lettres), which brought out the book, produced during the same year similar volumes of works by two other ­classic Yiddish writers: Mendele Moykher-­Sforim and Yitskhok Leybush Peretz. However, Yiddish works by Soviet writers still did not have access to printing presses. Cang’s interview with Vergelis shows that in the fall of 1959, ­after the cele­ bration of Sholem Aleichem’s jubilee, Vergelis still uttered Suslov-­like arguments, which showed that he did not know yet w ­ hether the authorities ­were ready to allow publication of Yiddish books by con­temporary writers: If it ­were proved, he said, that t­ here is demand for Yiddish, it would be “more than likely that other books in that language would be published in Rus­sia.” He would not predict the date, but he was confident. The demand for Yiddish, he maintained,

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would create a possibility for the rebirth of Yiddish culture which, he stressed, had “never ceased to exist but was only interrupted for a period.” But, he said, the “Yiddish reading public has shrunk.” The young Jews no longer understand the language and the older ones are also gradually changing over to Rus­sian. This, he said, is a natu­ral form of “positive assimilation”; this is the reason . . . ​why so many Yiddish authors are translated into Rus­sian. . . . “­Don’t you feel rather humiliated,” I asked, “that while writing in Yiddish you cannot have your works published in the language you yourself speak and dream in.” “No,” he replied firmly. “I feel it to be an honor and a recognition that my work is being made accessible to a wider public. This is a mark of re­spect not only for me and other Yiddish writers . . . ​, but it is also a mark of re­spect for my p­ eople.”79

Still, in May 1960 Vergelis wrote to Khrushchev claiming that it was imperative to create a Soviet Yiddish forum for lit­er­a­ture and propaganda.80 No doubt, somebody gave him a signal to write this letter. Incessant international pressure, the findings of the 1959 Soviet census (more than 400,000 Yiddish claimants contradicted the Soviet official argument that the Jews had been fully acculturated), a  potential worldwide readership, and the support of some influential Rus­sian writers—­all ­these ­factors fi­nally brought Khrushchev (if he was personally involved in decision making) and other top policy makers to the conclusion that the Writers Union should establish a Yiddish literary journal. In 1961, the Writers Union’s publishing ­house Sovetskii pisatel’ (Soviet Writers) became the parent organ­ization for the journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet Homeland) and l­ater the principal producer of Yiddish books in the Soviet Union. On August  26, 1961, the  New York Times wrote, “The Yiddish language won a round in the strug­gle with Kremlin.”81 Indeed, Soviet policy makers had come to the conclusion that Yiddish could be used as a cultural diplomatic tool in the Cold War. This purely po­liti­cal decision was a victory for scores of Yiddish authors and for thousands of Yiddish readers. As a rule, neither the writers nor the readers realized that, from the point of view of Soviet ideologues, publication of the Yiddish journal and books was worthwhile not for satisfying the cultural needs of a very small fraction of Soviet Jews: its main purpose was a cultural diplomatic one. Frederick C. Barghoorn defines “cultural diplomacy” succinctly as “the manipulation of cultural materials and personnel for propaganda purposes.”82 In this Yiddish case, manipulation was needed to show the world, or at least ­those in the world who ­were ready to believe, that the Soviet government took care of its Jewish citizens and their culture. At the same time, the environment created primarily for pursuing objectives of cultural diplomacy gave a chance for writers and actors to work professionally in the field of Jewish culture and for many thousands of ­people to read publications in Yiddish and to attend per­for­mances by Yiddish actors. The journal Sovetish heymland became the central institution in the niche created for Yiddish, and although its readership kept declining year ­after year, it endured u­ ntil 1991 and even nurtured a group of young authors.83



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notes 1. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachala do kul’minatsii,

1938–1953 (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 6.

2. ​Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik

­Revolution (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002), 200. 3. ​Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-­Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014), 4. 4. ​Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 7. 5. ​Mikhail Romm, “The Question of the National Question, or A Rally for a Genuinely Rus­ sian Cinema,” in Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering, ed. Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 219. 6. ​Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), 94, 577. 7. ​Robert H. Thayer, “Cultural Diplomacy: Seeing Is Believing,” Vital Speeches of the Day, 25, no. 24 (1959): 740–744. 8. ​Gennady Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Khrushcheva: vlast, intelligent­sia, evreiskii vopros (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2012), 180. 9. ​See Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War (Oxford: Legenda, 2008), 25. 10. ​Henry F. Srebrnik, Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Proj­ect, 1924–1951 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 204. 11. ​Chaim Maltinsky, Der Moskver mishpet iber di Birobidzhaner (Tel Aviv: Nay-­lebn, 1981), 105; Ber Boris Kotlerman, In Search of Milk and Honey: The Theater of Soviet Jewish Statehood ­(1934–49) (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009), 245. 12. ​Olga P. Zhuravleva, Istoriia knizhnogodela v Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (Khabarovsk: Far Eastern Scientific Library, 2008), 91, 119–120, 158–159; S. I. Skvortsova, “Knigi evreiskoi traditsii kontsa XIX—­nachala XX vekov v fondakhmuzeia,” in Birobidzhanskii proekt: opyt mezhnatsional’nogo vzaimodeistviia, ed. V.  S. Gurevich et  al. (Birobidzhan: Government of the JAR, 2008), 78; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Khrushcheva, 181; Kotlerman, In Search of Milk and Honey, 218–240. 13. ​Joseph Gordon, “Soviet Union,” American Jewish Year Book 55 (1954): 272. 14. ​“Jewish Autonomous Oblast.” The FOIA Electronic Reading Room. https://­www​.­cia​.­gov​ /­readingroom​/d­ ocument​/­cia​-­rdp80​-­00810a004100660005​-­9 (accessed January 11, 2022). 15. ​Harrison E. Salisbury, “Birobidzhan Jews Drop Yiddish, Prefer Rus­sian, Visitor Is Told,” New York Times, June 22, 1954, 6. On Salisbury, see Dina Fainberg, “A Portrait of a Journalist as a Cold War Expert: Harrison Salisbury,” Journalism History 41, no. 3 (2015): 153–164. 16. ​Olga P. Zhuravleva, “Periodicheskaia pechat’ Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (1928–1960gg.),” in Birobidzhanskii proekt: opyt mezhnatsional’nogo vzaimodeistviia, 89. 17. ​Salisbury, “Birobidzhan Jews Drop Yiddish.” 18. ​“The Visit to Khabarovsk and Birobidzhan of Israeli Ambassador to Moscow Yosef Avidar and His Wife, Yemima Tchernovitz (1956): Excerpt from Yemima’s Diary,” introduced and annotated by Yaacov Ro’i, in Mizrekh: Jewish Studies in the Far East, ed. Ber Boris Kotlerman (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 154. 19. ​Mark W. Hopkins, “Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev: Three Concepts of the Press,” Journalism Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1965): 531. 20. ​See Gennady Estraikh, “The Warsaw Outlets for Soviet Yiddish Writers,” in ­Under the Red Banner: Yiddish Culture in the Communist Countries in the Postwar Era, ed. Elvira Grözinger and Magdalena Ruta (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2008), 217–230. 21. ​“New Light on Biro-­Bidjan,” Jewish Advocate, December 1, 1955, 2; “More Red Propaganda,” Jewish Advocate, December  15, 1955, 2; “In a novine—­oyfgedekt a farloymdung vegn Biro-­ Bidzhan,” Morgn-­Frayhayt, January 1, 1956, 5. 22. ​Zhuravleva, Istoriia knizhnogo dela v Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti, 58.

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23. ​Zhuravleva, “Periodicheskaia pechat’ Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti,” 90. 24. ​See, e.g., Chaim Sloves, In un arum (New York: YKUF, 1970), 145. 25. ​See, e.g., Semen Ra­bino­vich, “Vos dertseylt ‘Biro-­Bidzhaner shtern’?” Morgn-­Frayhayt,

January 3, 1957, 5; and “Tipn fun yidn in Biro-­Bidzhan,” Morgn-­Frayhayt, January 15, 1957, 5. 26. ​RGALI (Rus­sian State Archive for Lit­er­a­ture and Arts), f. 631, o. 26, d. 3879. 27. ​RGALI, f. 631, o. 26, d. 3879. 28. ​“Paul Novik, David Matis, and Abraham Bick,” p.  3. The FOIA Electronic Reading Room. https://­www​.c­ ia​.­gov​/­readingroom​/­document​/­cia​-­rdp91​-­00965r000500120021​-­0 (accessed January 11, 2022). 29. ​Mordechai Gutman, “Soviet Treatment of Jews,” New York Times, September 2, 1959, 28. 30. ​See Gennady Estraikh, “Paul Novick, a Standard-­Bearer of Yiddish Communism,” in A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-­Speaking World, ed. Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 93. 31. ​See, e.g., Mordechai Altshuler, Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), 433. 32. ​See Gennady Estraikh, “Zalman Wendroff: The Forverts Man in Moscow,” Leket: Yiddish Studies ­Today 1 (2012): 521. 33. ​See, e.g., George Sherman, “Jewish Solidarity a Shock for Rus­sians,” The Observer, September 22, 1957, 4. 34. ​“USSR Yiddish Culture,” Jewish Advocate, September 19, 1957, 2. 35. ​Sloves, A shlikhes keyn Moskve, 63, 139. 36. ​RGALI, f. 631, o. 26, d. 3879. 37. ​Chaim Suller, “Eyewitness Report on Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union,” Daily Worker, August 31, 1956, 6. 38. ​“USSR Yiddish Culture,” 2; Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 56. 39. ​Chone Shmeruk, “Yiddish Publications in the U.S.S.R.: From the Late Thirties to 1948,” Yad Vashem Studies on the Eu­ro­pean Jewish Catastrophe and Re­sis­tance 4 (1960): 106–108. 40. ​“British Communists in the Soviet Union: Jews in the Soviet Union,” World News 4, no. 2 ( January 12, 1957): 21. 41. ​Goldberg, The Jewish Prob­lem in the Soviet Union, 233. 42. ​Goldberg, The Jewish Prob­lem in the Soviet Union, 22. 43. ​“Yiddish Heard but not Read,” Jewish Advocate, February 5, 1959, 17; Sloves, A shlikhes keyn Moskve, 125, 131. 44. ​Suller, “Eyewitness Report on Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union.” 45. ​See Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 51–52. 46. ​RGALI, f. 631, o. 26, d. 3901. 47. ​Frederick Charles Barghoorn, Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 79. 48. ​RGALI, f. 631, o. 26, d. 3900. 49. ​Harrison E. Salisbury, “Writers in the Shadow of Communism,” New York Times, June 9, 1957, 10, 28. 50. ​See Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 12 (1989): 34–40. 51. ​Victor Zorza, “New ‘Awakening’ of Soviet Jewry,” Manchester Guardian, September  24, 1957, 7. 52. ​Chaim Shoshkes, “Bay Dovid Bergelsons almone in Moskve,” in David Bergelson, Oysgeklibene shriftn, ed. by Shmuel Rozhanski (Rollansky) (Buenos Aires: Ateneo Literario en el Iwo, 1971), 317. 53. ​Y. Shmulevitsh, “Der nayer ‘Dovid Bergelson brentsh’ 44 Arbeter Ring,” Forverts, June 11, 1957, 3.



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54. ​Aron Vergelis, “Literaturnye otshchepentsy,” Literaturnaia gazeta, August 9, 1959, 4. 55. ​ “Miting moskovskikh literatorov,” Literaturnaia gazeta, November  15, 1956, 1; “Pozor

pobornikam rabstva,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, November 15, 1956, 4. 56. ​Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 55–56. 57. ​Joel Cang, “Meeting a Yiddish Writer in Rus­sia,” Jewish Advocate, October 29, 1959, 1, 11. 58. ​See, in par­tic­u­lar, Judd L. Teller, “Exit of Jews to Siberia Hinted,” Christian Science Monitor, January 5, 1959, 4; Marianne Rachel Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2007), 120. 59. ​Irving Spiegel, “Mikoyan Denies Exiling of Jews,” New York Times, January  16, 1959, 1; “Mikoyan Says Reds Plan No Jewish Colony,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 16, 1959, 3; Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong, 120. 60. ​“Soviet Plan to Begin Publishing Yiddish Writers a­ fter Ten Years,” The Sentinel, February 26, 1959, 3; Paul Novick, “Volume of Sholom Aleichem’s Works in Yiddish Is to Appear in Moscow Soon,” Morgn-­Frayhayt, February  23, 1959, En­glish page; “The Sholom Aleichem Centenary,” Jews in Eastern Eu­rope 1 (1959): 24. 61. ​“Soviet Concessions,” Jewish Chronicle, March 6, 1959, 36. 62. ​ “Published in Rus­sia, Sholem Aleichem Book to be Sold in Chicago,” The Sentinel, March 26, 1959, 5; Richard Hellie, “Working for the Soviets: Chicago, 1959–61, Mezhkniga, and the Soviet Book Industry,” Rus­sian History 29.2/4 (2002): 539. 63. ​See Gennady Estraikh, “Soviet Sholem Aleichem,” in Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics and Art, ed. Gennady Estraikh, Kerstine Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), 63–82. 64. ​For some reflections on this topic see, e.g., Iosif S. Brener, “Rol’ i vliianie Sholom-­Aleikhema v razvitii kul’tury i iskusstva v Birobidzhane,” Vestnik Tikhookeanskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 1 (2010): 245–252; Vsevolod  D. Bederson, “Sholom-­Aleikhemi ‘vynuzhdennyi evreiskii natsionalizm’ v identichnosti Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti,” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: Psikhologiia 2 (2013): 98–104; Boris  M. Golub’, “O meste i znachenii toponimov evreiskogo proiskhozhdeniia na territorii Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti,” Vestnik Priamurskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im. Sholem-­Aleikhema 3 (2014): 37–47. 65. ​Naum Fridman and David Shaver, “Tikhon’kaia—­Birobidzhan,” in Evreiskaia avtonomnaia oblast’ (Khabarovsk: Khabarovsk Book Publishing, 1959), 32. 66. ​Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Sholem Aleichem: Spokesman for P ­ eople,” New York Times, September 20, 1964, 11. 67. ​Estraikh, “Soviet Sholem Aleichem,” 74. 68. ​Vsevolod Ivanov’s speech was published in Folks-­Shtime, May  19, 1956; see also Itshok Katsnelson, “Di yidishe kultur-­manifestatsye in Moskve,” Folks-­Shtime, May 29, 1956, 3. 69. ​“Vecher, posviashchennyi Sholom-­Aleikhemu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 15, 1956, 3. 70. ​“Yiddish Theatre to Reopen in Moscow in ‘57,” Daily Worker, September 19, 1956, 7. 71. ​Moyshe Maydansky, “Tsu vayterdiker farfulkumung,” Sovetish heymland 11 (1968): 149. 72. ​Grigory Remenik, Sholom-­Aleikhem: kritiko-­biograficheskii ocherk (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1963), 3. 73. ​See Eduard Flink’s letter in the Moscow journal Lechaim 2 (2001): https://­lechaim​.­ru​ /­ARHIV​/­106​/­mail​.­htm (accessed March 14, 2018). His collection of stories, Metronom, came out in Dnipropetrovsk in 1989. 74. ​Leon Shapiro, “Soviet Union,” American Jewish Year Book, 61 (1960): 261–262. In 1959, stamps bearing a portrait of Sholem Aleichem ­were also issued in Israel and Romania. Bernard Isaacs, the translator of The Bewitched Tailor, came to the Soviet Union from E ­ ngland. He was imprisoned in the gulag twice, for a total of about eight years—­see Michael Durham, “Rus­sians Wrong about Briton who ‘Died in Stalin Camp,’ ” Independent​.­co​.­uk, September 6, 1992. 75. ​Boris Sandler, Stupeni k chudu (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1988), 3–8.

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76. ​Mikhail Aleksandrovich, Ia pomniu . . . (Moscow: Pro­gress, 1992), 212–214. 77. ​Yaakov Ro’i, “Nehama Lifshitz: Symbol of the Jewish National Awakening,” in Jewish Cul-

ture and Identity in the Soviet Union, ed. Yaakov Ro’i and Avi Beker (New York: NYU Press, 1991), 173. 78. ​Aron Vergelis, “Esli by zhil Sholom-­Aleikhem,” Literaturnaia gazeta, January 14, 1960, 4. 79. ​Cang, “Meeting a Yiddish Writer in Rus­sia,” 11. 80. ​Aleksandr Lokshin, “Iz istorii literatury ‘samogo slabogo zvena’: popytka vozrozhdeniia,” Lechaim 4 (2004): 35–43. 81. ​“Yiddish Wins a Round,” New York Times, August 26, 1961, 16. 82. ​Barghoorn, Soviet Cultural Offensive, 19. 83. ​See, e.g., Gennady Estraikh, “Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991,” Studies in Con­temporary Jewry 31 (2020): 70–86.

10 • ­FA MILY DISCOURSE, MIGR ATION, AND NATION-­ BUILDING IN POL AND AND ISR AEL IN THE L ATE 1950S M A RCOS SI LBER

On November 4, 1956, Wiktor L., the head of procurement in a Warsaw firm, together with his wife Irena and ­daughter Ala, applied to the Polish authorities for permission to emigrate to Israel. In the application, Wiktor  L. explained that he had a b­ rother in Israel, Abram, who had been living t­ here since 1946. He was Abram’s only relative: their parents and other siblings had perished during the German occupation. A trip to Israel, as Wiktor L. states in his application, was “his only dream.” He was, he emphasized, “counting on government resolutions on the question of ­family reunification.” He hoped, as it states in his application, that his “request w ­ ill be dealt with positively,” for which he thanks the authorities “in advance.”1 Shortly ­after that, Wiktor and his ­family ­were granted permission, and they emigrated to Israel in February 1957. About the same time, in October 1956, Teodor R., of Wrocław, together with his wife Elżbieta R.  W. and their three-­year-­old d­ aughter, submitted a similar application to leave Poland for Israel, on a similar basis. Teodor was a physician, Elżbieta a dental surgeon.2 Like Wiktor L. and so many ­others, Teodor based his request on ­family reunion. They received permission in spring 1957, leaving the country shortly afterward.3 Most historians’ research on the migration of Polish Jews in the 1950s has explored mass migrations to Israel or the West from a top-­down perspective.4 Much of this work scrutinizes government policy and social circumstances,5 orga­nizational aspects,6 and ideological influences on t­ hese flows of Jewish emigration.7 Most scholars start from the premise that the mi­grants’ decisions ­were the fruit of macro pro­cesses and po­liti­cal decisions made in high places. Many of the top-­down studies offer a deductive analy­sis of the effects of ­these policies 195

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on individual Jews. In addition, they are informed by a quantitative approach to demography and statistics.8 What is badly needed instead is analy­sis of the reasoning ­behind individuals’ decisions; that is, bottom-up research that takes an inductive approach, studying specific cases, discerning patterns, and, only ­after that, generalizing and inferring explanations. ­Because this approach has rarely been followed, how f­amily ­matters and gender perspectives structured the pro­ cesses have remained mostly in the shadows. This chapter seeks to help fill the gap. If one follows ­these major trends in the scholarship and adopts a positivist approach, it would be reasonable to say that when the Polish state reopened its doors to Jewish emigration in the late 1950s, the families of Wiktor L. and Teodor R., like many Jewish families in Poland with relatives in Israel, took advantage of the new situation and de­cided to emigrate. Taking a narrative approach, however, we may still ask why Wiktor L. and Teodor R. represented themselves this way in their requests. Why, for example, do Wiktor L.’s and Teodor R.’s perspectives take center stage, whereas t­ hose of Elżbieta R. W. and Irena L. are virtually ignored? Are ­these sorts of cases indicative of the discursive strategies that potential mi­grants generally used? What ­were the strategies used by other potential emigrants who wanted to leave Poland or, alternatively, return? How may cases like ­those of Wiktor L., or Teodor R. help us understand ­family discourse? What ­factors enabled some families to stay together? How did gender, socioeconomic level, religious and po­liti­cal affiliation, geography, timing, and circumstances affect ­these choices? How did all of ­these ­factors continue to play a role ­after emigration was accomplished? How did they affect the discourse of postwar migration and state-­and nation-­building? The massive emigration from Poland to Israel—­about 30,000 ­people moved to Israel from Poland between 1949 and 1951, and another 50,000 in the second half of the 1950s9—­like other flows of this magnitude, for instance, to Germany or the United States, comprised thousands of individual experiences. That is why I integrate a “bottom-up” perspective that views individuals as agents of their own lives.10 I also use inductive tools: beginning with specific observations, I then identify routines and patterns, gradually offering broader conclusions. In addition, I conduct a qualitative analy­sis of sources that capture the voices of mi­grants, especially their communications with and references to the state agencies charged with overseeing emigration. ­These tools enable the reconstruction of individual patterns of strategies that ­were used to surmount government obstacles to exit visas. Taking the “theoretical saturation” approach,11 I have plumbed the source material to the point where the descriptions, situations, and strategies that ­were gleaned became repetitive and confirmed previously ascertained data. In such “thick” analyses,12 the depth and richness of the findings are more illuminating than mere numbers.13 In this chapter I analyze the functioning of f­ amily discourse in relation to postwar East Eu­ro­pean Jewish migrations. This approach enables me to reassess the migration strategies of Jewish Poles in the face of government directives aimed at stem-



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ming the population flow between Israel and Poland in the late 1950s. Analy­sis of ­these dynamics reveals a new perspective on the nation-­building discourses of ­these two countries. But, si­mul­ta­neously, to understand this pro­cess from a bottom-up perspective, we need to take into consideration the place of individuals shaping it. In this regard, ­family and gendered discourse are of cardinal importance.

Encoding ­Family Discourse: The Male Perspective In general, the Communist regime in Poland imposed a non-­exit rule.14 Allowing the mass exit of the Jewish population to Israel (similar to the policy on the emigration of ethnic Germans to Germany) became a rare exception to the Polish migration policy.15 So, while Jews or Germans ­were given the option of emigrating, the doors w ­ ere closed to ethnic Poles. This policy was dictated by the wish of broad sectors of Communist Poland to build a homogeneous socialist nation-­ state. Consequently, the criteria of the ethnonational state mixed with supposedly social and ideological criteria, constituting a par­tic­ul­ar characteristic of the state. It was only natu­ral, then, that when Polish policy makers formulated state policy on the emigration of Jews from Poland, they vacillated between two princi­ples. One was the ethnonational princi­ple of nation-­building, letting the “­Others” go while absorbing the “Ours” “out t­ here”; that is, ethnic Poles abroad. The second was the socioeconomic princi­ple of building the state of the ­People’s Poland (or Polska Ludowa, the semi-­official, mostly colloquial term), which was to be committed to ideological and class princi­ples. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the implementation of the new Polish state’s (the Republic of Poland from 1944 to 1952 and then the Polish ­People’s Republic ­until 1989) policy on Jewish emigration entailed a constant maneuvering between ethnonational princi­ples of nation-­building and socioeconomic princi­ples of state-­building. It allowed socio-­ideological Jewish “ele­ments” who ­were “undesirable” or “unassimilable” to the Polish Communist proj­ect to emigrate to Israel if they so desired, yet the socioeconomic princi­ple of the Communist state-­building proj­ect was equally prominent. During the wave of emigration from 1949 to 1951, the authorities facilitated the emigration of the el­derly, the disabled, and the unemployed, b­ ecause they ­were considered to be a burden to Polish society. The Central Committee of the Communist Party (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR) reaffirmed what it saw as the need to cleanse the nation of undesirables as quickly as pos­si­ble. Merchants and ­lawyers, for instance, received permission quite easily, whereas requests from “productive and valuable ele­ments” ­were declined.16 The state made sure not to allow the emigration of professionals and workers whom it considered indispensable to the state-­building proj­ect, such as physicians, dentists, pharmacists, textile workers,17 and ­others whose absence would reduce the normal production of cooperatives and factories.18 In the second half of the 1950s, a new Polish state policy was introduced. Known as the “Thaw,” it was implemented with the collapse of Stalinism, ­after a

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wave of mass workers protests swept through Poland. Demands for po­liti­cal, economic, and social change ­were followed by manifestations of anti-­Jewish sentiment by a considerable number of Poles. As a result, authorities gave Polish Jews the option to emigrate, an option that had been unavailable during the harshest years of Polish Stalinism, between 1951 and 1956. During the wave of emigration from Poland to Israel in the late 1950s, the Polish ethnification of the cadres and the economy was advanced enough for many non-­Jews to replace Jews in impor­ tant roles in the state apparatus.19 Consequently, socioeconomic limitations w ­ ere less strict, and professionals who had been barred from emigration between 1949 and 1951 ­were now ­free to go. The main sectors that still had limitations on the number of Jews that could be allowed to emigrate ­were the armed forces and the security forces. The Politburo de­cided that Jews in t­ hese sectors who applied to emigrate “should be dismissed from the army, employed in another sector, and ­after a certain time permitted to emigrate.”20 In ­earlier studies I analyzed how individuals dealt with the discrepancy between the ethnonational proj­ect of nation-­building and the socioeconomic princi­ple of state-­building and so overcome restrictions on their emigrating.21 It is also impor­tant, however, to analyze the way individuals as f­ amily members overcame ­these inconsistencies and contradictions in state policy; that is, when ­family discourse challenged ­these policies and their inconsistencies, opening up opportunities for individuals to shape their own ­futures. ­Family discourse was embedded in the practice of Jewish migration from Poland in the late 1950s. To reintroduce the ethnonational princi­ple that enabled Jewish emigration from Poland, the authorities encoded it in the discourse of “­family reunification,” which justified the emigration of members of Jewish (and ethnic German) families that had been separated by World War II and its consequences. That was explic­itly stated by Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz at a press conference in June 1956: he reaffirmed that the state would not interfere in the submission of applications by Jews seeking to be re­united with their relatives abroad.22 On the one hand, the discourse of “­family reunification” framed the f­amily discourse of ­those wanting to leave. To get approval for leaving, the applicant had to emphasize strong ties with f­ amily in Israel, as Wiktor L. and Teodor R. did. On the other hand, the same discourse had potential discrepancies. What ­family princi­ple and concomitant ethnonational princi­ple, for example, would prevail in mixed Jewish-­ Christian, Jewish-­Polish, or Jewish–­non-­ Jewish marriages? Precisely ­these discrepancies w ­ ere pre­sent in the cases of Wiktor  L. and ­Teodor  R. According to ethnonational princi­ples encoded in the discourse of ­family reunification, they had ­little chance of being granted emigration visas. Wiktor L. and Teodor R. w ­ ere Polish Jews, married to Irena and Elżbieta, respectively, both of whom w ­ ere non-­Jewish Poles with strong f­amily ties in Poland. Consequently, Wiktor L. and Teodor R. based their applications on their bonds with Jews already in Israel, their only living f­amily, while ignoring Irena’s and Elżbieta’s close ­family in Poland.



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A similar example is that of Józef and Danuta G. and their ­daughter. Józef, a planning surveyor at the Polish National Bank in Warsaw, applied for a visa to emigrate to Israel in December 1956 on the basis of ­family reunification. He emphasized his f­ amily in Israel but did not mention his non-­Jewish wife Danuta’s many relatives in Poland. Józef and Danuta ­were granted a visa on the basis of ­family reunification. In May 1957 Józef left the country, but Danuta and their d­ aughter de­cided to postpone their departure. Their ­daughter was sick, Danuta explained, and she asked to extend her emigration permit by six months.23 We can take Danuta’s explanation at face value: How could she begin the arduous pro­cess of migration, deciding what she would take with her or leave ­behind, preparing the transportation, making all the arrangements regarding the journey by train and ship, with a sick child? But, if that was the case, why did she ask to extend the permit for so long? Józef and Danuta  G.’s strategy of ­family migration is as old as the history of migration. One f­ amily member migrates first and establishes a base for the o­ thers, who join him or her ­later. That seems to be what Józef G. did. An “experienced mi­grant,” he had already left Poland once before, in 1946, with the big wave of migration following the Kielce pogrom. His tortuous journey ended in Italy. But apparently unable to adapt to conditions t­ here, he returned to Poland in 1948.24 He prob­ably remembered the difficulties of being an emigrant ten years before and now wanted to prepare the way for his wife and d­ aughter when they emigrated to Israel, and so he began the journey alone. Their plan was for Danuta to join him ­after that. Another similar story of emigration is that of Irena I. Twenty-­four years old and married when the war began, she escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, surviving with forged papers among non-­Jewish Poles. Her husband, ­mother, and siblings—­indeed her ­whole f­ amily—­were killed. In 1945, she remarried, this time to a non-­Jewish col­on­ el in the Polish security forces. This marriage severely reduced her chances of being granted an emigration permit. In December 1956, she applied anyway to the Polish authorities for an “emigration visa to Israel, for a temporary stay in that country.” This option—­open only to party activists, security-­service personnel, and recently retired military men—­did not require one to give up Polish citizenship. She may have been eligible for this type of visa ­because she belonged to a more privileged social group than other Polish citizens. She worded her application to emphasize her emotional distress resulting from the total disruption of her life during the war and, in addition, from her husband abandoning her, which meant that she now had no f­amily left in Poland.25 For Irena I., divorce served as a strategy for her to obtain a visa and also served as an escape valve for Col­o­nel I., who was to apply l­ ater for a visa also on the grounds of ­family reunification. Thus, the discourse of ­family framed Jewish emigration from Poland. This discourse took the perspective of the individual with relatives abroad, emphasizing the goal of ­family reunification while concealing the existence of ­family ties with

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“ethnonational Poles.” In almost all the cases I found, the male perspective was placed at the forefront. Such a strategy was indeed so widespread that the Israeli Embassy would put the potential emigrant in touch with his or her supposed ­family members in Israel to strengthen the chances of being granted an emigration permit. Sometimes ­family members would emigrate together. But sometimes one member would emigrate first, while t­ hose left b­ ehind would ask to have their emigration visas extended.

A Disputed Right of Return: The Female Perspective Given the large number of ­people emigrating from Poland to Israel from the late 1940s to the second half of the 1950s, it is not surprising that at least some of them wanted to return to Poland.26 But the number in the latter group was small; the percentage of applications from p­ eople who emigrated from Poland a­ fter the war and applied to return to Poland was between 8 and 15 ­percent, a low figure compared to other waves of migration of Jews from Eastern Eu­rope in e­ arlier times or Jewish mi­grants to Israel at the same time.27 Despite its ­limited size, this potential return led to disproportionate, obsessive anxiety in the governments of Israel and Poland; neither Poland nor Israel had expected Jews who had more or less “voluntarily” left Poland for Israel to want to return. Both states considered “Jewish migration” from Poland to Israel to be a tool for the consolidation of their nation-­ states, and both implemented l­egal mea­sures to prevent their return. Each state followed its own clear logic, which sometimes converged with the other’s, regarding demographic choices and nation-­building.28 The Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (KC PZPR) determined that whoever chose the “Jewish homeland” would not be entitled to return to Poland: “out­going mi­grants must renounce their Polish citizenship and their right to return to Poland.”29 Henryk Świątkowski, Poland’s minister of justice, told the Israeli envoy in Warsaw, “­There can be no ‘trial journey’; e­ very citizen should think carefully about w ­ hether to leave. Once he leaves, t­here is no ­going back.”30 By granting exit visas, the Polish state permanently marked as undesirable the 70,000 Polish citizens who had moved legally to Israel during the 1950s. As soon as t­hese ­people chose to become citizens of the State of Israel, they became “foreigners” in the eyes of the Polish authorities. Thus, Poland implemented a strict closed-­door policy on return migration from Israel, placing returnees in a hopeless situation: the Polish authorities would not pro­cess applications of ­people who ­were no longer Polish citizens. “Poland has no desire to take back the Jews who wish to return t­ here,” explained an Israeli reporter who interviewed the Polish chargé d’affaires in Israel in 1957. My impression from the archival material is the same.31 This policy has special significance if we see it in the context of simultaneous “repatriation” or immigration to Poland. At the very same time, Poland implemented a policy facilitating the repatriation of



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Poles from the Soviet Union and supporting them financially. A quarter of a million Poles or former Polish citizens immigrated or returned from the Soviet Union to Poland between 1955 and 1959, including 30,000 Jews. ­Those Jews who w ­ ere accepted based on their Polish citizenship before World War II ­were given the same privileges granted to non-­Jewish “returning” Poles,32 at least in the very short term, ­because most of them used Poland as a transit point to the West or Israel. In other words, while Poland was denying its Jewish former citizens who had moved to Israel the option to return, it was recognizing the right of return of its prewar non-­Jewish citizens who w ­ ere still in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the refusal to accept would-be returnees from Israel was mentioned in the same breath as Poland’s difficulties in bringing back “Poles” from the Soviet Union. Słowakowski, the Polish chargé d’affaires in Israel, explained in 1957: “Polish policy is to deny ­those who left the right to return, [since] . . . ​Poland is facing a severe prob­lem absorbing repatriates . . . ​and cannot add to its already g­ reat difficulties.”33 From Israel’s perspective as well, a return to Poland was undesirable for several reasons. First and foremost, the Zionist ethos viewed the emigration of fellow ethnonationals to the Jewish homeland as the primary tool for nation-­building. According to the Zionist discourse, any Jewish migration out of Israel was to be discouraged. But a return to Poland had additional significance: from a propagandistic point of view it was a threat to the continued immigration of Polish Jews. Moreover, returning to Poland would jeopardize Israeli efforts to get the Soviets to open the gates for Jewish emigration to Israel. Hence, the Israeli authorities concluded that they had to stop Jews from moving back to Poland. ­Behind closed doors and publicly, the Israeli authorities expressed their concerns about such a return. It turns out that both countries perceived return migration as r­unning ­counter to the desired overall direction of migration and as interfering with the pro­cess of ingathering their scattered nationals and building a productive and homogeneous nation. The “undesirable” would-be returnees obviously knew that. A few of ­those wishing to return, however, succeeded in having their request granted, at least partially. That is true for the mixed ­family of Wiktor L. It seems that they did not adapt to the conditions in Israel, even though the ­family had emphasized Wiktor’s ­family ties to Israel to obtain their migration permit. Once ­there, using the same argument of ­family reunification, they formulated their request to rejoin Irena’s non-­Jewish f­ amily, f­ ather, m ­ other, and ­sister in Poland. To support the f­amily’s request, Irena’s f­ather ensured that he would support the returnees on their return, so that they would “not be a burden on society.”34 When pro­cessing the request, the Polish authorities in Poland remarked, “It is noteworthy that when [Wiktor L.] applied for an exit visa he did not consider himself to be ­family of his father-­in-­law, mother-­in-­law and sister-­in-­law, stating that he had no ­family in Poland.”35 This kind of pre-­emigration declaration of deep bonds with ­family in Israel ignored existing bonds with “Polish” members of the ­family and thus was seen by the Polish authorities as ignoring bonds with the “Polish

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nation.” This affiliation to one nation alone—­Wiktor’s emphasizing his “Jewish” side when applying for a permit to migrate to Israel and then Irena’s Polish side when asking to return to Poland—­reflects the strong national g­ rand discourse of both Zionism and Polish national Communism. Wiktor L. and his ­family, as did other ordinary potential returnees, seemed to perceive and understand the top-­down policy of the state. According to a circular sent out to members of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, “some applications of [members of] mixed marriages to return [to Poland] from Israel would to be considered [positively].”36 The term “mixed marriage” meant that one partner (husband or wife) was Jewish and the other was non-­Jewish. Wiktor and Irena L. ­were in a mixed marriage. ­Under Polish law, both Wiktor and Irena ­were now foreigners: by migrating to Israel and becoming Israeli citizens, they w ­ ere automatically denaturalized, thus forfeiting their Polish citizenship. Yet both declared to the Polish authorities that ­because they had not accepted Israeli citizenship they w ­ ere entitled to return to Poland as citizens. The bureaucrat gatekeepers, however, did not trust Wiktor’s declaration, yet stated that Irena had “filed a credible certificate [stating] that she did not accept Israeli citizenship.”37 Thus, by describing one declaration as trustworthy and the other as unreliable, the bureaucrats defined who was worthy of Polish citizenship and who was not, and who could or could not return. Whereas the official reports of the case emphasize the willingness of Irena’s parents to take care of the returnees so that they would not be a burden on society, Wiktor is depicted as a potential burden, particularly ­because of his lack of l­abor skills.38 The Polish gatekeepers de­cided that Irena was entitled to return, and Wiktor was forced to remain far from his ­family. Many other examples reveal similar discursive strategies for dealing with the barriers faced by Jews who wished to return to Poland. For instance, at the Polish legation in Tel Aviv when applying to return, Jakub and Józefa Jadwiga H. emphatically stated, “Our departure for Israel, as with many other families, was never linked to the idea of repatriation to the lands of our forefathers but to par­tic­ul­ar circumstances and well-­known general difficulties.” To overcome the obstacles they faced in obtaining permission to return to Poland, applicants emphasized ethnonational arguments demonstrating their ties to Poland while playing down their ethnic bonds to Israel. Jacob H. used bureaucratic language to veil the antisemitism that had led him to leave Poland, emphasizing that he had not left Poland ­because of his attachment to the Jewish ­people or their culture or ­because of a desire to live near his f­amily in Israel.39 Like many o­ thers, Jakub and Józefa Jadwiga H. identified the category that would help them overcome the obstacles to return and then presented themselves accordingly. While applying to emigrate from Poland in May 1957, Jakub and Józefa Jadwiga H. explained their decision on Jakub’s need to be close to his relatives “who survived Hitler’s occupation [and] have gone to Israel.”40 Disappointed ­after an unsuccessful absorption in the new country, they concealed all ­family ties to Israel, especially the husband’s, while



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emphasizing their ties with t­hose over “­there” in Poland, especially t­hose Poles who ­were ­family members of the ­woman applicant. Simply put, they formulated their CVs according to the same princi­ples they had used before leaving Poland, but the other way around. Teodor R. and his wife Elżbieta R. W. also did not, it seems, adapt to their new life in Israel. Their marriage collapsed, and Elżbieta wished to return to Poland with her four-­year-­old ­daughter, Elżbieta worded her application to emphasize her social, economic, and cultural alienation from Israeli society and her attachment to Poland and her parents t­ here. Not only had she found it difficult to adapt to life in Israel but she was also unemployed and missed her ­family.41 The rabbinical court had nullified her marriage ­because she was not Jewish, and so she could get a divorce.42 Apart from her ex-­husband, she had no one in Israel.43 Elżbieta R. W. thus portrays herself as a lonely Polish w ­ oman whose social and ethnonational alienation is drawing her back to her native country. She may well have found it difficult to integrate and been miserable and unhappy; she was without a job, husband, ­family, or friends and was responsible for a small child. The Polish authorities considered her relatives in Poland to be reliable and prepared to take responsibility for her.44 Her case was not unique. Minister of L ­ abor and Social Welfare Stanisław Zawadzki told the Israeli envoy in Poland: I have received heartrending letters from Polish ­women in Israel who have been abandoned by their Jewish husbands. It is clear to me that they ­were abandoned not necessarily ­because they are Polish, and certainly t­ here are Jewish ­women who are abandoned by their husbands. But this husband is the only link connecting [the ­woman] with the new Jewish and Israeli milieu. With the severing of this link, they are uprooted, cut off from every­thing.45

Reports from the Polish consulate in Tel Aviv and the Israel Embassy in Warsaw noted that non-­Jewish immigrants to Israel, especially w ­ omen, had a particularly hard time in Israel—­suffering insults, ostracism, and harassment—­and ­were therefore applying to return.46 According to Polish reports, non-­Jewish w ­ omen wrote to party leaders and government officials in Poland, telling them horror stories about discrimination to get permission to return as citizens.47 The Polish legation in Tel Aviv was sympathetic to their complaints. They asked the Israelis to facilitate the departure of non-­Jewish w ­ omen immigrants (especially wives), whose citizenship status in Poland was no dif­fer­ent from that of other immigrants to Israel.48 The Israeli Foreign Ministry agreed to do so, forgiving their debts to Jewish Agency.49 It is most likely that the ­women’s complaints did reflect their painful experiences. Yet, at the same time, it is highly probable that would-be returnees understood the ethnocentric, authoritarian, patriarchal mode of thinking in Poland and used it to their advantage. Employing gendered self-­representation emphasizing female weakness and distress served as a way of circumventing the system—it was

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a sophisticated mode of exploiting sexist paradigms. For Elżbieta R. W., it was a successful strategy. She was granted the desired permit and returned to Poland in October 1958.50 But that is not the end of her story. In June 1960, Elżbieta R. W. applied to re-­ emigrate, ­going so far as to renounce her and her ­daughter’s Polish citizenship. Tadeusz R., her ex-­husband and f­ather of her d­ aughter, was ready to pay all the expenses related to her re-­emigration.51 At this point, she formulated her experience in the reverse, again emphasizing her lack of work, being a burden on her ­family, her better prospects in Israel as a dentist, and Tadeusz having a good ­house ­there. She also emphasized that her divorce was invalid, b­ ecause the rabbinical court did not have the right to nullify a civil marriage. Consequently, she was, she argued, entitled to be re­united with her ­family.52 What made Elżbieta R. W. change her mind and seek to return to a real­ity she had just fled? Conversations, monitoring, and reports by the Polish security ser­ vice indicate that the divorce was as a tactic to enable Elżbieta to return. She would serve as a bridgehead to bringing the w ­ hole ­family back to Poland. It seems that she was well aware that her chances of getting permission to return ­were greater than her ex-­husband’s. When he was not granted permission to return as a citizen, he tried to get a tourist visa. But this attempt also failed. Consequently, Elżbieta tried to re-­emigrate.53 In some ways her experience was similar to that of Danuta’s and Józef G.’s—­but in reverse. Józef G. emigrated to Israel first. And Danuta, his wife, as we have seen, remained in Poland, asking to extend her permit to emigrate for six months ­because of their d­ aughter’s poor health.54 A ­ fter six months, she gave up trying to emigrate. She not only mentioned in the application her ­family connections in Poland (missing in the applications to emigrate to Israel) but also that she was an only child, which made it difficult for her to “separate herself from her parents and her country.”55 A short time ­later, both Danuta G. in Warsaw and Józef G. in Tel Aviv submitted requests to allow him to return to Poland on the basis of ­family reunification. Though it would be unreasonable to doubt the pain Józef felt in the emigration process—­adapting to a new language, society, culture, and even climate, or the grief and guilt of abandoning parents—it is reasonable to assume that Danuta G. identified categories that would enable her to overcome her husband’s restrictions on returning and represented herself accordingly. In her most recent application, she remained s­ ilent about her husband’s f­amily ties in Israel while emphasizing her ties with ­family in Poland. Elżbieta’s and Danuta’s cases, as many o­ thers, challenged the Polish authorities and forced them to rethink and renegotiate their stances t­oward ethnic, geographic, and po­liti­cal bound­aries. Should they grant a husband the right to return, thus giving the ­family the possibility to function as a ­whole? Would they have to accept the Jewish, now Israeli, husband b­ ecause of his Polish’s wife return? Or



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should they separate the f­amily, accepting only the Polish w ­ oman while turning down her Jewish ex-­Polish, now Israeli husband? Ultimately, Józef G. was not granted permission to join Danuta. The reports of the Polish secret ser­vice emphasize his many ­family links outside Poland, giving less importance to his f­amily ties to his wife and d­ aughter in Poland. They also emphasize the suspicion that Józef had collaborated with the Israeli intelligence ser­vices.56 Eventually, he emigrated to Brazil, where the Polish secret ser­vice lost track of him.57 Similarly, the Polish secret ser­vice distrusted Elżbieta R.  W., and the Polish authorities refused to grant her permission to leave the country and return to Israel. Thus, they deprived her of the possibility of joining her husband and of allowing their ­daughter to grow up with both parents.58 In the cases of Danuta G., Elżbieta R. W., and many ­others, migration led to the breakup of families. When dealing with non-­Jewish Polish w ­ omen in mixed marriages, male bureaucrats acted to buttress ethnonationalism, in keeping with their patriarchal values. Yet Jewish ­women of non-­Jewish husbands, as well as men, both Jewish and non-­Jewish seemed to evoke even less empathy from Polish bureaucrats than did non-­Jewish ­women. In the case of Irena and Col­o­nel I., a Jewish ­woman sought to rejoin her non-­Jewish husband in Poland a­ fter he had failed to get permission to join her in Israel.59 Col­o­nel I.’s letters, intercepted and copied by the Polish secret ser­vices, reflect the despair of their son Jerzy, of Irena, and of Col­on­ el I. himself. “Perhaps we have committed the greatest and most unforgivable error of our life. . . . ​I am paying for it no less than you!” replied the col­o­nel to his son’s desperate letters.60 Well aware that his correspondence was being censored, he used codes to request some sign of life.61 But his anguished letters in the Polish archives provide evidence that this was not always an effective strategy to keep open the channels of communication between ­father and son. Irena and Jerzy ­were eagerly awaiting Col­on­ el I. in Israel or permission to return to Poland, but he was never granted permission to be re­united with then, ­either in Israel or in Poland. Józef G. never received permission to rejoin his wife Danuta in Poland. The case of Adam H., by contrast, is unusual in many re­spects. The number of references to this case in numerous archive files indicates it was a cause célèbre.62 Adam  H. survived the war in hiding in Eastern Galicia ­after a young ­woman obtained papers for him that listed him as an “Aryan”; in 1944 they married. Soon they had a child, but the marriage dissolved shortly thereafter. Years ­later he became a journalist on a prestigious newspaper in Wrocław and married Barbara. A non-­Jew, she was his third wife. In late 1956 or early 1957, Adam and Barbara applied to leave for Israel. As in most other cases, their application was based on the idea of f­amily reunification, emphasizing Adam’s f­amily in Israel—­his ­sister lived in Tel Aviv at the time. Not only did they not mention Barbara’s close ­family ties in Poland but they also failed to mention Adam’s son and Adam’s m ­ other,

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both of whom still lived in Poland. Adam and Barbara w ­ ere granted permission and emigrated to Israel in March 1957.63 As in other cases we have seen, ­these mi­grants did not adapt to their new country. Adam and Barbara applied to return to Poland, introducing, as other applicants had usually done, previously unmentioned close relations—­Barbara’s ­father and Adam’s ­mother. To get the ball rolling, Adam turned to connections in Poland—­people he knew who ­were associated with the Border Protection Troops (Wojska Ochrony Pogranicza), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Polish legation in Tel Aviv.64 But Adam was accused of collaborating with the Israeli security ser­vices, and his request was denied. In the meantime, their financial situation worsened, and their marriage fell apart.65 Adam then presented himself as non-­Jewish, explaining his non-­Jewish roots. That may have been a strategy that would enable him to return, but it may, alternatively, have reflected his alienation from a society to which he could not adapt, being confronted with unsurmountable difficulties. The pro­cess of ethnification, which led many mi­grants to reshape their “Jewishness,” functioned in this aty­pi­cal case in an aty­pi­cal way: Adam was reshaping his “Polishness.” While in Israel he got baptized.66 Excerpts from an intimate letter from Barbara H. to her f­amily in Poland, and quoted by the Israeli censor, illustrate the odd situation Adam H. found himself in: We went to church in Jaffa. This after­noon Adam w ­ ill be g­ oing to Lod, where a lot of Poles live. Imagine, Adam is proving to be very active in Catholic affairs. I am pleased ­because it’s better late than never. A ­ fter coming [to Israel], he realized that in his heart he is a devout Catholic. Now we both are more attached than ever to our homeland [Poland].67

She added, “­Here I think Adam has finished once and for all with his fondness for the Jews. ­Today he is the biggest antisemite t­ here is. He had to come h­ ere to understand what it means to be a Jew.” 68 In addition to Adam’s fury as reflected in the excerpts from Barbara’s letters copied in the report by the Israeli censor, we feel the deep painful disappointment caused by his failure to integrate. If mixed families’ immigration to Israel is evidence of the indistinctness of the ethnic bound­aries of Jewish society or of a belief that they could join Jewish society by dif­fer­ent social means that would lead to assimilation, the experience of ­people like Adam H. shows that the plasticity of the construction of ethnicity construction blurs ethnic bound­aries in dif­fer­ent and contradictory ways.

A Bittersweet Epilogue or the Individual Shaping His Fate? The requests of some of the ­people discussed ­here ­were granted ­either to emigrate or to return. According to files in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw, Adam H. never returned to Poland. Barbara, however,



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was granted permission to return in early 1962.69 It seems that for her it was the end of a ­bitter experience. The story of Elżbieta R. W. continued during the tragic days ­after the March events of 1968, including the state-­run anti-­Zionist campaign. The heartbreak of the forced mass emigration of Jews from Poland appears to have led her to pack her bags once again as she sought to take charge of her own life. A Polish secret ser­vice report from the 1970s suggests that she returned to Israel. Her new address in Israel seems to be the same as she had when she lived ­there before with Tadeusz.70 An especially telling case is that of Ajzyk B. and his ­family—­according to the Polish secret ser­vice, “a Polish wife and two ­children”—­who emigrated to Israel in 1956. He and his f­ amily managed to return to Poland in 1958. Yet in 1964, he applied to re-­emigrate to Israel, providing the “classic” justification that in Poland he had “no close ­family” and in Israel he had “a ­brother and a ­sister.” According to government documents, Ajzyk B., to minimize his ties to Poland, stated, “His wife, who is much younger than him, would like to arrange her life without him.”71 This application completely omits his two ­children. He thus used the most common justification for emigration: f­ amily ties to Israel and the absence of such ties to Poland. Ajzyk B. also cited socioeconomic f­ actors, emphasizing his poor job prospects in Poland.72 This argument was a strong one, b­ ecause it implied that if prevented from emigrating he would become a burden to Polish society. The deputy director of Section II of the Voivodship Police Headquarters of the Polish Security Ser­vices (Służby Bezpieczeństwa Komendy Wojewódzkiej Milicji Obywatelskiej) recommended that he be granted permission to emigrate. His re-­emigration to Israel would not only prevent him from becoming an economic burden on Poland but his leaving without his Polish wife would also conform to the ethnonational order that male bureaucrats sought to impose, according to their ethnonational patriarchal values. In addition, Ayzik’s re-­emigration would, the Polish authorities believed, serve the sociopo­liti­cal proj­ect of the Polish ­People’s Republic. According to information obtained by the Polish secret ser­v ice, the Israeli security ser­v ices had interrogated Ajzyk  B. while he was living in Israel. Assuming that he would be interrogated again by the Israelis when he was back in Israel, the Polish secret ser­ vice planned to provide him with false information before he left. They used spycraft to prepare this material and even planned ways to manipulate Ayzik, hoping that he would unwittingly pass it on to Israeli counterintelligence.73

Conclusion Thus, a dialectic pro­cess developed in the relationships between the policy makers who established the princi­ples, the bureaucrats who implemented them, and the ordinary potential mi­grants. On the one hand, the bureaucrats and policy makers legitimated the use of f­amily discourse, and individuals developed strategies accordingly to overcome migration restrictions. On the other, the ordinary mi­grant “spoke” and the bureaucrat listened. Potential mi­grants used ­family discourse when

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trying to cope with the top-­down difficulties, specifically to emphasize belonging to the place “over ­there,” across state borders. In this chapter I have not attempted to verify to what degree the experiences of ­these outliers reflect wider truths about Polish Jewish emigrants to Israel. It is fair to assume that many of the emotions expressed in their correspondence ­were indeed heartfelt. Many of ­these mi­grants, perhaps all of them, prob­ably felt profoundly lonely, alienated, and estranged. Some expressed sorrow or anger. Many non-­Jewish ­women likely experienced harassment ­after emigrating to Israeli. ­Were ­these the predominant emotions, the dominant ingredients in their experience? I  am not looking ­here for this “truth,” as one would when taking the positivist approach. Rather, I am taking another direction. The cases discussed h­ ere show how the mi­grants presented their experiences to the bureaucrats, according to their understanding of or assumptions about bureaucratic mechanisms and government logic. Each ­adopted an approach to cope with the logic of the authorities, a logic that aimed to shape subjects whose compliance in turn legitimized the authority and practices of the state.74 Ordinary immigrants ostensibly accepted the logic of ethnonationalism and the gender bias, but as agents of their own lives they used them at the right moment to their own benefit. The desired results w ­ ere not, however, always achieved. Government agencies developed new mechanisms to cope with ­those strategies that sought to circumvent them and, from the authorities’ point of view, subvert them. When ordinary potential mi­grants became sources of social disruption and challenged the “legitimate” order, the authorities institutionalized new criteria, denounced t­ hose who ­were insubordinate, and subdued them, bringing them back into the normative ethnonational order. Migration and return migration facilitated nation-­building. My research into specific cases of migration reveals a clear trend in which the Jewish mi­grants remained outside Poland, while some non-­Jews, especially ­women, went back home to Poland. The return of many of the non-­Jews helped, in the words of Bruno Latour, to “purify” the state and, in the world of emigration from Poland to Israel and sometimes back, into “pure” national categories of “ours” and “not ours.”75 ­Later, this return also helped discursively to facilitate the creation of supposedly homogeneous socie­ties.

Acknowl­edgments Most of the archival sources quoted in this text w ­ ere published in Marcos Silber, Szymon Rudnicki eds. Te’udot le-­yahasei Yisrael Polin, 1945–1967 ( Jerusalem: Israeli State Archives 2009) and in Szymon Rudnicki and Marcos Silber, eds., ­Stosunki polsko-­izraelskie (1945–1967): Wybór dokumentów (Warsaw: Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwów Państwowych, 2009). In this chapter they appear u­ nder their original archival signatures.



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notes 1. ​“Notatka slużbowa,” March  12, 1960, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), BU_00_231_ 265_4. 2. ​Ministry of the Interior correspondence (MIc), March 16, 1961, BU 00-231/265/5, IPN. For more personal data, see “Notatka,” October 13, 1962, IPN, BU 00-231/265/5; “Notatka,” October 24, 1962, IPN, BU 00-231/265/5. 3. ​MIc, Warsaw March 16, 1961, IPN, BU 00-231/265/5. 4. ​A case in point is David Engel, Bein shiḥrur le-­breeḥa: Niṣolei ha-­Shoah be-­Polin ve-­ha-­ma’avaq al hanhagatam, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996). Also see Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah (New York: Random House, 1970); Thomas Albrich, Exodus durch Österreich: Die jüdischen Flüchtlinge 1945–1948 (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1987); Ephraim Dekel, Briha: Flight to the Homeland (New York: Herzl Press, 1972); Yohanan Cohen, Ovrim kol gvul: “Briha” Polin 1945–1954 (Tel Aviv: Zmora-­Bitan, 1995); Natalia Aleksiun, “Nielegalna emigracja Zydów z Polski w latach 1945–1947,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 1, no. 175 (1995–1996): 67–90; 179 (1996): 33–49; 180: 35–48; Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950) (Warsaw: Trio, 2002). 5. ​For instance, Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw: PAN-­ISP & IPN, 2011), 49–65, 129–140, 219–232. 6. ​See Nellie Oren, “Retzifut u-­tmurot be-­yahasei Yisrael-­Polin, 1944–1951,” master’s thesis, Ben-­Gurion University of the Negev, 1993, 34. 7. ​Engel, Bein shiḥrur le-­breeḥa. 8. ​See Albert Stankowski, “Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczące emigracji Żydów z Polski po 1944 roku,” in Studia z historii Żydów w Polsce po 1945 roku, ed. Grzegorz Berendt, August Grabski, and Albert Stankowski (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2000), 103–151; David Engel, “Patterns of Anti-­Jewish Vio­lence in Poland, 1944–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 47–50. 9. ​Oren, “Retzifut u-­tmurot,” 138; Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia?132, 484. 10. ​For example, Karen Auerbach, The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw ­after the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). This approach has often been taken in biographies, such as Joanna Nalewajko-­Kulikov, Obywatel Jidiszlandu: Rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w Polsce (Warsaw: Neriton and IH PAN, 2009), 275–285, and, more broadly, Marita Eastmond, “Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 248–264; and Amy Schuman and Carol Bohmer, “Representing Trauma: Po­liti­cal Asylum Narrative,” Journal of American Folklore 117, no. 466 (2004): 394–414. 11. ​Theoretical saturation comprises an approach predicated on grounded theory. Among the abundant work on grounded theory, see, first and foremost, Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine, 1967). Also see Clive Seale, “Grounding Theory,” in The Quality of Qualitative Research, ed. C. Seale (London: Sage, 1999), 87–105. 12. ​Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: ­Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 13. ​Patricia I. Fusch and Lawrence R. Ness, “Are We ­There Yet? Data Saturation in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Report 20 (2015): 1408–1416. 14. ​Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? 15. ​Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? ,46–75, 129–140. 16. ​Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN) KC PZPR, V-7, s. 060–061 V-8; EEDc (Eastern Eu­ro­pean Department correspondence), March  17, 1950, Israeli State Archives (ISA), 130.11/2502/10; Memo, May 25, 1951, Archiwum Ministerstwa Spraw Zagranicznych (AMSZ), z-11 w-19 t-3336. 17. ​EEDc, January 8, 1950, ISA 130.11/2502/10; EEDc, February 6, 1950, ISA 130.11/2507/15.

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18. ​Alina Cała and Helena Datner-­Śpiewak, Dzieje Żydów w Polsce 1944–1968: teksty źródłowe

(Warsaw: ŻIH, 1997), 208

19. ​On the difficulties Jews encountered in trying to find work, see Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia?,

133–134. Some xenophobic proposals to limit the number of Jews ­were presented by the nationalist faction of the “Natolins” at the Seventh Plenum of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Aleksander Kochański, Antoni Dudek, and Krzysztof Persak, eds., Centrum władzy: Protokoły posiedzeń kierownictwa PZPR: Wybór z lat 1949–1970 (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2000), 188, 196. 20. ​Kochański et al., Centrum władzy, 184 21. ​Marcos Silber, “Surmounting Obstacles to Migration and Repatriation amid Polish and Israeli Nation-­Building,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 47, nos. 2–3 (2017): 189–207. 22. ​EEDc, September 2, 1956, ISA 130.11/2503/13; Dariusz Stola, “Opening a Non-­Exit State: The Passport Policy of Communist Poland, 1949–1980,” East Eu­ro­pean Politics and Socie­ties and Cultures, 29, no. 1 (2005): 102–103; Grzegorz Berendt, “Emigracja ludności żydowskiej z Polski w latach 1945–1967,” in Polska 1944/1945–1989, Studia I materiały,1 vol. 7 (Warsaw: IH PAN, 2006), 40–41. 23. ​“Notatka,” October 29, 1959, IPN, BU 00231-209, t 26. 24. ​“Notatka,” October 29, 1959. 25. ​“Notatka,” 29 December 1959, IPN, BU 00231/209, t.28. 26. ​See Oren, “Retzifut u-­tmurot,” 34; Stankowski, “Nowe spojrzenie,” 114, 116, 121, 130. The statistics regarding the returnees are incomplete. Indeed, Polish and Israeli sources give dif­fer­ ent figures for the same event. 27. ​Jonathan Sarna, “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Eu­rope, 1881–1914,” American Jewish History 71, no. 2 (1981): 256–268; Marcos Silber, “ ‘Immigrants from Poland Want to go Back’: The Politics of Return Migration and Nation Building in 1950s Israel,” Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 27, no. 2 (2008): 201–219, ­here 203–204. 28. ​On the emigration of ethnic minorities (mainly Germans, Ukrainians, Belorus­sians, and Jews) from Poland, ­whether voluntary or forced, as a way of consolidating a new Polish national society, see Krystyna Iglicka, Poland’s Post-­War Dynamic of Migration (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 15–22. See also Kersten, “Forced Migration,” 75–86. On Jewish emigration from Poland in the late 1950s, see Ewa Węgrzyn, Wyjeżdżamy!, Wyjeżdżamy?! Alija gomułkowska 1956–1960 (Kraków: Austeria, 2016). The special status of Jewish migration from and to Poland and the forces that ­shaped it in the 1950s are an impor­tant topic that still awaits extensive, in-­depth research. For the possibility of returning to Poland, viewed from a top-­down perspective, see Silber, “ ‘Immigrants from Poland Want to Go Back.’ ” 29. ​Aleksander Kochański, “Sprawy zagraniczne w protokołach Biura Politycznego i Sekretariatu KC PZPR z roku 1949,” Polski Przegląd Dyplomatyczny 3 (2001): 263. 30. ​Israel Barzilai to Moshe Sharett, August 9, 1949, ISA, 130.43/5556/9. 31. ​ “Survey of Correspondence of Polish Immigrants,” October  11, 1957, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S6/6035. 32. ​Krystyna Kersten, “International Migrations in Poland ­after World War II,” Acta Poloniae Historica 19 (1968): 49–69. 33. ​Dov Sattath to the Israeli legation, Warsaw, January 20, 1957, ISA 130.09/3118/4. 34. ​“Notatka Slużbowa,” March 12, 1960, IPN, BU 00-231/26514. 35. ​“Notatka Slużbowa,” March 12, 1960. 36. ​Circular to the Politburo members and the secretaries of the Central Committee of the PZPR, December 31, 1957, AAN PZPR V-59, 249/21P2; Protocol of the Secretariat of KC PZPR, January 8, 1958, AAN PZPR 237-­XIV-137. 37. ​“Notatka Slużbowa,” March 12, 1960. 38. ​“Notatka Slużbowa,” March 12, 1960. 39. ​Jakub and Józefa Halicki to the Polish Legation in Tel Aviv, September 22, 1959, IPN, BU 231-209-­t.26.



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40. ​Marcos Silber, Surmounting Obstacles, 189. 41. ​J. Kawala to Naczelnik Wydziału Skarg i Wniosków MSW, [December 1962] January 1963

(?), IPN, BU 00231/265/5; “Notatka,” October 24, 1962, IPN, BU 00231/265/5. 42. ​J. Kawala to Naczelnik Wydziału Skarg i Wniosków MSW, December  1962(?) IPN, BU 00231/265/5. 43. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 44. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 45. ​Conversation between Minister Yisrael Barzilai and Minister Stanisław Zawadzki, June 9, 1950, Warsaw, June 13, 1950, ISA, 93.07/507/10. 46. ​Memo from Sluczański on his conversation with Laron, the counselor at the Israel Embassy, on October 24, 1951, Presidium of the Council of Ministers, October 25, 1951; K. Katz to Shimoni, May 8, 1958, ISA, 130.09/3118/18. 47. ​Cable from Eshel to K. Katz, December 22, 1957, ISA, 130.09/3118/18. 48. ​This included settling their debts with the Jewish Agency. In contrast to its ­handling of other cases, the Israeli Foreign Ministry cooperated in ­these par­tic­ul­ar examples, letting them go. Cable from Eshel to K. Katz, December 22, 1957, 130.09/3118/18, ISA. 49. ​Cable from Eshel to K. Katz, December 22, 1957. 50. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 51. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 52. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 53. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 54. ​“Notatka,” October 29, 1959, IPN, BU 00231-209, t 26. 55. ​“Notatka,” October 29, 1959. 56. ​“Notatka,” March 23, 1959; and “Notatka,” October 29, 1959. 57. ​“Notatka,” October 29, 1959. 58. ​“Notatka,” October 24, 1962. 59. ​“Notatka,” October 29, 1959. 60. ​Col­o­nel I.’s letter to his son, June 1, 1963, IPN, BU 00231/209, t.28. 61. ​Col­o­nel I.’s letter to his son, February 1, 1963, IPN, BU 00231/209, t.28. 62. ​See IPN, BU 00231/209 t.28; IPN, BU 00231/209 t.23; IPN, BU 00236/140 t.1; IPN, BU 00231/209/t32. 63. ​“Notatka,” June 10, 1959, BU 00231/209 t.28, IPN; “Notatka,” June 11, 1959, BU 00231/209 t.28, IPN. 64. ​“Notatka,” June 10, 1959. 65. ​“Notatka,” June 10, 1959. 66. ​“Notatka,” January 25, 1960, IPN, BU 00231/209, t.23. 67. ​“Survey of Correspondence of Polish Immigrants,” August 30, 1957, CZA, S6/6034. 68. ​“Survey of Correspondence of Polish Immigrants.” 69. ​Matejewski to Waluk, February 14, 1962, IPN, BU 00231-209, t. 23. 70. ​Anczura to Wydzial II Biura “C” MSW, August 15, 1977, IPN, BU 00231/265/5/. 71. ​St. Kopczyk to the head of the Fifth Division (wydział), Second Department of the MSW, August 19, 1964, IPN, BU 00231/265/7. 72. ​St. Kopczyk to the head of the Fifth Division. 73. ​St. Kopczyk to the head of the Fifth Division. 74. ​Michael Foucault, “Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21; and “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick  H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1988), 16–49; Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 1–52, 87–104. See also Bruce Curtis, “The Impossible Discovery,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 27 (2002): 505–533. 75. ​Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986).

DISSIDENTS

part 4

11 • THREE JEWISH SOCIAL NET WORKS A (Non-)Encounter in Malakhovka GALINA ZELENINA

Po Kurskoi, Kazanskoi zheleznoi doroge . . . —­V ladimir Vysotsky

Jeffrey Veidlinger’s study about a Soviet Ukrainian shtetl opens with what, I believe, are two correct assertions: the “assimilated Soviet Jewish intelligent­ sia based primarily in Moscow and St.  Petersburg . . . ​has come to define Soviet Jewry for the world,” and “scholarly writings on the Jewish experience in the twentieth-­century Soviet Union also focus overwhelmingly on big-­city life in general and on the elite in par­tic­ul­ar.”1 It would have been equally correct to add that scholarship on Soviet Jewry and Judaism in the USSR has dealt mainly with “macro history,” focusing on big questions such as the Jews in the ­Great Patriotic War (from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945), genocide on Soviet territory and the demographic changes that followed, the “Jewish Question” in Soviet politics and public antisemitism, and Jews in the Soviet cultural elite and cultural production. More recently, the emphasis seems to have shifted to rediscovering the life of the “Soviet shtetl.” Drawing mostly on oral history sources, scholars have sought to reconstruct the history of local communities in the former Pale of Settlement in Soviet times, with special attention to the conflict and confluence of tradition and modernity, and to assem­ble the remnants of Yiddish civilization and folk religion in con­ temporary Jewish life in Ukraine, Moldova, Belorus­sia, and the Baltic states.2 Meanwhile, with the traditional focus on macro-­processes and elites and the new focus on the periphery and on recovering the Soviet shtetl, the “assimilated Soviet Jewish intelligent­sia of big cities” remain in the shadows, and only the tip of the iceberg—­comprising the cultural elite and the refuseniks—is researched extensively. Very ­little attention has been paid to the everyday life of the ordinary Soviet Jews who populated the “heart of our motherland,” and even less to Moscow Oblast,3 despite the fact that throughout the entire Soviet period vari­ous 215

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Moscow suburbs had a considerable Jewish presence in dif­fer­ent arenas and in dif­fer­ent forms, including cottage industries, leisure-­time activities, religion, and the Jewish national movement. In this chapter, I focus on three milieus of Jewish presence in one of the best-­ known Jewish loci of the Moscow Oblast: the well-­known old-­dacha settlement of Malakhovka, southeast of Moscow, along the Kazansky railroad line. ­These three milieus are the elders frequenting the synagogue, ­people attending refusenik-­ organized events, and the summer dacha residents. They are examined as groups with specific leisure practices that had some ideological implications but w ­ ere not totally defined by ideology. This means that the research is not only structured ideologically—as in the abundant lit­er­a­ture on the Jewish national movement and religious under­ground—­but also geo­graph­ic­ ally, focusing on several groups operating in one shared location. In this approach, which emphasizes social and leisure aspects while avoiding an excessively ideological focus and traditional binary oppositions (Soviet vs. anti-­Soviet, Soviet vs. Jewish), I consider t­hese milieus as “publics of one’s own”—­a concept formulated by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak4—­and in terms of social network analy­sis as developed in relational sociology by Harrison White and his followers.5 Drawing on oral history interviews with participants of religious life in Malakhovka, members of refusenik circles, and dachniks, as well as on archival documents of state supervisory authorities, I portray Malakhovka in late Soviet times as a multidimensional Jewish center that included publics, or networks, seemingly uninterested in each other yet connected by weak ties. Although this is a case study, further analy­sis testifies to it being part of a broader phenomenon of late Soviet Jewish life outside the cities (as with matzah baking or visiting places of mass shooting during World War II in capitals of other Soviet Socialist Republics) and the diversity of that life. Although late Soviet Jewish identity has been famously labeled as “thin culture,”6 several Jewish publics existed, their members w ­ ere interconnected on a personal level, and they functioned u­ ntil the early 1990s (when they would be considerably thinned out by emigration and new Jewish groups would appear). The dacha settlement in Malakhovka began in the mid-1880s a­ fter the Malakhovka railroad station opened in 1884. The expansion of this settlement, the growth of the local village population, and the construction of workers’ settlements for the newly opened factory in Lyubertsy led to the development of public facilities in Malakhovka, including a high school, a hospital, a pharmacy, a horse-­drawn tram, a summer theater, and a church; all t­ hese buildings are captured in prerevolutionary photo­graphs taken from 1911 to 1913, published as postcards (partly at the ­initiative of the local pharmacy owner, a certain Mr.  Schlesinger), which ­were popu­lar at that time and w ­ ere recently republished on the Web.7 According to archival sources, such as registration rec­ords of Jewish Communities in Moscow Guberniya, correspondence between Jewish Communities and provincial authorities, and the Moscow Guberniya Memorial Books (Pamyatnye



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knizhki) for 1899 and the early 1900s, Jewish Malakhovka emerged not long ­after the dacha settlement in Malakhovka. Most of the Jews expelled from Moscow in 1891–1892 tried to remain near the city at all costs and often settled, legally or illegally, in Moscow suburbs, including Malakhovka and other localities of Bronnitsy uyezd.8 ­Others came from the Pale of Settlement and received official permission to ­settle in this area, where they opened businesses such as pharmacies. Though even at the peak of their migration Jews accounted for no more than one-­fifth of its population, Malakhovka was known throughout the Soviet years and afterward as a markedly Jewish place.9 This reputation was also reflected in jokes, one of which goes, “What is the difference between Palestine and Malakhovka? In Malakhovka ­there are no Arabs.”10

The Synagogue and the Jewish Community in Malakhovka The Malakhovka Jewish Community survived the revolution and grew markedly in the 1920s with the influx of mi­grants from Ukraine and Belorus­sia; it soon ­comprised about 20 ­percent of the population of Malakhovka.11 Many of ­these mi­grants had originally headed for Moscow but then relocated to Moscow Oblast ­because of the catastrophic overpopulation in the capital and difficulties in obtaining permission to stay t­ here. Among other reasons t­ hese difficulties w ­ ere caused by the lishenets status—­that is, stripped of civil rights—­that was assigned very often to middle-­class Jews. The Malakhovka Jewish Community had a synagogue, a cemetery, a Jewish boys’ shelter, several under­ground chedarim, a kosher butcher’s shop, and a matzah bakery. Not all the institutions ­were registered with the state. It was during this period, however, that numerous Jewish congregations or prayer ­houses in Moscow and Moscow Oblast succeeded in becoming registered, along with vari­ous other associations, including of vegetarians, occultists, hypnologists, and homeopaths; their registration files are held together in the collection of the administrative department of the Moscow Council. Jewish congregations’ registration files of the mid-1920s include applications for registration, lists of members, biographical information, and lists of property.12 Unregistered groups of believers of no fixed address ­were classified as a counterrevolutionary danger and persecuted accordingly.13 In the years of the ­Great Purge, from 1936 to 1938, all the facilities in Malakhovka ­were closed and some p­ eople suffered greatly.14 A ­ fter the war, however, the Community and its synagogue w ­ ere registered again and managed to survive, despite threats of closure during the Doctors’ Plot in 195315 and again during Khrushchev’s campaign against religion in 1960,16 ­until the post-­Soviet Jewish revival. The Community was of par­tic­ul­ar importance for Moscow Jews, especially ­because of its cemetery and matzah bakery, which for some time served the capital. In the late Soviet period the decreasing numbers of regular synagogue attendees among the older generation, who comprised the bulk of the congregation,17

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­ ere compensated for somewhat by younger attendees. Reports by the authoriw ties in 1972 and 1983 note with satisfaction that synagogue ser­vices w ­ ere attended predominantly by “se­nior citizens,” but t­hose written in 1984 and 1985 mention younger congregants between the ages of twenty and forty.18 Oral history research has confirmed and expanded this picture. This testimony is from an occasional synagogue attendee, though an attentive observer: In 1980, I spent a winter at my aunt’s dacha in Malakhovka. From time to time I went to the synagogue ­there. They wanted me to come more often, ­because they needed a minyan. It was the first time I saw such a mestechkovyi [small-­town or shtetl] synagogue. Old men with their avos’kas [shopping-­bags] with tfiln and tales came from the station in the dark. Then they prayed, “boo-­boo-­boo.” Then, if anyone had a yortzait, they made a lekhaim followed with lekeh, they talked in Yiddish, shared some gossip which I d­ idn’t understand at all. . . . ​And suddenly, say, on Yom Kippur, about fifty younger men appeared ­there, aged 40 or 50, and all of them knew how to h­ andle a siddur and which brocha [blessing] to say. It was quite natu­ ral for them to attend on such holidays.19

This story illustrates the coexistence of two or three generations in the Malakhovka synagogue at the turn of the 1980s. The regular attendees ­were el­derly men whose religious observance, generally deemed ideologically incorrect and outdated by the authorities, was nonetheless tolerated. Their attending synagogue is described by observers as neither a manifestation of their deep piety, nor some dissident oppositional activity, nor part of Jewish religious anti-­Soviet re­sis­tance as it is often remembered retrospectively,20 but as a sort of leisure pastime and a way to socialize. This observation comports with another, drawn from Ukrainian field material, that the synagogue served as an old men’s club for rather secularized Soviet citizens who started to go t­here only for Yizkor (Remembrance; that is, ­after their parents had died) and came mostly to have a drink and to talk.21 The younger group of irregular attendees, “aged 40 or 50,” w ­ ere neither members of the  club nor complete novices; they w ­ ere more cautious and more assimilated ­bearers of tradition, perhaps likely to join the “club” in due course. In the mid-1980s, the younger generation supported by foreign emissaries, or directed by them, took over and began instituting reforms aimed at transforming this late Soviet old men’s club into a regularly functioning synagogue. One of the main actors (or, at least, so he evaluates his role) of the transformation recalls, Missionaries from Amer­ic­ a came and started persuading me to head the Community in Malakhovka. So I did. ­There was [a] certain Fikh. He was in charge of the cemetery and he used to drink occasionally. And I proved I could do every­thing as it should be. I became the administrator t­ here. When I was called up to the Torah, they said, “Michael ben Yehuda-­Leib, a-­shoykhet, a-­zavhoz” [kosher slaughterer and supply administrator]. I practically renovated the ­whole building from floor to



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ceiling. I made a new floor, walls and roof. I had ­running w ­ ater installed ­there. What is most impor­tant, ser­vices started t­ here at least three times a week: on Saturdays, Mondays and Thursdays. Moreover, we or­ga­nized regular Torah classes.22

The movement of younger Jews to the synagogues was part of a multifaceted Jewish revival of the 1970s and 1980s, admittedly stemming from growing Jewish discontent with vari­ous forms of Soviet antisemitism, as well as from a natu­ral and “inevitable” search for their roots, including the strug­gle to be allowed to emigrate and to have some local cultural activities.23

Refusenik Gatherings in Ovrazhki Near Malakhovka In roughly the same years, the refuseniks (otkazniki)—or, more precisely, members of the Jewish national (or “in­de­pen­dent”) movement,24 self-­named Aliyah—­ began to or­ga­nize gatherings in the forest near the Ovrazhki station, three kilo­meters from the Malakhovka station.25 From the 1960s to the 1980s, members of the Soviet intelligent­sia grew fond of hiking and traveling, ranging from one-­day weekend hikes in the countryside to longer mountain hikes and canoe trips. Petr Vail’ and Alexander Genis, in their famous study of the Soviet 1960s, describe traveling as a mass trend of the late Thaw.26 Together with non-­Jewish friends and colleagues, members of the Jewish intelligent­sia also went hiking and traveling, seeing it not only as a means of escape from Soviet real­ity but also as a par­tic­u­lar state of mind of that time and place, as is evident from the following recollections: In ­those days, traveling was a way to escape from the authorities, to the woods or wherever pos­si­ble, so as not to see and not to hear.27 In Rus­sia, nature for me was an opportunity to escape from many events and ­people. We always spent vacations at the seaside, in the woods, or on a canoe trip along a river, but invariably on our own, without other ­people. But ­here [in Israel] I do not want to escape from anything, ­either from events or from ­people.28

Forms of outdoor leisure popu­lar among the academic and scientific intelligent­ sia incorporated intellectual activities, as in winter schools where participants alternated skiing with lectures on math or physics. Eventually, Jewish activists inserted Jewish content into such events29 or created their own forms of outdoor activities loaded with Jewish learning, as in the Hebrew ulpan (school) at the seaside in the Crimea and, ­later, during canoe trips.30 The organizers of gatherings in Ovrazhki themselves had gone on regular weekend trips to the countryside, and so they came up with the idea of gathering outside of town in an attempt to bring together many ­people si­mul­ta­neously (which would have been impossible in any apartment) and to avoid the unwanted attention of the authorities.31 Although the latter objective

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failed, they succeeded in attracting a wide audience (up to several hundred ­people at a time, as mentioned in ­later interviews), which makes the Ovrazhki events similar to the large gatherings near the Moscow Choral Synagogue on Simhat Torah. When speaking of both types of gatherings, which ­were attended by hundreds of ­people, including activists and regular participants, as well as occasional visitors, one should avoid the terms “refuseniks” and “activists of the Jewish national movement”: many among ­those hundreds of p­ eople ­were neither refuseniks nor active participants in under­ground Jewish life. Instead, I propose a broader term, the “refusenik milieu,” similar to the phrase otkaznye krugi, which was sometimes used by the ­people involved. Regular gatherings in Ovrazhki began in May 1976. Several activists would create a program for each gathering, which included a lecture on Jewish history or tradition, singing Jewish songs, and some team sport. L ­ ater, they added other activities, such as exhibitions of ­children’s drawings and photo­graphs, sports competitions named ­after the Maccabiah Games in Israel, and—­the event that made Ovrazhki famous—­the annual song competition held from 1977 to 1980. All ­those events w ­ ere extensively photographed and ­today, thanks to numerous efforts undertaken by former refuseniks to preserve the memory of their lives in the movement, are usually portrayed as a “heroic strug­gle”: the photos of the Ovrazhki gatherings are among the key symbols and testimonies of the period. ­There are also surviving documents. For instance, the organizers self-­published song lyr­ics and reports about the Ovrazhki song festivals. The Sputnik tret’ego festivalia evreiskoi pesni (Companion to the Third Festival of Jewish Song) reports on the growing success of this annual event. Its language, full of optimistic clichés, is strongly reminiscent of the official language of Soviet pro­gress reports and front-­ page stories in the newspapers: “For three consecutive years now the Jewish song festival has been held in Ovrazhki. It has grown in number of participants, it has grown in popularity . . . ​full of indefatigable energy . . . ​selflessly devoted to the culture of our nation . . . ​smiles and tears . . . ​fireworks of ovations . . . ​a solemn atmosphere.”32 Equally full of pathos are the songs cited in the Sputnik tret’ego festivalia evreiskoi pesni. Their lyr­ics, which emphasize national culture and nation-­building, differs from the themes of the narrative evidence. Nearly all the recollections of the Ovrazhki gatherings mention not so much the songs, competitions, lectures, or other “positive” content but rather the encounters with KGB men, especially the comic story about the tractor “they” used to disrupt the song competition, ordering the driver to plow the same field twice just to keep its engine ­running and make noise.33 This is just one of many illustrations of the importance of the emotional and social experience for many participants in the Aliyah events or members of the refusenik milieu. Of course, t­here w ­ ere committed Zionists among them—­ although in their interviews even some of the Aliyah leaders condemn the obligatory ideology and admit to having been attracted by individuals rather than Zionism.34 Yet the ordinary, irregular, or even regular participants in t­ hese Jewish



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activities had, they emphasize, no specific national or religious feelings but instead valued the com­pany of young Jews and the emotional experience of gathering together or ­doing something illegal and confronting the police. In a similar vein, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, official reports of the plenipotentiary of the Council for Religious Affairs (a Soviet government body established in 1965) to its chair repeatedly states that groups of young p­ eople gathered near the Moscow Choral Synagogue had no interest in the religious ser­vices and “demonstrated no religious feelings.”35 Such statements might be deemed slanderous or ignorant of Jewish religious practice, but interestingly, a considerable ­number of former attendees themselves described their participation in ­those gatherings in a similar spirit, rarely mentioning ideological or religious aspects. They emphasize that they felt “inspiration” and “so much energy in the air” and that they w ­ ere inspired by the “huge crowd of Jewish young p­ eople, singing and  dancing, surrounded by militia men and KGB agents [liudi v shtatskom].” Fi­nally, they explain why they participated in t­hese events: “it was only for the crowd [tusovka]; it was purely personal—­nothing national.”36 The attractiveness of the Ovrazhki gatherings is usually explained in the same way: Very dif­fer­ent ­people attended, often random ­people. Some went ­there once or twice. I went to Ovrazhki about four times. P ­ eople often went just to have some com­pany. Well, they sang ­there, and drank something and ate something. But ­people ­were the most impor­tant t­ hing. . . . ​You know, my life had been so dull u­ ntil all t­ hose Jewish events started, which meant so many new acquaintances, places to go, ­things to do.37

Thus, it is fair to assume that, for many participants in this refusenik milieu, national identity was not the most relevant t­ hing; by joining t­ hese events, they felt they belonged to and w ­ ere involved with good Jewish com­pany, not the Jewish ­people as a w ­ hole. Consequently, most of the activities w ­ ere related to leisure and socializing, not to ideological and po­liti­cal strug­gle. Interested as they seem to have been in the revival of Jewish tradition, none of the Aliyah activists from Moscow mention in their ­later interviews the Malakhovka religious Community.38 When asked specifically about the Malakhovka synagogue, an interview subject claimed that he did not know about it; another replied that she knew but did not care about it: it was a shtetl-­like (mestechkovyi) locus, a piece of the old world, not the Jewish life they w ­ ere looking for. They assumed that no one except el­derly Yiddish speakers went t­ here, not the Jewish com­pany they sought to join. Malakhovka as a dacha area is a dif­fer­ent story. Aliyah activists mention dachas from time to time, particularly ­because they themselves rented them in Malakhovka and surrounding dacha settlements. This was especially true a bit l­ater, in the mid1980s, when they went ­there to spend vacations with other Aliyah families and to

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accommodate their Jewish kindergarten that used to be in Bykovo (five kilo­meters away) and ­later in Malakhovka. Evidence of refusenik ­children’s summer activities at the Malakhovka dachas is provided by handwritten newspapers for ­children like Ani maamin (I Believe) and Moskovskii orthodox (Moscow Orthodox).39 In an especially telling piece of refusenik narrative about the Jewish dachniks in Malakhovka, a former activist, Eleazar Yuzefovich, recalls his and his friends’ attempts to rent a dacha for their under­ground kindergarten: ­ fter five or six trips [to dif­fer­ent dacha settlements] we fi­nally found the dacha A that met all our requirements. It was in Malakhovka. It was not irrelevant that this was a Jewish place. . . . ​We discussed all the terms and conditions with the landlady. Her intelligent-­and noble-­looking Rus­sian husband was pre­sent but did not take part in the conversation. The landlady was a typical pushy Jewish huckster.40

Yuzefovich holds anything Jewish in high esteem, yet at the same time he demonstrates contempt for mestechkovyi Jews who have, in his opinion, no place in the Jewish revival. An Ovrazhki national-­minded Jew, he considers a dachnik Jew a typical representative of the old Jewish world. Paradoxically, Malakhovka dachniks of quite another type (which I describe ­later) in turn regarded national-­ minded Jews with some contempt, as if they ­were taking a step backward.

Dacha Subculture in Malakhovka and Its Jewish Flavor The third late Soviet subculture of Malakhovka is the dacha subculture. ­Until recently it was neither examined as a cultural phenomenon nor considered to be particularly Jewish. Soviet scholarship discussed dachas mostly within area studies or architectural studies. From the late twentieth ­century or early twenty-­first ­century, however, the subject was taken up, first by Western and then by Rus­sian scholars who looked at it in its social and cultural contexts.41 Although everyday dacha life is considered to have been more or less similar in dif­fer­ent periods,42 the attitude to dacha leisure underwent considerable changes over time. In the 1860s, Rus­sians fled to their dachas to escape the “miasma” of the city, which was on the verge of a sanitary disaster.43 A few de­cades ­later, during the fin de siècle, they expected dacha recreation to calm their nerves and cure the fash­ion­able disease of neurasthenia.44 In the early Soviet period, townsfolk sought escape from overcrowded communal apartments at their dachas, and, as Melissa L. Caldwell and Stephen Lovell argue in their recent publications, the Soviet intelligent­sia in the ­later years of the USSR saw the dacha as a private space, a way to escape the pressures of urban life and excessive state control over their lives. The last of ­these views implies some degree of nonconformity with the regime on the part of dacha dwellers; yet this has been persuasively contested by some critics who believe that true escapism and po­liti­cal opposition are to be found in camping in the g­ reat outdoors,



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which did indeed provide them with a certain freedom, whereas dachniks remained ­under the watchful eyes of their neighbors and the cooperatives.45 To add social and ethnic dimensions to the subject of the dacha, we should start with an observation made by social historians of the interwar period—­namely, that in the 1920s and 1930s dacha leisure was a class-­specific activity of members of the intelligent­sia and of white-­collar workers, whereas blue-­collar workers e­ ither spent vacations with their relatives in the countryside or received f­ ree vouchers for health resorts, something mostly unavailable to members of the intelligent­sia.46 On the one hand, the dacha was one of the privileges of the ruling elite, the party bureaucracy, and the officially recognized artist intelligent­sia; dachas ­were distributed by the state to members of vari­ous official creative ­unions. On the other hand, building a dacha—­finding workers and procuring building materials—­required resourcefulness and connections (blat).47 Jews generally succeeded in both areas. Soviet dachas varied in size and appearance. Many w ­ ere small summer h­ ouses, consisting of one room, an attic, and a veranda but without ­running w ­ ater or a flush toilet. Nevertheless, owning a dacha was envied, and dacha leisure as an attribute of the Jewish lifestyle was noticed with dis­plea­sure by Gentile observers in the prewar and especially the postwar years. During the antisemitic campaigns of late Stalinism, anonymous letters to newspapers, written by resentful and vigilant citizens, typically went something like this: Once I went out of town to visit my kids at a Young Pioneer camp, and I saw a lot of dachas near railroad stations. I went through—­and what did I see? Only Jews in pajamas, who ­were walking t­ here with their fat Rachels. . . . Most of them [­those Jews] have their own dachas. . . . We raise the question of removing all the Jews from their jobs at food ware­houses, retail chains, and in logistics, of sending all the Jews to mine coal . . . ​, taking away the dachas they have built.48

The dacha as a sign of Jewish prosperity also appears in late Soviet sources, including urban folklore with its many “Jewish” jokes. For instance, • Mr. Ra­bino­vich, ­you’ve got a dacha and an apartment. • ­So what? I­ sn’t that good? • Yes, but your salary is only 120 rubles. • ­So what? I­ sn’t that bad?49 As one of the Malakhovka dachnik in­for­mants recollects, most ­children in her class at school in the late 1950s and early 1960s used to spend the summer at their grand­ mothers’ places in the villages; only she and two of her Jewish friends had dachas, and she sometimes told lies about ­going to a village just “to be like every­one e­ lse.”50

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The widespread idea of Jews as dacha ­owners, particularly in Moscow Oblast and, more specifically, along the neighboring Kursky and Kazansky railroad lines (where ­there was a cluster of dacha settlements with vis­i­ble Jewish populations, including Saltykovka, Malakhovka, Otdyh, Il’inskaia, Tomilino, Bykovo, and ­Kratovo), is reflected in the lyr­ics of the song “Antisemity” (Antisemites) by the legendary singer-­songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky, written in 1964: “Along Kursky and Kazansky railroad lines / They built dachas and live ­there like ­they’re gods” (Po Kurskoi, Kazanskoi zheleznoi doroge / Postroili dachi—­zhivut tam kak bogi). The dacha also appears in discussions of status and well-­being or leisure and hobbies in late Soviet and post-­Soviet Jewish sources, such as memoirs and interviews. It appears particularly often in arguments for and against emigration. The dacha as a symbol of high status and prosperity might have discouraged ­people from emigrating; other in­for­mants emphasize that they emigrated, regardless of having to leave ­behind dachas and other benefits. Speaking of their friends and acquaintances who opted to emigrate, some in­for­mants mention that they regretted their choice ­because they had to give up the good t­ hings in life, including their dachas.51 In the same sources the dacha is treated not only as a real value and symbolic capital but also as the most sentimentalized locus in their home country, combining many advantages over a city apartment: the dacha is a freestanding h­ ouse; it was usually built by the o­ wners themselves; it may have an individual style; it is located in a beautiful, healthy, natu­ral environment; it is associated with better times—­vacations, holidays, warm summer weather; and, last but not least, it used to be regarded as a uniquely Rus­sian phenomenon, so a prospective emigrant had to be prepared to lose his or her dacha for good (unlike an apartment or a car). Thus, rather unpatriotic or even anti-­Soviet-­minded Jews perceived their dachas as the best of what their Soviet country offered. For instance, a Polish Jew, Esther Gessen, born in Bialystok, who was very hostile to her second homeland, the Soviet Union, never emigrated (although her ­children did). In her memoir she offers her love for her dacha as the reason why: My love for the homeland centered on [our dacha in] Sheremet’evka. It seems that’s why I do not want to leave this country. I’ve written “love for the homeland” and it surprised me: what kind of love could it be when all my life I’ve been thinking that I hate this country and have been dreaming of getting out of h­ ere?52

In my interviews with members of families of the Jewish intelligent­sia in Moscow who owned or rented dachas in Malakhovka in 1970s and 1980s, I tried to focus on the Jewishness of their experience t­here. Did they feel dif­fer­ent from the non-­ Jewish dachniks and, if so, in what way? Did they think of Malakhovka as an especially Jewish place? ­Were they aware of religious or cultural Jewish activities in or near Malakhovka related to the synagogue or to refusenik events? Did they ever have any interest in participating in them?



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­After reading ­those biographical interviews with former Soviet Jews that mention dacha experience, it becomes evident that Jewish dachniks sometimes did feel dif­fer­ent from their non-­Jewish neighbors with regard to gardening. In the postwar years of economic hardship, growing vegetables at the dacha was a means of survival; in­for­mants remember that they used to “live off” their dacha kitchen garden (typically about six square meters).53 ­Later, gardening became less necessary and more of a summer hobby. Some dacha cooperatives and gardening associations required that the land be cultivated, making it a condition for getting a dacha or a lot to build on, and some Jewish dachniks of the older generation who grew up in shtetls eagerly followed the rule: “My granddad, who was originally from a shtetl [mestechko], had missed the land very much, and he was delighted when he got a dacha. He repaired every­thing ­there with his own hands. What­ever he planted shot up like mushrooms. He reaped record-­breaking harvests of cucumbers.”54 Members of the next generation, however, often preferred not to garden: “My dad always said that physical l­abor was even worse than intellectual work; so he tried to persuade every­one that getting to the dacha was even more expensive than buying the vegetables in Moscow.”55 ­Others tried to garden but with ­little success, explaining their failure or mediocre results by their social and ethnic origin. They even turned to history to confirm their feeling that gardening was not a suitable pastime for Jews: “Other dachniks around us, including ­those who rented the other half of the ­house, did better than me. Well, . . . ​her ­mother was originally from a ­village. . . . ​And our nation is not inclined to agriculture. A certain tsar wanted Jews to get used to farming but he failed, you know; nothing came out of it.”56 In Malakhovka, the Jewish intelligent­sia dachniks backed and justified the gardenless approach. The absence or scarcity of a kitchen garden was not seen as a deficiency but rather as a token of a particularly ­free dacha lifestyle. One dachnitsa claimed, “In Malakhovka we raised only c­ hildren, not crops.” Her friend laughingly told me about having reaped a potato harvest for the first time in her life at the age of eighty; another in­for­mant related how in his ­whole life he had grown only about five potato plants, “so that his ­children know what they look like” (in contrast to his village-­born neighbors who cultivated plenty of vegetables, “using ­every square centimeter of their plot”).57 The change in attitude to gardening over three generations and the perception of a gardenless dacha as a dacha for the Jewish intelligent­sia dacha are well articulated in the following story: My grandparents, who had received that dacha, approached it [gardening] quite responsibly, while my parents far less so. And for us it was more like an unpleasant duty. [In Malakhovka] nobody I knew grew any food. Perhaps just a bit, as a sort of a hobby. Only pot herbs, berries, or apples. We had our kitchen garden, too, but it was somewhat ridicu­lous. Nobody regarded it as a source of nutritious food. Th ­ ere was only fennel, parsley, and carrots with overly long tops. Once we even grew potatoes but they ­were only fit for compote. . . .

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We liked the fact that we spent the time at our dacha mostly having tea, riding bikes, and singing songs, while our friends and classmates ­were forced [by their parents or grandparents] to slave away at their dachas. . . . ​I ­don’t remember it ever being discussed but I’m sure it was implied [that not having a garden was a Jewish feature], in comparison with our non-­Jewish neighbors, who lived in Malakhovka all year round, kept a large kitchen garden, which they lived off of. Recently, N. and I agreed that it w ­ ouldn’t be a bad idea to learn how to plant potatoes, but I wondered if we ­were at all able to do that.58

Even though they may have felt dif­fer­ent from other dachniks, Jewish dachniks of Malakhovka usually did not identify as committed Jews or express an interest in Jewish religious or national activities. As one in­for­mant (who did not merely spend summers in Malakhovka but lived ­there full-­time while growing up) laughingly pointed out in reply to my question, “­There ­were no Jews—­only decent ­people. . . . ​I was told Malakhovka was a Jewish place but never noticed that myself.”59 She actually remembers that quite a few of her neighbors—­her schoolmaster, her private tutor, a pediatrician, and a bicycle repairman—­were Jewish but that was of no interest to her. Generally, the scientists, teachers, their ­children, and their students among the in­for­mants demonstrated a kind of identity known as “Rus­sian intelligent­sia of Jewish origin.” This self-­image was extremely typical of educated Rus­sian Jews, ranging from prominent intellectuals, writers, and memoirists to ordinary intelligenty (teachers, librarians, even engineers), who left nothing in writing (except perhaps some unpublished memoirs) but had a chance to express and defend their position when interviewed by ­people ­doing research on Soviet Jewry in the late twentieth and the early twenty-­first ­century. Their religion, or the spiritual core of their identity, was centered on world culture, on Rus­ sian culture mixed with Orthodox Chris­tian­ity, or on Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture. One of their favorite dacha pastimes was writing light-­hearted plays and other literary pieces with ­every word starting with the same letter as the genre itself (poem—­P, vaudeville—­V, and so forth).60 Another criterion for differentiating between “us” and “them” would be explic­itly stated anti-­Soviet sentiments61 but not ethnicity. When asked about Jewish activities in Malakhovka, my in­for­mants admit they somehow knew about t­ hose activities but considered them irrelevant. They e­ ither never attended the Malakhovka synagogue or only went a ­couple of times in their lives.62 Moreover, they mentioned quite a number of Orthodox Christian dachniks of Jewish origin, including the parishioners of ­Father Alexander Men’, to make the point that Jewishness was an ethnic rather than a religious category.63 Refusenik activities w ­ ere also not relevant for this circle of the intelligent­sia. One in­for­mant did not recognize the word “refusenik” at all; another said he was a well-­educated and well-­off young Jewish man and therefore did not imagine himself emigrating and did not remember anyone significant for him from Malakhovka who emigrated in the 1970s or ­later.64 The third in­for­mant did not want to emigrate herself ­because, she said, “I’ve been teaching Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture all my



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life”; yet she said that p­ eople around her w ­ ere emigrating, so that “by the early 1990s Jewish Malakhovka had noticeably thinned out.”65 Yet another one remarked that she was not interested in refusenik activities ­because “­here, in Malakhovka, we had another milieu”; she remembers someone who left for Israel in the early 1990s but says this was “more like an exception.”66 For this intellectual circle, becoming involved in Jewishness would be a step backward or would narrow the wide cultural horizons they felt w ­ ere open to them. A similar position was formulated by prominent Soviet intellectuals of Jewish origin, starting with Lydia Ginzburg, as expressed in “The Jewish Question”: Yes, the fascists can tear me to pieces as a Jew, I bear this in mind (­people often have to bear real responsibility for the accidental), but t­here is no one who can force this set of prob­lems on me as my own, as something that is in my blood. Inwardly, this d­ oesn’t concern me. My set of prob­lems is that of the Rus­sian intelligent­sia in its latest phase.67

­These intellectuals treated Jewish interests and Jewish activities in a condescending manner, as in the following interview: Actually, I’ve never lived in Malakhovka. We had no dacha ­there. But I frequently went to visit. I would say every­thing Jewish was too obvious a choice for them. They would visit Israel but not in order to admire the Jewish state or pray at the Western Wall, but to reconstruct the crusaders’ feelings at the sight of Jerusalem. This is how it was with our history teacher [who had a dacha not far away, in ­Kratovo]. She used to make rather derogatory remarks about her fellow Jews [sobrat’ia po natsii] who had started to avoid tearing toilet paper on Saturdays or got concerned with Jewish tribulations ­after seeing discrimination everywhere.68

Naturally, repatriation to Israel—­ the ultimate goal of the refusenik movement—­did not seem a worthy choice to the Malakhovka intelligent­sia. Even ­people whose life l­ater became connected with Israel remember that emigration to Israel was, in the early 1990s, considered something second-­rate: My mom’s cousin from Lviv used to come to visit Moscow, and he tried hard to persuade me to go to Israel. His own ­daughter had left for Israel through the Naale program. I ­didn’t even take him seriously. To emigrate to Israel from Lviv—­this seemed reasonable, but from Moscow, from my high school, from Malakhovka? Ridicu­lous! What for? [But some ­people from your circle did emigrate, ­didn’t they?] Well, N.’s b­ rother suddenly became an ardent Zionist and left for Israel, but he was seen as a bit of a loser, you know.69

Unlike Esther Gessen, who was fascinated with the natu­ral environment around her dacha—­the beautiful forest and the Klyazma reservoir—­the Malakhovka

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dachniks’ love for their dachas was determined more by their devotion to their milieu. The self-­sufficiency of this milieu and its self-­concept also determined their indifference to the Jewish revival and prospect of emigration. But having in mind ­those few ­people (or not so few, depending on the in­for­ mant) from this circle who did emigrate and ­those dachniks who attended the Malakhovka synagogue, even if only out of curiosity or cultural interest, it is safe to assume that this was just one of the positions held by Malakhovka Jewish dachniks and perhaps the most extreme position. Certainly, t­ here must have been some who w ­ ere less devoted to Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and more susceptible to Jewish “propaganda.” But even “Rus­sian intelligenty of Jewish origin,” who ­were seemingly oblivious of their origin or demonstratively indifferent to it, still took their Jewish belonging for granted more on the emotional than on the rational level—­ feeling their affinity to the dachniks of their circle and their difference from o­ thers (“my ­mother rented out part of the h­ ouse to summer residents, and I do not remember any non-­Jews among them”70). ­Because of the multilayered nature of their identity and their ­family and social ties, the circle of members of the intelligent­sia did not stand totally apart from other Jewish milieus. All three groups, seemingly so dif­fer­ent from each other, should, I suggest, be viewed as being defined by dif­fer­ent types of leisure activities and dif­fer­ent versions of “good Jewish com­pany,” rather than as parts of an intellectual under­ ground or of clubs whose members ­were involved in an ideological strug­gle. We should therefore abandon the traditional binary oppositions of Soviet versus anti-­ Soviet and Soviet versus Jewish. Further analy­sis of ­these groups along a social dimension rather than an ideological one may profit from applying two methodological frameworks that w ­ ere developed in a recent Soviet anthropology study and in several studies in relational sociology. First, t­ hese three groups can usefully be viewed as examples of the late Soviet “publics of svoi,” or “publics of vnenahodimost’,” a concept proposed by Yurchak in Every­thing Was Forever, u­ ntil It Was No More.71 ­These publics are neither pro-­ Soviet nor strongly anti-­Soviet, but exist vnye (outside): trying to live outside the system and trying to remain invisible to the authorities. This category, perhaps initially obvious, becomes somewhat blurred when Yurchak assigns almost any late Soviet group or association to ­these publics.72 Nevertheless, it remains very useful ­because it does away with the binary model of socialism that reduces the late Soviet real­ity to the opposition of repressive state versus heroic groups of re­sis­tance. The refusenik milieu may reasonably be seen as an exemplary deterritorialized milieu ­because of its members’ pronounced desire to be as vnye as pos­si­ble—to leave their current nation and country and join another nation and another country—­and ­because of their current vnye position as ­people fired from their jobs and sometimes excluded from their formal social circles. Most impor­tant, when considering the broader refusenik milieu, consisting of hundreds of p­ eople



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attending the Ovrazhki picnics and festivals, their sense of belonging was determined by socialization purposes and leisure choices; it was not necessarily or primarily po­liti­cally motivated. ­People who attended the Malakhovka synagogue came mostly to drink l’chaim and to socialize, to preserve their own language and cultural language; they ­were neither pro-­Soviet nor anti-­Soviet—­they ­were svoi. The same category of “publics of vnyenahodimost’” applies to the dacha subculture, which was obviously formed by leisure and socialization choices but also had about it an atmosphere of passive opposition or distancing oneself from the system, especially if seen, as Caldwell argues,73 as an escape from totalitarian state control. Another quite dif­fer­ent theoretical framework, which also opposes the schematic oppositions of official versus unofficial and public versus private, is that of social network analy­sis, which can, as has been recently suggested,74 be effectively applied to the study of vari­ous late Soviet publics. In social network analy­sis, a network is understood as an open and unstable structure that—­unlike Communities, associations, or other organ­izations—­exists only by means of interpersonal ties and implies no established and permanent membership. Three Jewish groups pre­sent in late Soviet Malakhovka had no official membership or other characteristics of a rigid social structure. This enables us to define them as social networks and to apply some findings from relational sociology, which may allow us not only to go beyond the dichotomies of official versus unofficial (or Soviet versus Jewish) but also to discuss ties and connections between individuals and therefore between dif­fer­ent group; to evaluate the importance of ­these connections, intersections, and switching between networks; and to shed light on identities formed in them. When applying the concept of social network to Soviet history, the networks of blat, or useful connections (poleznye znakomstva)—­which exchange resources that would hardly be available by ­legal, official means—­are the first to come to mind. Scholars of blat networks argue that the system of informal connections and often illegal transfers of resources emerged si­mul­ta­neously with the planned economy and distribution system and became increasingly widespread and effective with the course of time.75 In this regard, it is worth recalling that Jews—­ whether in internal or external, laudatory or, much more often, condemnatory descriptions—­are generally attributed with notorious diaspora solidarity and nepotism, as well as with agility and smartness. In par­tic­ul­ar, Soviet Jews traditionally ­were portrayed as masters of connections, invariably able to establish themselves (umet’ ustraivat’sia) and drag their relatives, friends, and colleagues along (protaschit’ svoih).76 This makes dif­fer­ent milieus of Soviet Jewry a potentially productive subject for social network research. In helping one understand the three Jewish milieus that coexisted in late Soviet Malakhovka, with members of at least two of them feeling more Jewish when coming to Malakhovka, the idea of dynamic identity, which was developed in relational sociology, may well prove useful. According to Harrison White, neither

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institutions nor individuals possess any permanent, invariable identities; rather, identities are acquired and changed in pro­cesses of interaction or by switching between dif­fer­ent networks.77 This moment of switching therefore becomes instrumental in constructing individual and social identities. The next level White considers is that of creating the narrative of the switch or the story of acquiring one identity or losing another. Participants in the Aliyah events seem to have constructed, acquired, and reacquired their Jewish identity precisely when switching from their non-­Jewish formal network (at work, at university, in the street, or in the grocery store) to their Jewish network; that is, the refusenik milieu. This switch may also usefully be defined in spatial terms as a switch from an urban network to a rural one. In communication with foreigners in diaries, memoirs, and interviews ­these ­people created narratives of this switch; in ­doing so, they named, acknowledged, and confirmed their newly acquired Jewish identity and, in some cases, also abandoned (rhetorically at least) their previous identity of a Soviet citizen or a member of the Rus­sian intelligent­sia. In late Soviet cinema the following consistent pattern is discernible: a character’s official social role is considered an empty shell, a mask, while his or her au­then­tic self is private, socially manifested only in a narrow circle, in a public of svoi. Interestingly, this pattern becomes an inversion of the early Soviet mobility narrative about ­simple folk from the countryside, or even from a far-­flung province, who come to the city and turn into Soviet heroes. ­These “ ‘Cinderellas’ of late Soviet cinema move in the opposite direction: from officially prescribed roles, already formalized and devoid of an ideological charge, . . . ​to the sincerity of a ‘small world.’ ”78 This transition or, more emphatically, escape or flight, can usefully be seen as a “key meta­phor of late Soviet cinema,” and using this meta­phor is “one of the commonplaces in the narrative about the late Soviet era.”79 It is impor­ tant that this switch between identities or flight from a formal social role is sometimes expressed in the move from the city to the countryside, as in the film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit, 1979). Personal narratives of members of the refusenik milieu, which relate the story of their identity change, may also reasonably be viewed as an inversion of early Soviet Jewish narratives of geo­graph­i­cal and social mobility from the stifling atmosphere of the isolated Jewish shtetl to the vibrant, open, internationalist life of the big cities. In the 1970s, Jews from the refusenik milieu strove to leave the big city for specifically Jewish places in the countryside, to abandon their Soviet internationalist identity for an ethnically par­tic­ul­ar one, to replace their false public identity with an au­then­tic private one. Their escape from a false identity and their quest for an au­then­tic one, as well as their switching between social roles and social networks, took place on a railway train ­running between the city of Moscow and the suburb of Malakhovka. This spatial transition serves as a meta­phor for their search for identity and switching, and as a prototype for the ultimate transition they desire—­going outside the Soviet Union. It is fair to see this impetus to move and its depictions in con­temporary and ­later narratives as the modern



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implementation of the traditional Jewish topos of the Exodus,80 but it equally deserves consideration as a late Soviet topos of the flight from the formal, false, social identity associated with urban life. Members of the two other Jewish milieus in Malakhovka apparently did not share the narrative of the quest for an au­then­tic Jewish identity—­either ­because they already had one (their circle from synagogue) or ­because they felt no need for one (like the dachniks). And yet they definitely did switch between social roles and networks and experienced their spatial transition from the city to Malakhovka as a transition from a public sphere to a private one (or public–­private, meaning a public of svoi). When speaking of the occasional intersections between the three Malakhovka networks, which ­were typically unaware of or indifferent to one another, we should address yet another influential concept in network analy­sis that was famously elaborated by Mark Granovetter.81 Citing several empirical studies, Granovetter argued that weak ties between individuals paradoxically are more impor­tant than strong ties. Innovations are spread, information is communicated, and resources are distributed through weak ties. Whereas strong ties are generally concentrated within social networks, weak ties facilitate connections between dif­fer­ent networks. Although close friends and ­family remain within one milieu, occasional acquaintances penetrate the social membrane (as did the dachniks attending synagogue, the refuseniks communicating with local Jewish residents to rent a dacha for their kindergarten, and the younger dachniks from the intelligent­sia who contacted the Jewish movement and eventually emigrated). Consequently, the Malakhovka Jewish networks most likely ­were connected by weak ties. Multiple social networks in Jewish life in late Soviet Moscow intersected on several levels: individual, social, and geographic. One and the same person could belong to dif­fer­ent networks identifying him-­or herself as an academic, a refusenik, a parishioner of an intelligentsia-­oriented Jewish-­born Orthodox priest, or a dachnik from a highbrow dacha crowd. One and the same crowd could include members of dif­fer­ent networks, as is evident, for instance, when Malakhovka dachniks mention “exceptions” from their circle who eventually opted for emigration. And fi­nally, Malakhovka itself was a point of intersection of multiple Jewish networks. To reduce t­ hese networks to a common denominator—­Soviet Jewry—or to divide them into several large groups or generations and regard them as isolated clusters would be both artificial and unproductive. They ­were connected; just as Kushkova’s in­for­mants speaking of postwar Malakhovka emphasize personal connections, so mine explain refuseniks’ choosing the Kazansky railroad with the repeated assertion that “Jewish connections are very strong.”82 Prob­ably what deserves the most attention in the social history of Jewish life in the late Soviet Union is the switching between roles and networks, between strong ties and weak ties, which provided intersections between dif­fer­ ent publics, and the loci of such intersections, one of which was the old dacha settlement of Malakhovka.

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Acknowl­edgments The research for this chapter was supported by a Brandeis-­Genesis Institute for Rus­sian Jewry research grant.

notes 1. ​Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-­Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), xiv. 2. ​Svetlana Amosova, ed., Lepel’: pamiat’ o evreiskom mestechke (Moscow: Sefer, 2015); Irina Kopchenova, ed., Glubokoe: pamiat’ o evreiskom mestechke (Moscow: Sefer, 2017); and Zheludok: pamiat’ o evreiskom mestechke (Moscow: Sefer, 2013); Leonid Smilovitski, Evrei v Turove: istoria mestechka mozyrskogo Poles’ia ( Jerusalem: s.n., 2008); Valerii Dymshits et al., eds., Shtetl, XXI vek: Polevye issledovania (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta, 2008); and Arkadii Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki, 1917–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006). 3. ​The exception is the PhD thesis by Anna Kushkova: “Navigating the Planned Economy: Accommodation and Survival in Moscow’s Post-­War ‘Soviet Jewish Pale,’ ” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2017. 4. ​Alexei Yurchak, Every­thing Was Forever, u ­ ntil It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006). 5. ​See especially Harrison White, Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, 2nd ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2008). 6. ​Zvi Gitelman, “Thinking about Being Jewish in Rus­sian and Ukraine,” in Jewish Life a ­ fter the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 49. 7. ​The set “Old Malakhovka in the Postcards of the Early Twentieth ­Century” was published by the Museum of the History and Culture of the Malakhovka Settlement (http://­malmuseum​ .­ru) and has repeatedly been reproduced online; for example, http://­archive​.i­s​/­PAkS9 (accessed October 20, 2020). 8. ​See Dmitri Feldman, “Moskovskoe izgnanie evreev 1890 goda,” Vestnik EUM 11 (1996): ­170–195; Yuri Snopov, “Evrei v Moskve: Dinamika chislennosti i rasselenie (XV—­seredina XX v.),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 6 (2002): 68–85. 9. ​Kushkova cites several definitions of Malakhovka as a “Jewish settlement,” “Birobidzhan,” or “Podol” (a Jewish district in Kyiv) provided by her in­for­mants; see Kushkova, “Navigating the Planned Economy,” 132–133, 141. 10. ​Mikhail Melnichenko, Sovetskii anekdot (Ukazatel’ siuzhetov) (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014), No. 5555. 11. ​See Kupovetskii, “Evreiskoe naselenie,” 68. 12. ​Central State Archive of Moscow (CSAM), Fond 1215, Series 7, Files 32–37. 13. ​See Central State Archive of Moscow Province (CSAMP), Fond 4999, Series 1, File 13, p. 44. 14. ​Semen Charnyi, “Melamedy iz Malakhovki,” Lechaim 10 (2002), https://­lechaim​.­r u​ /­ARHIV​/­126​/­arhiv​.­htm (accessed January 25, 2018). 15. ​CSAMP, Fond 7383, Series 5, File 72, pp. 30–38. 16. ​CSAM, Fond 3004, Series 1, File 66, p. 259; Ilya Erenburg, Liudi. Gody. Zhizn’, vol. 3 (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1990), 324. See also Semen Charnyi, “Gosudarstvennaia politika v otnoshenii evreiskih religioznyh obschin v period ottepeli, 1953–1964,” PhD diss., RGGU, Moscow, 2008. 17. ​In dif­fer­ent years the lists of the official “twenty” (the minimum membership that the authorities required to register a congregation) in Malakhovka (as everywhere) consisted



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almost exclusively of retired men (CSAMP, Fond 7383, Series 5, File 72, pp. 40–41, 46–53, 77–78, 95–96). 18. ​CSAMP, Fond 7383, Series 5, File 73, pp. 1–6, 69, 90, 99, and 101. 19. ​My interview with Mikhail Krutikov (b. 1958); recorded in 2014. Published in Galina Zelenina, Iudaika dva: Renessans v litsah (Moscow: Sefer; Knizhniki, 2015), 472. 20. ​See “Undefeated Synagogue,” http://­brusovani​.­com​/­undefeated​-­synagogue (accessed January 25, 2018). 21. ​Valerii Dymshits, “Why Do Jews Go to Synagogue?” https://­www​.y ­ outube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​ =­RLy​-­VwQ1F4o (accessed January 25, 2018); Shimon Yantovsky, Sud’by evreiskih obschin i ih sinagog SSSR, 1976–1987 ( Jerusalem: Machanaim, 2003). 22. ​My interview with Mikhail Greenberg (b. 1951); recorded in 2012 and published in Zelenina, Iudaika dva, 384. 23. ​For similar developments in Odessa and Moscow, see my interview with the spokesman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Rus­sia, Boruh Gorin (b. 1973); recorded in 2014 and published in Zelenina, Iudaika dva, 419–460. 24. ​Yaacov Ro’i, ed., The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 25. ​The Malakhovka Station is on the Riazanskaia branch, and the Ovrazhki Station is on the Kazanskaia branch of the same railroad. 26. ​Petr Vail’ and Alexander Genis, 60-­e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 121–128. 27. ​Vladimir Prestin interviewed by Yuli Kosharovsky, http://­kosharovsky​.­com​/­интервью​ /­владимир​-­престин (accessed September 1, 2017). See also an interview with Vladimir Slepak, conducted by Yuli Kosharovsky, http://­kosharovsky​.­com​/­интервью​/­владимир​-­слепак (accessed September 1, 2017). 28. ​Viktoria, who left Moscow for Israel in 1972, in an interview recorded for a book: Liudmila Dymerskaia-­Tsigelman and L. Umanskaia, eds., Aliya 1970-­h ( Jerusalem: Stav, 1978). 29. ​Interview with Veniamin Fain conducted by Yuli Kosharovsky, http://­kosharovsky​.­com​ /­вениамин​-­файн (accessed September 1, 2017). 30. ​Unpublished memoir by Yuli Edelstein about Tania Edelstein, copy in the possession of the author. 31. ​Interview with Anatolii Schwartzman, conducted by Yuli Kosharovsky, http://­kosharovsky​ .­com​/­книги​/­том​-­2​/­часть​-­v​-­в​-­борьбе​-­за​-­выезд​-­и​-в­ ыживание​-­в​-о­ ​/­глава​-­33​-г­ орка​-и­ ​-­овражки (accessed September 1, 2017). 32. ​ Sputnik tret’ego festivalia evreiskoi pesni. Vaad Rus­sia, Moscow. Archive of Samizdat, Fond 1, Materialy evreiskogo nezavisimogo dvizhenia, Series 1, Section 3. 33. ​See the interviews by Yuli Kosharovsky with Anatoly Schwarzman and Leonid Volvovsky: http://­kosharovsky​.­com​/­книги​/­том​-­2​/­часть​-­v​-­в​-­борьбе​-­за​-­выезд​-­и​-­выживание​-­в​-­о​/­глава​ -­33​-­горка​-­и​-о­ вражки​-­2 (accessed January 25, 2018). 34. ​See the interview by Yuli Kosharovsky with Alexander Yoffe: http://­kosharovsky​.­com​ /­интервью​/а­ лександр​-­иоффе (accessed January 25, 2018). 35. ​CSAM, Fond 3004, Series 1, File 101, p. 85. 36. ​Interview by Yuli Kosharovsky with Dov Kontorer (http://­kosharovsky​.­com​/и ­ нтервью​ /­дов​-­конторер (accessed January 25, 2018); my interview with the Alexander Lokshin (b. 1948); recorded in 2015, published in Zelenina, Iudaika dva, 235; my interview with Evgenia M. (b. 1960), recorded in 2016. 37. ​My interview with Natalia R. (b. 1958); recorded in 2016. 38. ​See collections of interviews with refuseniks recorded or compiled by Yuli Kosharovsky and the Remember and Save Association. 39. ​Vaad Rus­sia, Moscow, Archive of Samizdat, Fond 1, Series 1, Section 3.

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40. ​Eleazar Yuzefovich, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, http://­berkovich​-­zametki​.­com​/­2013​/­Zametki​

/­Nomer2​/E ­ Juzefovich1​.­php (accessed January 25, 2018). 41. ​See Stephen Lovell, Dachniki: Istoria letnego zhil’ia v Rossii: 1710–2000 (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2008); Melissa  L. Caldwell, Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Rus­sia’s Countryside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Olga Malinova-­Tziafeta, Iz goroda na dachu: sotsiokul’turnye factory osvoeniia dachnogo prostranstva vokrug Peterburga (1860–1914) (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v S.-­Peterburge, 2013). 42. ​ Olga Malinova-­Tziafeta, “(Post)sovetskie dachi i dachniki, voobrazhaemye i real’nye,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 124 (2013): 360. 43. ​Malinova-­Tziafeta, Iz goroda na dachu, 90–111. 44. ​Malinova-­Tziafeta, Iz goroda na dachu, 190–215. 45. ​Malinova-­Tziafeta, “(Post)sovetskie dachi.” 46. ​Natalia Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg: Neva—­Letnii sad, 1999), 252–253. 47. ​Sheila Fitzpatrick, Povsednevnyi stalinizm: Sotsialnaia istoria Sovetskoi Rossii v 30-­e gody: gorod (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), 123ff. 48. ​RGANI, Fond 5, Series 16, File 602, p. 33; Fond 5, Series 15, File 407, p. 22; Fond 5, Series 16, File 602, p. 43. 49. ​Melnichenko, Sovetskii anekdot, 688. 50. ​My interview with Elena V. (born in Moscow, 1954); recorded in Moscow, 2018. 51. ​Interview with Grigorii Kagan (born in Kyiv, 1920); recorded in Kyiv, 2004. Archive of the Judaica Institute, Kyiv (AJI, Kyiv), Collection “Svideteli evreiskogo veka”; interview with Arkadii Bekkerman, (born in Kharkiv, 1930); recorded in the United States, 1997. AJI, Kyiv, Collection “Proekt Gitelmana”; interview with Iosif Bursuk (born in Chernivtsi, 1931); recorded in Chernivtsi, 2002. AJI, Kyiv, Collection “Svideteli evreiskogo veka.” 52. ​Esther Gessen, Byalostok—­Moskva (Moscow: AST—­CORPUS, 2014), 170–171. 53. ​For instance, an interview with Alexander Grin (born in Moscow, 1924); recorded in Moscow. AJI, Kyiv, Collection “Svideteli evreiskogo veka.” 54. ​My interview with Мaria K. (born in Moscow, 1976); recorded in Moscow, 2014. 55. ​My interview with Мaria K. 56. ​My interview with Anna L. (born in Moscow, 1938); recorded in Moscow, 2014. 57. ​My interviews with Elena V. (born in Moscow, 1954), Regina M. (born in Malakhovka, 1948), and with Arkadii D. (born in Malakhovka, 1949); recorded in Moscow, 2018. 58. ​My interview with Ekaterina G. (born in Moscow, 1975); recorded in Moscow, 2015. 59. ​My interview with Regina M. 60. ​My interview with Elena V. 61. ​My interviews with Elena V. and Arkadii D. 62. ​My interviews with Elena V., Regina M., and Arkadii D. 63. ​My interview with Arkadii  D. For the phenomenon of late Soviet Jewish intelligent­sia embracing Eastern Orthodox Chris­tian­ity, see Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligent­sia, and the Rus­sian Orthodox Church (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 64. ​My interviews with Regina M. and Arkadii D. 65. ​My interview with Elena V. 66. ​My interview with Nadezhda T. (born in Moscow, 1958); recorded in Moscow, 2015. 67. ​Lydia Ginzburg, “The Jewish Question,” in Lydia Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translations, ed. Emily Van Buskirk and Andrei Zorin (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 356. 68. ​My interview with Dmitri (David) G. (born in Moscow, 1972); recorded in Moscow, 2015. 69. ​My interview with Xenia S. (born in Moscow, 1978); recorded in Moscow, 2015.



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70. ​My interviews with Arkadii D. 71. ​Yurchak, Every­thing Was Forever. This approach to the refusenik milieu as an exemplary

“public of svoi” is elaborated in greater detail in my “Gorka i Ovrazhki: Nahozhdenie natsii v mestah vnenahodimosti,” Ab Imperio 3 (2019): 207–251. 72. ​Platt and Nathans point out that, among ­things, Yurchak has merely replaced the much-­ criticized dichotomy of Communists versus dissidents with the “just slightly less simplified” ­triple scheme of Communists–­dissidents—­“normal ­people” (or publics of svoi); see Kevin Platt and Benjamin Nathans, “Sotsialisticheskaia po forme, neopredelennaia po soderzhaniiu: pozdnesovetskaia kul’tura i kniga Alekseia Iurchaka ‘Vse bylo navechno, poka ne konchilos.’ ” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 101 (2010): 167–184. 73. ​Caldwell, Dacha Idylls, 149. 74. ​Irina Kaspe, “ ‘Ia est’!’ Pozdnesovetskoe kino cherez prizmu reliatzionnoi sotziologii Harrisona Uaita (et vice versa),” Sotziologicheskoe obozrenie 16, no. 3 (2017): 178. See also Ilia Kukulin, “Prodistziplinarnye i antidistziplinarnye seti v pozdnesovetskom obschestve,” Sotziologicheskoe obozrenie 16, no. 3 (2017): 136–173. 75. ​See Stephen Lovell, Alena V. Ledeneva, and Andrei B. Rogachevskii, eds., Bribery and Blat in Rus­sia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the ­Middle Ages to the 1990s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); and Alena V. Ledeneva, Rus­sia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 76. ​About two contrary narratives presenting Jews as geniuses of blat and nepotism: the accusatory one was prolifically developed in newspaper feuilletons of the late Stalinist period, see Galina Zelenina, “ ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia’: istoki i funktsii sluhov vokrug dela vrachei,” Antropologicheskii Forum 31 (2016): 119–154; the appreciative one appears in non-­Jews’ recollections of Jewish solidarity, such as Gennadii Trifonov, “Russkii otvet na evreiskii vopros: popytka memuarov,” Kontinent 111 (2002). 77. ​White, Identity and Control, 2–13. 78. ​Kaspe, “ ‘Ia est’!” 187. 79. ​Kaspe, “ ‘Ia est’!” 186. 80. ​For this perspective, see Klavdia Smola, “The Reinvention of the Promised Land: Utopian Space and Time in Soviet Jewish Exodus Lit­er­a­ture,” East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs 45, no.  1 (2015): 79–108. 81. ​Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973): 1360–1380. 82. ​My interview with Elena V.

12 • THE OPPOSITION OF THE OPPOSITION New Jewish Identities in the Illegal Under­ground Public Sphere in Late Communist Hungary K ATA B O H U S

In April 1984, Hungarian historian Miklós Szabó discussed the prob­ lem of prejudice and antisemitism in an interview published on the pages of Hírmondó, the Hungarian samizdat—an illegal under­ground journal opposed to the socialist regime. He opined that Hungarian society should react to the so-­called Jewish issue in two ways: first, it should not discriminate in any way against ­those who are or want to be assimilated; second, it has to make it pos­si­ble for Jews to express their Jewish identity if they wish to do so.1 Szabó correctly noticed that ­there had been significant changes in the self-­definition of Hungary’s Jews by the late 1960s. But what exactly did t­ hese new Jewish identities encompass, and how should Hungarian society put Szabó’s ideas into practice? My study maps the discourses surrounding this shift in identity among Hungary’s Jews, the largest Jewish community in East Central Eu­rope ­after the Shoah. ­After two postwar emigration waves—in 1945–1948 and ­after the failed revolution of 1956—­the Hungarian Jewish Community numbered more than 100,000 ­people,2 even though the majority ­were highly assimilated. I argue that the dif­fer­ ent responses to the “Jewish Question” from among this still sizable Jewish population w ­ ere not only connected to prob­lems of minority politics but ­were also indicative of key questions about the nature of the f­ uture Hungarian democracy and the dif­fer­ent groups within the then-­forming Hungarian opposition and proto-­parties. Thus, the arguments put forward by the under­ground Jewish formations discussed in this chapter engaged in debate not only with the socialist regime but also with its opposition. The “Jewish Question” thus became deeply embedded in the broader structural and ideological po­liti­cal issues of Hungary. 236



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The SALOM Peace Group Both Hungary’s post-­Stalinist socialist regime and the country’s official Jewish Community leadership defined Jewish identity in purely religious terms. In exchange for conformity to this definition, the regime promised the Jewish Community financial support and protection from antisemitism. This assurance, however, did not mean that all Hungarian Jews accepted ­these ­limited possibilities for their Jewish self-­definition. The 1967 Six-­Day War, when Israeli forces achieved a rapid and surprising victory against their Arab counter­parts, strengthened t­ hose voices that questioned this compromise between Community and the regime. The Israeli victory “became the starting point for young Jews to redefine their Jewish identities”3 in Hungary. A ­ fter the conflict, all the countries of the Eastern Bloc, with the exception of Romania, broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, and official Communist propaganda presented the country as the “aggressor.” During his lengthy speech at the UN General Assembly a­ fter the conflict, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin compared Israeli policies to ­those of the Third Reich, likening the occupation administration set up by the Israeli government to t­ hose of the Gauleiters in Nazi Germany: “In the same way as Hitler’s Germany used to appoint gauleiters in the occupied regions, the Israeli government is establishing an occupation administration on the territories it has seized and is appointing military governors ­there,” said Kosygin.4 The question of ­whether Israel’s actions ­were warranted and defensible became the topic of heated discussions across the Eastern Bloc, including within the Hungarian Jewish Community. Indeed, it appears that many Jews in the country felt that Israel was merely defending itself against Arab aggression and that Jews had fi­nally emerged as a strong, fighting community. József Prantner, president of the State Office of Church Affairs—­the administrative body responsible for “Jewish affairs” in state-­socialist Hungary—­met with thirteen leaders of the Hungarian Jewish Community on June 23, 1967. He wanted to “steer their perceptions t­ oward the correct direction” in the wake of the war, especially regarding Israel’s role in the ­Middle East conflict. Although he noted with satisfaction that all his conversation partners had reassured him about their loyalty to the Hungarian ­People’s Republic, it did not escape his attention that none of them named Israel as the aggressor during the conversation, nor did they explic­itly condemn Israeli be­hav­ior.5 In the wake of the Six-­Day War, many young Jews started to feel connected to their hitherto ignored, suppressed, or simply unknown heritage, a development that resulted in the formation of informal, loose groups outside official Jewish communal institutions; ­these groups gathered privately in apartments and cafés. One group functioned more or less like a book club and read texts by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig.6 During ­these discussions, participants often searched for parallels and connections between Jewish and Christian traditions. ­Others gathered at the private Budapest apartments of intellectuals or artists such

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as Ferenc Lovász, Mária Antalfi, and the Herbst f­amily, discussing Jewish topics, listening to Hebrew songs, or lectures about Jewish traditions, with which many of them ­were unfamiliar.7 During the early 1980s, Rabbi Tamás Raj ran a Bible study group at his apartment and then held lectures on Jewish cultural history.8 ­Later, the Oneg Shabat group ran by the psychologist Tibor Engländer gathered in the synagogue on Budapest’s Bethlen Square e­ very week to discuss issues relating to Jewish traditions; another frequent topic was the need to create Jewish repre­ sen­ta­tion on a civil (instead of a religious) basis.9 In the Rabbinical Institute, the well-­known Jewish scholar Sándor Scheiber or­ga­nized Friday eve­ning kiddushes.10 On t­ hese occasions, many among his large audience, which frequently numbered more than a hundred ­people, first learned about Jewish traditions and culture.11 Around the same time, the question of Jewish identification was also explored from a sociopsychological perspective by sociologist András Kovács and psychologist Ferenc Erős. Between 1984 and 1988, Kovács and Erős conducted more than one hundred ­family history and life interviews with Jews born between 1945 and 1965. The results showed that this post-­Shoah generation grew up considering their Jewish roots more as a stigma or a “prob­lem to solve” than as a basis for open identification.12 The preliminary results published by Kovács and Erős received considerable attention, especially among Jews. Our study “was not successful ­because what we did was so brilliant”—­remembered Ferenc Erős in a l­ater interview—­“ but simply b­ ecause it filled a gap. . . . ​It provoked a lot of attention and more and more ­people came that they want to make interviews and ­others that they want to give interviews.”13 Kovács and Erős also talked about the topics of Jewish identification and trauma in the post-1945 period in other illegal, under­ ground events. Even though they ­were not openly po­liti­cal, t­hese gatherings ­were closely watched by the State Security Ser­vices, who suspected that such meetings could serve as hotbeds of Zionist activities.14 Clearly, the common feature of the discussions within the vari­ous groups was a regard for Jewishness beyond just religious traditions. Yet the state apparatus labeled all the cultural, historic, or po­liti­cal ele­ ments of Jewish identification, as they emerged during ­these meetings, as “Zionism.” The label thus did not signal an ­actual ideological position but only referred to the fact that the state viewed t­ hese discussions as inimical to its professed ideology. In 1986, many of ­those who participated in t­ hese gatherings w ­ ere arrested and questioned by the State Security Ser­vices, which threatened some with prison and the loss of their jobs.15 In the long run, the actions of the informal Jewish groups ­under surveillance did not confirm the authorities’ suspicions. However, challenges to the existing relationships between the Jewish Community and the Communist regime indeed arrived from outside the official institutional structure of the Jewish Community. As socialist power increasingly eroded by the ­later 1980s, so did its under­ground opposition gain momentum, and that included voices addressing the prob­lems of the Hungarian Jewish Community.



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A mere month a­fter Szabó’s interview, a new group named “SALOM—­ Hungarian In­de­pen­dent Jewish Peace Group” (Magyar Független Zsidó Békecsoport) announced its establishment on the pages of the samizdat with the largest circulation, Beszélő (Talker). In fact, SALOM was a one-­person operation: a single intellectual opposed to the regime, György Gadó, ran it. Gadó was born in 1930 into a nonreligious Jewish ­family. He survived the Holocaust hidden in a boys’ orphanage run by Salesian monks in an outer district of Budapest. He had been a member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and a convinced Communist ­until the Six-­Day War dramatically changed his views. Like many other Hungarian Jews, he was appalled by official Communist propaganda’s one-­sided condemnation of Israeli actions. “I began to become self-­aware as a Jew and a petty bourgeois,” observed Gadó in an interview.16 He resigned his party membership and became involved in the demo­cratic opposition at the beginning of the 1980s, when he started writing articles in the Hírmondó (Messenger) samizdat.17 Gadó felt that Jewish topics ­were not sufficiently explored in the illegal publications of the demo­cratic opposition, so he de­cided to publish an “in­de­pen­dent Jewish voice”—­first occasionally in the form of SALOM’s publications in existing samizdat journals and then on the pages of a new, specifically Jewish samizdat journal.18 Gadó’s involvement in the under­ground press and opposition was not without consequences. ­After a few copies of SALOM’s first statement w ­ ere found in the basement of his workplace, Interpress Magazine, where he had hidden the prints prior to distribution, he was immediately subjected to police harassment, including a formal investigation, a search of his home, a fine, and, fi­nally, dismissal from his job. Afterward, he was unable to find steady employment, ­because the authorities informed ­every potential employer about his illegal activities.19 He had to survive on part-­time employment, occasional translating opportunities, and income generated by the samizdat publications. However, the hardships did not scare Gadó away, who continued to engage with Jewish issues in the illegal press. In 1984, SALOM issued an “Open Letter to Hungarian Society and Hungarian Jewry.”20 Its timing was intentional: 1984 was the fortieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust, and the history of the country’s Jews was then receiving increased attention on the pages of official media outlets. The letter demanded that Hungarian society face its responsibility for what had happened to the country’s Jews between 1920 and 1944—­from the introduction of the numerus clausus law that restricted Jewish participation in institutions of higher education21 to the annihilation of the ­great majority of Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust. From Hungary’s Jews, the open letter demanded a revision of Jewish identity. Refusing the strictly religious definition, it argued that Jewishness should instead be defined according to historic, cultural, and ethnic ­factors. Though SALOM professed the Jews’ loyalty to the Hungarian nation, it proposed “integration” instead of assimilation: “When we acknowledge the right of the individual for assimilation, with regards to Hungarian Jewry we believe that it should not assimilate but integrate

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into the society living in this homeland.”22 The message was clear: SALOM questioned the long-­standing assimilationist paradigm. Instead of ­doing away with existing differences between Jews and non-­Jews, it proposed that the Jewish minority actively cultivate its cultural heritage, calling for a much stronger “awakening” than what Szabó had cautiously observed.23 The proposal sparked a heated debate on the pages of the then-­blossoming Hungarian samizdat press about what it meant to be Jewish. Liberal phi­los­o­pher János Kis—­himself a secular, assimilated Jew—­countered with an argument calling for a multiplicity of choices in the life strategies of Hungary’s Jews.24 He pointed out that t­here ­were several options to choose from between the two extremes laid out by SALOM of opting for a separate minority identity or complete assimilation. Even if only a portion of SALOM’s program w ­ ere to be implemented, Kis argued, it would pose a challenge to Hungarian society. “Then it would truly come to light w ­ hether Hungarians are able and willing to acknowledge that a minority living within our borders has the same rights as ­those that are considered natu­ral [by Hungarian society] for Hungarians living abroad,” he wrote.25 Thus, Kis considered the question of the f­ree expression of Jewish identity as one part of the broader issue of minority rights both in and outside Hungary. In his reflection, László Öllős, a Hungarian author living in Slovakia (then part of Czecho­slo­va­kia), drew parallels between the question of Jewish identity in Hungary and Hungarian identity in Slovakia.26 Just as Hungarians in Czecho­slo­ va­kia interpret their Hungarian identities in vari­ous ways, Öllős argued, Jews within the borders of Hungary should be ­free to do so as well. Yet he warned that any animosity between dif­fer­ent nationalities within a country’s borders only benefited the totalitarian state. Only through democ­ratization would disparate groups within Hungarian society be able to cooperate and reach sensible compromises, thus reducing the possibility of discrimination against any one of them. Remarkably, SALOM’s very concrete demands of the Jewish Community w ­ ere not interpreted by Öllős as specifically Jewish prob­lems, or even as specifically minority prob­lems, but as general arguments for a demo­cratic po­liti­cal system. In a ­later issue of Hírmondó, György Gadó offered a similar reflection, arguing that “the more demo­cratic and tolerant the po­liti­cal system, the better the chances of Hungarian Jews for survival as a group.”27 In other words, he saw po­liti­cal democracy, not the protection of a totalitarian state, as the key to Jewish survival. It is clear from ­these opinions that the question of how Jewish identity in Hungary could be defined became embroiled in two of the main po­liti­cal prob­lems in the 1980s: minority issues and the prob­lem of democ­ratization. It did not surface, however, in discussions of religious freedom or the right of assembly. Minority issues had become especially pressing in the 1970s in light of the discriminatory and repressive policies against the Hungarian minority in Romania and Czecho­ slo­va­kia. In Romania, the possibilities for education and public administration in the Hungarian language ­were curbed. Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime even manipu-



The Opposition of the Opposition 241

lated the 1977 population statistics, decreasing the recorded number of the country’s ethnic Hungarians, the biggest minority group with more than one and a half million ­people at the time.28 Meanwhile in Czecho­slo­va­kia, policies w ­ ere implemented that aimed at the forced assimilation of its significant Hungarian minority.29 With regard to democ­ratization, ­every group in Hungary’s growing opposition movement insisted that the majority of society was excluded from power, thus making socialism unjust and authoritarian. Both ­these issues made the opposition especially sensitive to questions of civil rights and self-­ determination. But if they ­were demanding justice for the country’s majority population, what was their position regarding the situation of the country’s minorities? SALOM’s appearance compelled them to think about this issue as connected to the country’s Jews, if only briefly. Though ­these early debates w ­ ere impor­tant, the question of ­whether nonreligious Jewish identities w ­ ere even pos­si­ble in Hungary received more attention ­after the erecting of a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg in 1987. This was the first plaque or statue in Hungary to commemorate the Swedish diplomat, who had saved thousands of Jewish lives in Budapest during World War II.30 Though the exact circumstances of his death remain unknown to this day, it is very likely that Wallenberg was arrested by the liberating Soviets and died a few years ­later in a KGB prison or a gulag camp. In 1987, as a result of international diplomacy on the part of American and Swedish diplomats, the Hungarian government reluctantly accepted the memorial statue for Raoul Wallenberg as a pre­sent and then had it built in Budapest. Reportedly, János Kádár, the aging general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, was not enthusiastic about the turn of events and commented in a resigned manner that he would again have to explain this ­whole affair to the Soviets.31 Though the monument was unveiled in a Budapest park on May 15, 1987, the main speaker at the inauguration was the secretary of the Budapest Committee of the Patriotic P ­ eople’s Front,32 a rather low-­ranking po­liti­ cal functionary. This clearly signaled that the regime was not willing to publicize or publicly assign importance to the memorial. Only one official Communist newspaper reported the unveiling in a short, ten-­line news item,33 referring to Wallenberg as a “humanist,” but notably omitting that he had saved Jews. SALOM, however, sprang into action once again and reacted promptly, making the connection between the erecting of the Wallenberg monument and the increasing number of antisemitic incidents in Hungary. The spring of 1987 saw a growing number of antisemitic statements made by soccer fans—­and subsequent police actions—­during the games between two prominent Hungarian clubs, FTC (Ferencvárosi Torna Club) and MTK (Magyar Testépítők Köre), the latter of which was widely considered a “Jewish team.”34 Jews ­were also harassed on the streets on several occasions. SALOM issued a statement in the samizdat journal Demokrata (Demo­crat), expressing concern about the growth of the very prejudices that the group felt Raoul Wallenberg had stood against—­antisemitism, racial, and national hatred. SALOM again emphasized that it was a misguided reaction on the part of

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Jews to cover up their Jewishness as a way to eliminate antisemitism. The right reaction to antisemitism—­SALOM argued—­was to “cooperate with t­ hose forces that are fighting for Hungarian democracy and po­liti­cal reform.”35 While acknowledging that Jews should not be afraid to identify with the Hungarian nation, SALOM did not simply recommend joining an opposition group but instead suggested that the Jewish Community establish its own autonomous institutions. In a reaction to SALOM’s statement, three well-­known intellectual members of the opposition issued their own statement in the Beszélő samizdat, in which they greeted SALOM’s coming forward and pointed out that Wallenberg’s story should serve as a cautionary tale. Interestingly, their text only referred to “national hatred,” “incitement of p­ eoples against each other,” and “terrorism that aims at cultural destruction,” but like the state media report on the monument, it failed to mention antisemitism by name.36 Although the statement also referred to the “necessity to establish a common homeland where t­ here is no ‘anti,’ only ‘pro,’ ” it did not openly state that this common homeland would and should include Jews with separate ethnic identities. The omissions might have had to do with the fact that the authors, István Csurka, György Konrád and Gyula Hernádi, belonged to very dif­fer­ent schools of thought within the Hungarian intelligent­sia. Indeed, they would have strug­gled to agree on any po­liti­cal platform, apart from their animosity ­toward Communist power. István Csurka belonged to ­those of a strong nationalistic orientation, who saw at the center of power an illegitimate elite that was opposed by their subject ­people, the real ­bearers of Hungarian national traditions and culture. György Konrád and Gyula Hernádi, in contrast, belonged to the so-­ called demo­cratic opposition, which was also anti-­elitist but emphasized that the Communist center of power was alienated from the p­ eople, b­ ecause it was not brought to power in a demo­cratic election pro­cess and ­because it oppressed civil society. If we can believe the report of the secret agent of the Security Ser­vices, Csurka had received SALOM’s text before it was published, with a request to sign it. But Csurka thought that the content was a “Jewish internal affair, and it dealt with prob­lems in such a way that he was unable to support it with his signature.” However, he agreed to publicly react to the statement “at least to avoid being accused of antisemitism.”37 The hesitation to stand ­behind SALOM’s statement and the three writers’ failure to reference the prob­lem of antisemitism suggest that the need to accept Jews as part of the Hungarian national community was not self-­ evident for every­one within the Hungarian intelligent­sia. The writers’ dif­fer­ent understandings and definitions of the Hungarian national community each had their roots in developments de­cades ­earlier. During the 1920s and 1930s, a radical literary and artistic movement in Hungary was s­ haped by adherents who ­were mostly concerned with, and took their inspiration from, the everyday life of the rural, poorer population of the country. By exposing the life of the peasantry, they also hoped to draw attention to the sociopo­liti­cal prob­ lems that this largest social stratum of Hungarian society was facing. A significant proportion of the followers of the népi (folkist, ruralist) movement—­who ­were



The Opposition of the Opposition 243

frequently referred to in En­glish as “populists,” even though this translation is inaccurate—­were public intellectuals; thus, in their texts and debates, lit­er­a­ture became entwined with ethical, po­liti­cal, and social questions. At the time, one of  the most impor­tant issue was how Hungarian sociopo­liti­cal development, which they regarded as delayed, could and should be modernized. ­Because népi writers tended to equate the fate of the Hungarian nation with that of the Hungarian peasantry, they si­mul­ta­neously sought the replacement of the reigning po­liti­ cal and cultural elites and viewed urbanization and the urban elites with g­ reat suspicion. The népi camp encompassed a wide array of po­liti­cal beliefs. Some articulated their thoughts on modernization as a separate “Hungarian road,” one opposed to both liberal democracy and Marxist socialism. O ­ thers ­were more sympathetic to socialism, some supported bourgeois democracy, and still o­ thers engaged with the ideas of the Far Right. Consequently, several publications coming from népi writers included antisemitic and racial ideas, ranging from subtle tropes to more explicit pronouncements. The ideas of the népi group stood in opposition to t­ hose of the so-­called urbánus (urban, internationalist) movement, who w ­ ere referred to by this name in the mid-1930s and who regarded themselves as progressive and leftist intellectuals. They emphasized the importance of individual rights, turned to Eu­ro­pean modernism and Western liberalism for inspiration, and supported internationalism. Whereas the népi camp focused on a specific con­temporary social prob­lem—­the impoverished and marginalized peasantry—­the urbánus group’s thinking was more abstract and concerned with the basic princi­ples of democracy. Many Jewish intellectuals belonged to this latter formation, but not all members of the urbánus group ­were Jewish.38 ­After 1945, the prob­lems discussed by the two groups lost their topicality, but the dividing lines between them continued into the socialist era. This was at least partly due to the regime itself instituting policies to reinforce the divide and keep Hungarian intellectuals from uniting against the power center.39 During the last de­cade of socialism, the same divide again became a primary f­actor in deciding the issues around which the proto-­parties of the ­future democracy would develop their policies. The demo­cratic opposition, which produced the overwhelming majority of samizdat publications, has been considered the ideological heir of the urbánus group.40 ­Those intellectuals who criticized the socialist regime from a more nationalistic point of view w ­ ere the heirs of the népi group and saw themselves “belonging neither to the opposition nor to the pro-­government forces.”41 As shown next, the Magyar Zsidó samizdat tried to address the consequences of this reemerging divide with regard to Jewish issues.

The Magyar Zsidó Samizdat Journal In 1987, for the first time in history, the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress held its meeting b­ ehind the Iron Curtain, in Budapest. The event, paired

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with the already mentioned antisemitic incidents and the building of the Wallenberg memorial, prompted the intellectual who was r­unning SALOM, György Gadó, to establish a new samizdat journal that dealt exclusively with Jewish issues. Though this samizdat journal only produced three issues, its contribution to bringing the question of new Jewish identities into public discourse on the eve of major po­liti­cal changes in Hungary should not be underestimated. The first issue of the magazine, Magyar Zsidó (Hungarian Jew), appeared in September 1987 in a press run of 800–1,000 copies. One of the most prominent members of the demo­cratic opposition, who ran the samizdat print shop, Gábor Demszky, provided a typewriter for the production. Another demo­cratic opposition member, Attila János Ötvös, printed the journal. Gadó covered the costs himself, and the samizdat became a more or less self-­sustaining investment. Copies ­were available at Demszky’s “samizdat boutique,” which operated illegally from a Budapest apartment that was open one day a week, at Budapest’s universities,42 and in the National Széchényi Library on an ad hoc basis. In spring 1988, the third issue was confiscated by the police, but another prominent demo­cratic opposition member, György Krassó, was able to mimeograph the copy he had in London and send it to Demszky. Demszky then reproduced it in Budapest in multiple copies.43 Thus, Magyar Zsidó was unquestionably linked to the demo­cratic opposition, given the involvement of several of its prominent members. However, this samizdat focused on issues and perspectives that w ­ ere mostly neglected by other opposition publications. In his analy­sis of Hungarian samizdat journals and their relationship to Holocaust memory, Richard  S. Esbenshade claims that the demo­cratic opposition, especially its members of Jewish origin, avoided the thematization of the Holocaust “as a key component of the postwar order” for fear that it would be labeled too Jewish and thus its power would be weakened.44 Furthermore, he argues that members of the demo­cratic opposition enabled the publication of Magyar Zsidó, ­because only this new, explic­itly Jewish publication could openly engage with the Holocaust without antagonizing the népies wing of the opposition. Although this might be true, Magyar Zsidó was not only the product of the debates among the vari­ous groups of the Hungarian opposition. Thematically, it represented the tendencies and topics that had already been discussed in the Jewish gatherings mentioned ­earlier. According to Gábor T. Szántó, who frequented some of ­these groups as a young university student, what was new about Magyar Zsidó was that “it collected t­hese topics [already pre­sent in the Jewish under­ground] into one journal.”45 One of ­those topics was the relationship between Hungarian and Jewish identities. An article displayed prominently on the first page of the first issue proclaimed clearly the Hungarian and Jewish self-­understanding of the “editors”46: “Hungarian Jews—­this is the title of our paper and we printed both words with the same font. Our allegiance is double: we are Hungarians and Jews. Which allegiance is stronger? We are not trying to mea­sure it. This can be the question of individual



The Opposition of the Opposition 245

feelings.”47 Compared with SALOM’s first statement, which considered Jews as a separate—if integrated—­group within Hungarian society, this definition allowed multiple identifications and even accepted that one’s Hungarian identity could be stronger than one’s Jewish identity. This understanding is perhaps closest to what János Kis had suggested ­earlier in Hírmondó. The article went on to state that “for us, Jewishness is not only a religion and a denomination, but a historically formed ethnic and cultural community that has secular foundations.” This definition went against the understanding of the Hungarian Communist regime, which treated Jewish issues exclusively as “church ­matters.” Furthermore, the samizdat implicitly rejected the well-­known Communist accusation of “Zionism,” which negatively labeled and stigmatized Jews who professed an in­de­pen­dent, nonreligious self-­identification. This Jewish self-­ understanding clearly positioned Magyar Zsidó—­and in the “editors’ ” view, the ­whole Jewish community—on the side of the opposition. Magyar Zsidó, like other samizdats of the opposition, openly criticized Communist ideology and con­temporary socialist regimes. The second issue of the magazine enumerated the negative traits of Soviet Communism and pointed out that, despite Jewish hopes for the opposite, it had been completely unable to eradicate antisemitism. “We can hardly expect Bolshevism to eliminate antisemitism, just like it has been unable to keep any of its other promises. . . . ​We have no reason to oppose the opinion and feelings of the majority of Hungarian society, which experienced this [socialist] system as alien and harmful. We have no reason to believe that this Soviet system w ­ ill protect us from the pos­si­ble revival of antisemitism.”48 With that statement, Magyar Zsidó explic­itly stood ­behind the opposition’s idea of democ­ratization, and rejected the legitimacy of existing socialism in general, and its Hungarian version in par­tic­u­lar. However, it presented this critique from a Jewish perspective, emphasizing Communism’s failure to eradicate antisemitism. The statement also rejected, however implicitly, the ste­reo­type of “Jewish Communism” when it claimed that the socialist system was just as alien and harmful to Jews as it was for the majority of Hungarians. This topic was further elaborated in the publication. One article in the first issue argued that the role of Jewish functionaries in the Hungarian Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi should be openly discussed.49 It was an open secret that the leading members of Rákosi’s leadership in the early 1950s ­were of Jewish origin, but the Kádár administration did not address this issue. However, in contrast to its Polish counterpart,50 the Hungarian regime never used their Jewishness to get rid of opponents by taking advantage of popu­lar antisemitism. At the same time, it did not c­ ounter beliefs that attributed Stalinism’s failures to the Jewish origins of ­those who implemented his policies in Hungary. Kádár feared that such policies could have led to yet another uprising similar to the one of 1956. Furthermore, airing the old topos of zsidókommuna could have also weakened the legitimacy of the post-­Stalinist order, a major prob­lem that the Soviet-­ imposed regime had to strug­gle with throughout its entire existence. However,

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Magyar Zsidó warned that such tabooization only breeds antisemitism. It should instead be made clear that “­whether it was implemented by Jews or not is not a fundamental character of Stalinist dictatorship, but [its fundamental character is] that sooner or ­later, it needs antisemitic incitement.”51 Another taboo subject that Magyar Zsidó addressed was the Hungarian role in the deportation of the majority of the country’s Jews in 1944. Communist ideology interpreted World War II first and foremost as a fight between fascism and antifascism,52 and the fact that many victims and perpetrators w ­ ere not primarily motivated by e­ ither of ­these ideologies was of secondary concern. Hence, the persecution of Jews—in other words, persecution of ­people who did not adhere to Communist ideology—­was not the focus of Communist interpretations of the war’s history, which presented Jews as one group of victims among many. Yet Hungary’s legally elected governments did carry out antisemitic policies starting in the interwar period. Th ­ ese included not only gradually stripping Jews of many rights enjoyed by other Hungarian citizens and appropriating the racial definition of Jews from the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 194153 but also effectively supervising and facilitating deportations to Auschwitz in 1944. The Kádár regime condemned the interwar Hungarian establishment of Horthy as fascist and placed the blame for the war­time alliance with Nazi Germany on “the ruling classes” and their manipulation of the proletariat and the peasantry, thus absolving the public of racial chauvinism and antisemitism. Magyar Zsidó criticized the regime for ­treating the issue as taboo and called attention to the “ethical responsibility of Hungarians” for the deportation of Jews.54 This responsibility stemmed from the public’s wide support for discriminatory policies during the interwar period. The base of the Horthy establishment was the Hungarian Christian ­middle class, members of the former gentry who ­were slowly losing their landed estates but w ­ ere still clinging to their privileged way of life. During the period of the Austro-­Hungarian monarchy, many members of this social class streamed into public sector employment. A ­ fter World War I, many lost their jobs b­ ecause of the layoffs in the successor states’ public ser­vices and the generally much smaller need for public administration staff in territorially reduced Hungary. When ­these former public servants then sought employment in liberal and intellectual professions, they found that t­ hose positions w ­ ere by and large occupied by Jews, which fed this class’s antisemitism. The Horthy establishment, representing their base’s views and interests, identified Jews as the main internal enemies of the Hungarian Christian nation. The discriminatory policies introduced during the Horthy era stemmed from this conviction and enjoyed considerable social support. Magyar Zsidó called for the examination and acknowl­edgment of this social support for antisemitism. Magyar Zsidó also openly addressed the con­temporary revival of antisemitism in Hungary. An interview with György Gadó in the first issue discussed the Kádár regime’s responsibility for the manipulation of public resentment against Jews. Gadó argued that the lower echelons of the party apparatus knowingly exploited



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ongoing economic prob­lems; they incited ­people in a vulnerable economic situation against t­ hose who profited from economic reforms—­which had been spearheaded by the party itself beginning in the late 1960s—by suggesting that the latter ­were Jews.55 “The Jewish Question is in fact a Hungarian Question. It is the question of the democracy, tolerance, openness and moral standard of Hungarian society, the question w ­ hether the contradictions of our society could be resolved freely, without aggression,” said Gadó.56 Disputing the Hungarian socialist regime’s official characterization of antisemitism as a marginal phenomenon, the article suggested that its elimination required profound changes in the way Hungarian society operated, how it defined itself, and its recent history. It is with this call for profound changes in Hungarian society that the views of Magyar Zsidó diverged dramatically from ­those of the demo­cratic opposition. The samizdat journals of the latter group considered the unsuccessful popu­lar uprising of 1956 to be the most impor­tant historical moment in recent Hungarian history. The largest samizdat journal, Beszélő, published an article relating to 1956 in nearly ­every issue,57 and several other under­ground magazines dealt exclusively with the national uprising theme.58 Another samizdat journal, Demokrata, described 1956 “as a national demo­cratic revolution and viewed [it] as a fundamental ideological and moral capital.”59 Furthermore, the opposition or­ga­nized both public and clandestine gatherings to commemorate the uprising on ­every impor­tant anniversary, even though that usually meant police harassment for participants.60 Thus, although the demo­cratic opposition also sought to do away with a taboo subject instituted by the Kádár regime,—­the popu­lar uprising of 195661—­the ethical lessons to be drawn from this event w ­ ere quite dif­fer­ent from t­ hose of the events in 1944. Whereas 1956 represented a positive basis for national renewal, 1944 would have required a much more critical assessment of Hungarian history as a basis for national identity. Magyar Zsidó also proclaimed the right to support the State of Israel, though not necessarily the policies of its governments. Its articles argued that the regime’s anti-­Zionism and the propagandistic vilification of Israel w ­ ere only a cover for bringing antisemitism back into public discourse.62 Yet another communist regime-­imposed taboo was broken, which had been firmly in place since 1967. Last but not least, and perhaps contrary to expectations, Magyar Zsidó did not openly take sides in the revival of the urbánus–­népies divide. ­After the dramatist György Spiró’s poem, “Jönnek” (They Are Coming), sparked a heated debate ­because of its blunt criticism of Hungarian nationalism, Magyar Zsidó published an opinion piece that was critical of Spiró’s position. “I feel for the poet, his emotions are also mine, but I do not agree with him,” wrote Gadó. “­Today, we have to be afraid of the repressive power,” which “subordinated national interests to dogmatic ideological viewpoints.”63 In other words, ­those who stand against the regime should see socialist power as the ­enemy, not each other. In the second issue, the samizdat journal highlighted the significance of a meeting of the népies wing of the Hungarian opposition in Lakitelek. This meeting, which was held in

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the early fall of 1987—­and l­ater was considered a fundamentally impor­tant moment in Hungary’s systemic change—­was criticized for its exclusion of ­those oppositional actors belonging to the urbánus group.64 However, Magyar Zsidó expressed the hope that the new social movement founded in Lakitelek, the Hungarian Demo­cratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Fórum),65 would be both demo­ cratic and possess a “national spirit.” The journal also explic­itly rejected the notion that the meeting signaled the revival of the népies–­urbánus controversy.66 Even though the publication Magyar Zsidó was short-­lived, it was very significant for ­those, mostly younger Jews in the capital, who managed to access it. As one of them put it, “It was r­ eally impor­tant to me b­ ecause it was the only publication from which one could learn about the Jewish re­nais­sance that was taking place at the time.”67 Just like Erős and Kovács’s research about con­temporary Jewish identities discussed e­ arlier, Magyar Zsidó addressed topics and broke taboos imposed by the Communist regime and Hungarian society that especially affected Jews born a­ fter the Shoah. Although the demo­cratic opposition did address the prob­lem of antisemitism in con­temporary Hungarian society,68 other issues related to Jewish identification and politics ­were by and large discussed only by ­those with a Jewish background.

Conclusion The articulation of Jewish identities examined in this chapter—­exemplified by informal Jewish groups that came into existence at the end of the 1960s, and ­later SALOM and Magyar Zsidó—­was oppositional in that ­these forums did not accept the Hungarian Communist regime’s strict definition of Jewishness solely in religious terms. Furthermore, SALOM and Magyar Zsidó called for economic and po­liti­cal democ­ratization to secure Jewish self-­determination and addressed topics that the regime had imposed as taboos. However, new Jewish identities, which called for an ethnic-­cultural self-­understanding and the ­free cultivation of Jewish traditions, ­were also at odds with significant groups of the anti-­Communist opposition. Discussions of prob­lems of democ­ratization in the framework of Jewish issues ­were missing from the pages of the demo­cratic opposition’s liberal samizdat journals, ­because they did not consider t­hese prob­lems relevant to the question of how relations between the country’s po­liti­cal leadership and society should be defined. Furthermore, the Jewish under­ground opposition and the demo­cratic opposition differed in their views on recent Hungarian history and, consequently, Hungarian identity. The samizdat journal Magyar Zsidó considered 1944—­that is, the deportation and subsequent extermination, mostly in Auschwitz-­Birkenau, of  the majority of Hungarian Jewry with the active participation of Hungarian authorities and the supportive silence of most of Hungarian society—as a key moment in modern Hungarian history. The demo­cratic opposition, however, saw the popu­lar uprising of 1956 as the turning point. The Hungarian socialist regime, in turn, preferred to avoid talking about both events. Yet the dif­fer­ent views of



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h­ istory held by the two oppositional groups suggests that the Jewish and the demo­cratic opposition evaluated the demo­cratic potential of the Hungarian ­people very differently. Although they fully supported the right of minorities for self-­determination, members of the demo­cratic opposition did not address how open self-­identification by Hungary’s Jews might be connected to past and f­ uture sociopo­liti­cal tensions. For t­ hose nationalist-­minded intellectuals like István Csurka, whose main concern was the po­liti­cal and cultural ascendance of the Hungarian nation, the right of minorities for self-­determination was only acceptable as long as it did not hinder this main goal. The Jewish opposition, in contrast, saw the absolute need to define Hungarian nationalism on fully democratic—­that is, inclusive and tolerant—­princi­ples. In addition to engaging in a debate with other groups of the Hungarian opposition, the texts examined in this chapter also highlight what is perhaps the most impor­tant development in the formation of Jewish identity in Hungary during the 1980s: a positive and self-­assertive Jewish identification. For de­cades, many Hungarian Jews had hid or even denied their Jewishness, which they associated with stigmatization.69 As this chapter has argued, this attitude was first challenged by the Israeli victory in the Six-­Day War in 1967 and then openly rejected by several newly formed, illegal oppositional Jewish groups in the 1980s. Arguably, this development played a key role in the cultural renewal of the Hungarian Jewish Community ­after the fall of Communism. Yet many issues that surfaced during the debates examined in this chapter regarding Hungarian national consciousness, minority rights, and the key moments of recent Hungarian history remain unresolved to this day.

notes 1. ​ A Hírmondó, April 1984. HU.302-0-2, Box 4, Collection of Gábor Demszky (CGD), Hungarian Samizdat Periodicals (HSP), Open Society Archives (OSA), Budapest. 2. ​Of the prewar population of 800,000 Jews, t­ here w ­ ere about 190,000 survivors in 1945; most of them lived in Budapest, whose Jewish population the Germans and their Hungarian collaborators did not have time to deport. ­After both waves of emigration and pressures for assimilation imposed by the atheistic socialist state, the number of Jews who remained in Hungary by the beginning of the 1980s has been estimated as ranging between 100,000 and 150,000. See Viktor Karády, Túlélők és Újrakezdők (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2002), esp. 68; Tamás Stark, “Kísérlet a magyar zsidóság számának behatárolására,” in Zsidók a mai Magyarországon, ed. András Kovács (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2002), 100–129. 3. ​András Kovács, “Magyar zsidó politika a háború végétől a kommunista rendszer bukásáig,” Múlt és Jövő, no. 3 (2003): 5–39, 24. 4. ​“General Assembly,” International Organ­ization 22, no. 2. (Spring 1968): 557–594. 5. ​József Prantner’s report of his discussion with the leaders of the Jewish Community, June 29, 1967. Hungarian National Archives, XIX-­A-21-­d, Box no. 39, document no. 0020-4/1967. 6. ​Author’s interview with Zsuzsa Hetényi, July 16, 2018. 7. ​“Szóval azt mondja, aki zsidó, tartsa magát zsidónak?” Interview of Mihancsik Zsófia with Ferenc Lovász, Budapesti Negyed 8, no. 2 (1995), http://­epa​.­oszk​.­hu​/­00000​/­00003​/­00007​/­mihan​ .­htm (accessed August 16, 2018).

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8. ​“Szóval azt mondja, aki zsidó, tartsa magát zsidónak?” Interview of Mihancsik Zsófia with András Rácz, Budapesti Negyed 8, no. 2 (1995), http://­epa​.­oszk​.­hu​/­00000​/­00003​/­00007​/­racz​ .­htm (accessed August 16, 2018). 9. ​Author’s interview with Gábor T. Szántó, July 16, 2018. 10. ​Author’s interview with Gábor T. Szántó. 11. ​“Szóval azt mondja,” interview of Mihancsik Zsófia. 12. ​András Kovács, A másik szeme (Budapest: Gondolat, 2008), 10–11. 13. ​András Lénárt, “Zsidó identitáskutatások a holokauszt után született generáció körében,” Socio.hu 3 (2016): 153. 14. ​Kovács, “Magyar zsidó politika,” 26. András Kovács, ed., Communism’s Jewish Question: Jewish Issues in Communist Archives (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), 283–284, 330–337. 15. ​“Szóval azt mondja,” interview of Mihancsik Zsófia. 16. ​“A Gadó,” Gábor T. Szántó’s interview with György Gadó, Szombat, January 1, 1995. https://​ ­www​.s­ zombat​.o­ rg​/­archivum​/­a​-­gado (accessed June 3, 2018). 17. ​“A Gadó.” 18. ​“A Gadó.” 19. ​“Argumentum ad hominem avagy: Mordulás személyes ügyben,” Magyar Zsidó, no  2. (November 1987), 5. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 20. ​“Nyílt levél a magyar társadalomhoz és a magyar zsidósághoz,” AB Hírmondó, no. 6–7 (May–­June 1984): 23–37. 21. ​For a detailed analy­sis, see Mária M. Kovács, Törvénytől sújtva: A numerus clausus, Magyarországon, 1920–1945 (Budapest, Napvilág Kiadó, 2012). 22. ​“Nyílt levél a magyar társadalomhoz és a magyar zsidósághoz.” 23. ​For a detailed analy­sis, see András Kovács, “Jews and Politics in Hungary,” in Values, Interests, and Identity: Studies in Con­temporary Jewry, ed. Peter  Y. Medding (New York: Oxford ­University Press, 1994), 50–62. See also Wolfgang Eichwede and Jan Pauer, eds., Ringen um Autonomie: Dissidentendiskurse in Mittel-­und Osteuropa (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2017), 254–255. 24. ​János Kis, “A Salom nyílt levele a Magyar társadalomhoz és a Magyar zsidósághoz,” Hírmondó, no. 6–7 (1984). The article also appeared in the Beszélő samizdat journal, http://­beszelo​ .­c 3​ .­hu​ /­c ikkek​ /­a​ -­s alom​ -­nyilt​ -­l evele​ -­a​ -­magyar​ -­tarsadalomhoz​ -­e s​ -­a​ -­magyar​ -­z sidosaghoz (accessed July 22, 2018). 25. ​Kis, “A Salom nyílt levele a Magyar társadalomhoz és a Magyar zsidósághoz.” 26. ​Sándor Balázs (pseudonym of László Öllős), “A Salom nyílt levele,” Beszélő, no. 1 (1986), http://­beszelo​.­c3​.­hu​/­cikkek​/­a​-­salom​-n­ yilt​-­levele (accessed May 6, 2018). 27. ​György Gadó, “Igenis közünk van egymáshoz: Válasz Naftali Krausnak, Izraelbe” Hírmondó, no. 3 (August–­September 1986), 48. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 28. ​For the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Romania, see Stefano Bottoni, “Finding the ­Enemy: Ethnicized State Vio­lence and Population Control in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” Journal of Cold War Studies 19, no. 4 (2017): 113–136. For a historical analy­sis of the situation of Hungarian minorities in Eastern Eu­rope, see Nándor Bárdi, Csilla Fedinec, and László Szarka, eds., Minority Hungarian Communities in the Twentieth C ­ entury (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 29. ​ Árpád Popély, “Czecho­slo­va­kia,” in Minority Hungarian Communities in the Twentieth ­Century, ed. Nándor Bárdi, Csilla Fedinec, and László Szarka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 407. 30. ​See Alex Kershaw, To Save a ­People (London: Hutchinson, 2011). 31. ​Murányi Gábor, “Wallenberg-­emlékművek Budapesten,” in Wallenberg Budapesten (Wallenberg in Budapest), ed. Ember Mária (Budapest: Városháza, 2000), 185–194. 32. ​The Patriotic ­People’s Front was an umbrella organ­ization of social movements and thus basically all agents of the po­liti­cal arena—­including the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party—­ from 1954 and 1990 in Hungary.



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33. ​“Felavatták Wallenberg szobrát,” Népszabadság, May 16, 1987, 4. 34. ​For more on the historical evolution of the social meaning of vari­ous Hungarian football

teams, see Miklós Hadas and Viktor Karády, “Futball és társadalmi identitás,” Replika, no. 17–18 (1995): 88–120. 35. ​“Az antiszemizimus ellen, a demokratikus megújhodásért,” Hírmondó, no.  2 (1987) and Demokrata, no. 5 (1987). 36. ​The text of the statement was reprinted in Magyar Zsidó as well: no 1 (September 1987), 4. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 37. ​Daily Observation, Summary Report, III/III Department, May 7, 1987. Archives of State Security Ser­vices, Budapest. http://­iii​-­iii​-­kronika​.­blog​.­hu​/­2014​/­05​/­07​/­csoori​_­sandor​_­megfigyeles (accessed June 3, 2018). 38. ​For more on the népi–­urbánus debate and its continuities into the late 1990s, see Tamás Fricz, A népi-­urbánus vita tegnap és ma (Budapest: Napvilág, 1997). 39. ​For example, even though many members of the two groups united against the regime in the so-­called Petőfi kör during the 1956 revolution, the retributions did not affect them to the same extent. For details, see Éva Standeisky, Az írók és a hatalom 1956–1963 (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1996). 40. ​Richard S. Esbenshade calls them “neo-­Urbanists.” See Richard S. Esbenshade, “Verdrängung oder Integration der Erinnerung? Der Zweite Weltkrieg und der Holocaust im ungarishcen Samizdat,” in Gegengeschichte: Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im Ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens, ed. Peter Hallama and Stephan Stach (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015), 261–286, esp. 262. 41. ​András Bozóki, The Hungarian Demo­cratic Opposition: Self-­Reflection, Identity and Po­liti­cal Discourse, unpublished manuscript. https://­politicalscience​.c­ eu​.­edu​/­sites​/­politicalscience​.c­ eu​ .­hu​/fi­ les​/a­ ttachment​/b­ asicpage​/5­ 0​/­07​-­bozoki101​.­pdf (accessed July 2, 2018). 42. ​Gábor T. Szántó’s information. See “A Gadó.” 43. ​I would like to thank Tamás Scheibner and the “COURAGE—­Connecting Collections” Proj­ect for this information. 44. ​Esbenshade, “Verdrängung oder Integration der Erinnerung?” 261–286. 45. ​Author’s interview with Gábor T. Szántó. 46. ​Although several names ­were on the list of contributors, all the articles ­were written by György Gadó ­under vari­ous pseudonyms. 47. ​“Új esztendő, új lap,” Magyar Zsidó, no.  1 (September  1987), 1. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 48. ​“A világtörténelem zsákutcája,” Magyar Zsidó, no. 2 (November 1987), 3. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 49. ​“Zsidóság, antiszemitizmus, anticionizmus a mai Magyarországon,” Magyar Zsidó, no.  1 (September 1987), 10. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 50. ​For the Polish case, see for example Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 51. ​“A vallomás,” Magyar Zsidó, no.  2 (November  1987), 12. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 52. ​For a detailed account of Marxist theories on fascism, see Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999). 53. ​See Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, Hullarablás: A magyar zsidók gazdasági megsemmisítése (Budapest: Hannah Arendt Egyesület—­Jaffa Kiadó, 2005). A similar argument is put forward in Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach, Das Letzte Kapitel: Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden (Stuttgart: DVA, 2002). 54. ​“Zsidóság, antiszemitizmus, anticionizmus a mai Magyarországon.” Magyar Zsidó, no.  1 (September 1987), 10. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 55. ​“Zsidóság, antiszemitizmus, anticionizmus a mai Magyarországon,” 9.

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56. ​“A zsidókérdést magyarkérdésnek is lehet nevezni.” Magyar Zsidó, no. 1 (September 1987):

4. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 57. ​Esbenshade, “Verdrängung oder Integration der Erinnerung?” 266. 58. ​In 1983, issue no. 8 of Beszélő was solely devoted to 1956. In 1986, nos. 18 and 19 of the samizdat journal also featured documents next to the articles. 59. ​Béla F. Reymund, “Tartsuk be a játékszabályokat,” Demokrata, no.  7–8 (1986): 21. Also quoted in Bozóki, The Hungarian Demo­cratic Opposition. 60. ​For a detailed account see György Litván, “1956 emlékének szerepe a rendszerváltásban,” Beszélő 12, no.1 (2007), http://­beszelo​.­c3​.­hu​/­cikkek​/­1956​-e­ mlekenek​-s­ zerepe​-­a​-­rendszervaltasban (accessed August 20, 2018). 61. ​On the tabooization of 1956 by the Kádár regime, see István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-­Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 62. ​“Zsidóság, antiszemitizmus, anticionizmus a mai Magyarországon,”10. 63. ​“Kik félnek és mitől?” Magyar Zsidó, no. 1 (September 1987): 12. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 64. ​The only representative of the demo­cratic opposition who was pre­sent was the writer György Konrád. 65. ​­Later, the movement was converted into a party of the same name and won the most votes during the first ­free parliamentary elections in 1990. 66. ​“Lakitelek után,” Magyar Zsidó, no. 1 (September 1987): 7. HU-­OSA 302-0-2, Box 5, CGD, HSP, OSA. 67. ​Personal correspondence with Éva Kovács, August 21, 2020. 68. ​For example, István Bibó’s groundbreaking analy­sis of Hungarian antisemitism, “A zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után,” was republished as a samizdat in 1984. 69. ​András Kovács, “Identitás és etnicitás: Zsidó identitásproblémák a háború utáni Magyarországon,” Világosság 4 (1992): 280–291. Ferenc Erős, “A zsidó identitás szerkezete Magyarországon a nyolcvanas években,” in Zsidóság, identitás, történelem, ed. Mária M. Kovács, Yitzhak M. Kasthy, and Ferenc Erős (Budapest: T-­Twins, 1992), 85–96.

ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

The idea of this volume originated some seven years ago when planning a joint research proj­ect with a Czech-­Polish-­German team of researchers on the Jews of postwar Czecho­slo­va­kia and Poland. Research grant no. 16-01775Y of the Czech Science Foundation, titled “The Inclusion of the Jewish Population into the Postwar Czechoslovak and Polish Socie­ties” was conducted at the Institute of Con­ temporary History, Czech Acad­emy of Sciences, Prague. The three core members of the team—­Kateřina Čapková, Kamil Kijek, and Stephan Stach—­agreed that history writing on the Jews of Communist Poland and Czecho­slo­va­kia has been dominated, first, by a Cold War perspective that, among other t­ hings, has emphasized the leading po­liti­cal actors, and, second, by questions about the relationship between Jews and Communism. We felt that not only an analy­sis f­ ree of ideological bias but also the perspective from below have been missing. Another crucial aspect was the need to draw on a greater variety of sources, particularly sources created by Jews. Last but not least, transnational ties within the pro-­Soviet bloc and across the Iron Curtain have been of key relevance to our research. To broaden this approach to other countries with experience of Communist regimes, we or­ga­nized an international conference titled “New Approaches to the History of Jews ­under Communism,” held at Villa Lanna in Prague in 2017. The call for papers met with such interest that it was extremely difficult to select a ­limited number of presenters for the two-­day conference. It was funded by the Czech Science Foundation, with additional funding from the Eu­ro­pean Association of Jewish Studies, Strategy 21 AV (the Global Conflicts and Local Interactions program), and CEFRES, Prague. It was at the conference—­encouraged greatly by the late David Shneer—­that the idea of a volume was born. For it, we have chosen twelve chapters by top researchers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Moldavia, Rus­ sia, the United States, Israel, and G ­ reat Britain. As the notes on the contributors reveal, this volume is the result of highly fruitful cooperation among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. Stephan Stach was a co-­organizer of the conference in Prague, and we also included his impor­tant comments on the first draft of the introduction of this volume. ­Because he has changed occupations and given his duties as editor of another related volume (coedited with Kata Bohus and Peter Hallama), Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in Communist Eastern Eu­rope (2022), he had to leave the book proj­ect at an early stage. We nevertheless are grateful to Stephan for his ­great cooperation in the past and for his continuing friendship. 253

254

Acknowledgments

We are also very grateful for the excellent cooperation with the Rutgers University Press. Our thanks go especially to Elisabeth Maselli and also to the copy editor, Gail Naron Chalew. Many thanks also to Alexander Trotter for creating the index of the book, which was funded by grant no. 19-26638X of the Czech Science Foundation, carried out at the Institute of Con­temporary History, Czech Acad­ emy of Sciences.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

kata bohus is a se­nior research adviser at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway.

Previously, she worked as an international fellow at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt/Simon Dubnow Institute Leipzig, where she curated a temporary exhibition on the history of Jews in Eu­rope ­after World War II. She coedited (with Atina Grossmann, Werner Hanak, and Mirjam Wenzel) the book, Our Courage: Jews in Postwar Eu­rope 1945–48 (2020). She has published several articles on Holocaust memory and memorialization in Communist Hungary, the reception history of Anne Frank’s diary, and Communist interpretations of the Eichmann trial in Eastern Eu­rope. kateřina č apková is a se­nior researcher at the Institute of Con­temporary History, Prague, and a teacher at Charles University and NYU in Prague. Her Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (2012; in Czech, 2005 and 2014) was named the Outstanding Academic Title of 2012 by Choice magazine. With Michal Frankl, she coauthored Unsichere Zuflucht (2012), which is about ­people fleeing to Czecho­slo­va­kia from Nazi Germany and Austria. With Hillel Kieval she coedited the volume Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands (2021). Thanks to the ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, she is currently working (with Diana Dumitru and Chad Bryant) on a book about the Rudolf Slánský Trial. diana dumitru is an associate professor of history at Ion Creangă State University of Moldova. She has authored two books and more than forty academic articles. Her second book, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, was published in 2016 (in Romanian, in 2019). Her article “Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation: Why Some ­People Harmed Jews and ­Others Helped Them during the Holocaust in Romania” (coauthored with Car­ter Johnson and published in World Politics) received the 2012 Mary Parker Follett Award for the best article or chapter published in the field of politics and history. valery dymshits is a research fellow at the Petersburg Judaica Centre, Eu­ro­ pean University at St. Petersburg, and a professor in the Liberal Arts Department of St.  Petersburg State University. His chief areas of research are the cultural anthropology and folklore of East Eu­ro­pean Jewry, folk and academic Jewish art, Yiddish lit­er­a­ture, and Russian-­Jewish lit­er­a­ture. He has edited and translated twenty-­five books and collection of articles, including Еврейские народные сказки ( Jewish Folk Tales; 1999) and Штетл, XXI век (The Shtetl, the 21st  ­Century; 2008). He is a member of the editorial boards of Народ Книги в мире книг (The 255

256

Notes on Contributors

Nation of the Book in a World of Books, St.  Petersburg), Judaic-­Slavic Journal (Moscow), and Yiddishland ( Jerusalem). gennady estr aikh is a professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and

Judaic Studies at New York University, where he also directs the Shvidler Proj­ect for the History of the Jews of the Soviet Union. His fields of expertise are Jewish intellectual history, Yiddish language and lit­er­a­ture, and Soviet Jewish history. His publications include Soviet Yiddish (1999), In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (2005), Yiddish in the Cold War (2008), Еврейская литературная жизнь Москвы (2015), and Transatlantic Rus­sian Jewishness (2020), as well as more than a dozen coedited volumes. ka mil kijek is an assistant professor in the Jewish Studies Department at the

University of Wrocław, Poland. His publications include Dzieci modernizmu: Świadomość, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w Polsce międzywojennej (­Children of Modernism: The Socialization, Culture and Po­liti­cal Consciousness of the Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland; 2017), for which he received an international prize from the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Rus­ sian and East-­European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as vari­ous articles in journals such as Jewish Social Studies, Polin, Gal-­Ed, and Journal of Genocide Research. anna koch is the Francis L. Carsten DAAD Lecturer at University College Lon-

don, School of Slavonic and East Eu­ro­pean History. She received her doctorate from New York University in 2015. Her book, Home a­ fter Fascism: Italian and German Jews ­after the Holocaust, is forthcoming in 2022. She has published several articles on Italian and German Jewish history and is coediting a book on Holocaust memory in Eastern and Western Eu­rope. Her current research examines the lives of German Communists of Jewish origin between 1918 and 1952. agata maksimowska holds a master of arts in Psy­chol­ogy and a master of arts

in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Warsaw. She is an author of Birobidżan: ziemia, na której mieliśmy być szczęśliwi (Birobidzhan: Land on which we ­were meant to be happy; 2019). She has also edited, together with Aleksandra Bielawska and Ala Sidarovich, a volume Good Practices in the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Heritage: A Guide Based on the Polish and Belarusian Experiences (2012). She participated in the doctoral program in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw (2007–2012). Maksimowska is also an author of several articles on religious minorities in the former Soviet Union, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork. david shneer ‫( ז״ל‬1972–2020) held the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and was a professor of history and Jewish studies, and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for Jewish Studies and coeditor-­in-­chief of



Notes on Contributors 257

East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs. He was the author or editor of several prize-­winning books, including Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (2005), Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (2011), and Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photo­graph (2020). anna shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (DPhil) from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popu­lar Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life u­ nder Stalin (2017). Together with artist Psoy Korolenko, Shternshis created and directed the Grammy-­nominated Yiddish Glory proj­ect, an initiative that brought back to life forgotten Yiddish ­music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. A recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently working on a book tentatively titled Last Yiddish Heroes: A Lost and Found Archive of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union about Yiddish ­music created in Nazi-­occupied Ukraine. marcos silber is associate professor and former chair of the Department of

Jewish History at the University of Haifa. He has written on Polish–­Israeli relations; migrations between the two countries; Jewish diaspora nationalism in Poland, Lithuania, and Rus­sia in the early twentieth c­ entury; and Yiddish and Polish cinema and popu­lar culture in interwar Poland. With Szymon Rudnicki he has published a se­lection of documents on Polish–­Israeli diplomatic relations, 1945–­1967 (2009, in Polish and Hebrew editions) and, in Hebrew, a book whose title translates as Dif­fer­ent Nationality, Equal Citizenship! The Efforts to Achieve Autonomy for Polish Jewry during the First World War (2014). stephan stach has been a researcher of East Central Eu­ro­pean history of the

twentieth ­century with a focus on Poland, Polish–­Jewish relations, and Holocaust memory in the Cold War era. He held positions at academic institutions in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. He coedited volumes on interwar Polish nationalities policy (with Chrishardt Henschel, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropafor­ schung, 2013), dissidents’ memories of World War II and the Holocaust (with Peter Hallama, Gegengeschichte: Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens, 2015), and on the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in Eastern Eu­rope (with Kata Bohus and Peter Hallama, Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism, 2022). Since June 2020 he has been serving as executive director of the party Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen in Saxony. galina zelenina is an associate professor in the Department for Jewish Theology, Biblical and Jewish Studies, Rus­sian State University of the Humanities, and a se­nior research fellow at the School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Rus­sian Presidential Acad­emy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. She is the author of От скипетра Иуды к жезЛу шута: придворные

258

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евреи в средневековой Испании (2007) on court Jews in medieval and early modern Spain, Иудаика два: ренессанс в лицах (2015) on the revival of Jewish studies in late Soviet and post-­Soviet Rus­sia, Огненный враг марранов: жизнь и смерть под надзором инквизиции (2018) on conversos and the Spanish Inquisition, and Изгои Средневековья (2021) on Jewish-­Christian relations in the M ­ iddle Ages. She has also written a number of articles on Soviet and post-­Soviet Jewish history.

INDEX

Abusch, Alexander, 112, 118, 122, 123 acculturation, 132, 139 Ackermann, Gertrude, 37 Adler, Gertrude, 46 Adler, Mojžíš, 37 agency, Jewish, 1, 2, 7, 196 Aguda Party, 22 AHEYM (Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories) proj­ect, 56 Aleichem, Sholem, 22, 137, 139, 181, 185–190 Aleksandrovich, Mikhail, 188, 189 Alexandrov, Georgii, 75, 77, 80 Aliyah events, 219, 220, 221, 230 Altshuler, Mordechai, 55 Ambijan (American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobizhan), 75, 141, 176 American Federation of Polish Jews, 17 Anatolyevich, Semen, 144 Antalfi, Mária, 238 anthropology, 3, 131, 228; social and cultural, 55; “thin and thick” cultures, 56 antisemitism, 16, 17, 26–27, 112, 117; absent from Bohemian Lands, 39; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 41, 42; decline in postwar United States, 155; in Hungary, 236, 241–242, 245, 246, 247, 248; as po­liti­cal tool, 120–121. See also Holocaust/ Shoah; pogroms antisemitism, Soviet, 55, 60, 63, 75, 86, 139–140; “Antisemity” [Antisemites] (Vysotsky song), 224; classification by nationality and, 143; derogatory terms for Jews in USSR, 142, 149n59; embraced by Soviet state, 71; Jewish revival and, 219; of late Stalinist period, 223; Stalin’s role in, 72 Antisemitismus und Rassenhetze [Antisemitism and Racial Hatred] (Kahn, 1948), 116 Aragon, Louis, 183–184 archives, local, 3 Aris, Helmut, 168 Aronstein, Georges, 163 assimilation, 3, 66, 132, 206; in Birobidzhan, 139; into Communist identity in GDR, 124–125; in Hungary, 236, 239–240; as myth, 6; pressure of, 7, 55

atheism, 45, 113, 117, 124, 145 Auschwitz-­Birkenau extermination camp, 19, 42, 47; deportations of Hungarian Jews to, 246, 248; liberation of, 119; memorial museums, 7; survivors of, 158, 161, 164 Austria, 84, 90n66 autonomy, Jewish, 4–5, 27 Averbuch, Leonid, 79 Axen, Hermann, 121, 122 Azhaev, Vasili, 180, 188 Baltic states, 215 Barghoorn, Frederick C., 190 bar mitzvah ceremony, 44, 122 Baron, Salo, 49 Bauman, Irma, 166 Bauman, Max, 158 Bauman, Mordecai, 166 Belarus, 55, 63, 95; Belorus­sian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), 83, 84; Doctors’ Plot and, 93; remnants of Yiddish culture in, 215 Bemporad, Elissa, 1, 55, 94 Bengelsdorf, Mikhail, 136 Bergelson, David, 180, 184–185 Bergelson, Tsipa (Tsilya), 184 Beria, Lavrentii, 73–74, 105 Berliner, Clara, 114 Berman, Adolf, 25 Beszélő (Hungarian samizdat journal), 239, 242, 247, 252n58 Bewitched Tailor, The (Aleichem), 188, 193n74 Bezymenski, Alexander, 185 Bhabha, Homi K., 145, 146 Bialik, H. N., 189 Bibó, István, 252n68 Birobidzhan, 5, 75; Aleichem’s place in Soviet literary canon and, 187; Bauhaus architectural plan for, 140; Birobidzhan Affair, 133; Jewish acculturation in, 143–147; Jewish culture in, 133–140; Jews as percentage of population, 176; “passive Jewish identity” in, 132; rumors of Jews’ deportation to, 92, 186; Soviet propaganda and, 175–186; utopian idea of, 131. See also Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR)

259

260

Index

Birobidzhaner Shtern (Yiddish-­language newspaper), 138, 176, 177 Birobidzhan State Yiddish Theater, 176 Black Book of Soviet Jewry, The, 76–77 blood libel, 29, 94 Bohemian Lands, 35, 37, 38, 40, 49. See also Czecho­slo­va­kia Bohus, Kata, 7 Bolków training camp, 23 Bolsheviks/Bolshevism, 71, 245 borders, changes in, 8 Brandt, Heinz, 120 Bratislava (Slovakia), city of, 42 Brent, Jonathan, 72 Brezhnev, Leonid, 63, 181 Bricha movement, 85–86, 90n71 Brno, city of, 35 Brod, Max, 42 Broderson, Moyshe, 179 Bronfman, Itsik, 138 Bruller, Jean, 183 Buber, Martin, 237 Buchenwald concentration camp, 159, 161, 162, 167, 168 Bulgaria, 4, 9 Bund/Bundism, 4, 22, 27, 28, 96 burial socie­ties (chevra kadisha), 134 Butler, Judith, 150n75 Caldwell, Melissa L., 222, 229 Canada, 84, 165–166 Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), 165, 173n62 Cang, Joel, 185, 189 Čapek, Karel, 42 Čapková, Kateřina, 3, 5, 6 Carpathian Ruthenia, 36, 45; annexation to Soviet Union, 37; Jews “repatriated” to Soviet Union from, 38; religious Jews from, 40, 48 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 240–241 cemeteries, 21, 134, 167, 169; in GDR, 157, 162, 169; gravestones taken from, 81; in Malakhovka, 217, 218 censorship, 4, 25 Central Committee of Polish Jews (1944– 1950). See CKŻP [Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich] Central Committee of the Jewish Communities in Slovakia, 50 Chaumont, Jean-­Michel, 88n31

Cheberiak, Vera, 105, 110n50 ­children, care of, 6 Chudiš, Pavlo, 51n11 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 85, 176 CKŻP [Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich] (Central Committee of Polish Jews), 4, 16, 17, 27, 28, 29 Claims Conference, 42 Cold War, 29, 49, 153, 155; creation of state of Israel and, 83; end of, 1; Jewish antifascism in GDR and, 155–157, 155–161; Yiddish as cultural diplomatic tool in, 189 colonialism, 154 Communism: authoritarianism of, 29; co­ali­tions dominated by, 5; Czech religious Jews’ attitude ­toward, 43; fall of, 249; as forcefully imposed foreign import, 18; propaganda against religion, 43; seen initially as a hope, 4; ste­reo­type of Jewish Communism, 245 Communist Party, Czechoslovak, 43 Communist Party, Hungarian (Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party), 239, 241, 250n32 Communist Party, in interwar Germany, 111 Communist Party, Israeli, 156 Communist Party, Polish (Polish United Workers’ Party [PZPR]), 2, 197, 200, 202, 210n19 Communist Party, Soviet, 63, 101; Agitprop department of, 75, 77–78, 81; Central Committee (CC), 74; Doctors’ Plot and, 105; Jewish members of, 84; Personnel Dep’t. in Central Committee, 174; Politburo, 78, 85; XX Party congress, Khrushchev’s speech at, 42 Communist Party USA, 166 concentration camps: commemorated on GDR postage stamps, 159–160; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 38, 39, 46, 48; Gross-­ Rosen, 16; Jewish prisoners liberated from, 71; Romanian-­run, 59; transformed into memorial sites, 161–163. See also Buchenwald; Ravensbrück; Theresienstadt/Terezín cosmopolitanism, Jews identified with, 82, 92, 99, 121 Council of the Jewish Community in the Bohemian Lands, 50 Crimea, 89n39, 219 Csurka, István, 242, 249 Cyrankiewicz, Józef, 198

Czech Jews, 35, 36, 163; dominant narrative about secular Jews, 47–50; German-­ speaking, 38–39, 45, 49; marriage to non-­Jews, 45, 46; religious Jews ­under secular Communism, 39–47 Czech language, 35, 41, 47, 50 Czechoslovak Army Corps, First, 37 Czecho­slo­va­kia, 1, 3, 4, 7, 35–36; Germans expelled from, 37, 41; German-­speaking Jews in, 38–39; Hungarian minority in, 240–241; marginalization/exoticization of Jewish history in, 9; migration and periphery in, 36–39. See also Slánský, Rudolf, show trial of (1952) Dahlem, Fritz, 121 Davidovič, Chaja and Emil, 37 Děčín, city of, 48 Deckname, Der [The Alias] (Abusch memoir), 122–123 Demokrata [Demo­crat] (Hungarian samizdat journal), 241, 247 Demszky, Gábor, 244 Dennis, John, 40–41, 49 Deutscher, Isaac, 123, 124 diaries, 3, 230 Dimanstein, Semyon, 141 Dimitrov, Georgi, 92 dissidents, 7, 8, 106, 235n72 Doctors’ Plot (1952–1953), 3, 54, 91–94, 100, 128n59; end of, 105–106; foreign influence among doctors feared, 97; Holocaust survivors’ responses to, 104; Jewish doctors interviewed about memories of, 95–97; Jewish names and identities hidden during, 97–99; Jews’ exclusion from Soviet informal networks and, 102–103; legacies of, 106–107; Malakhovka synagogue and, 217; mutual-­ aid strategies to survive in face of, 99–102; non-­Jews in medical institutions and, 100; normalization of antisemitic discourse, 99; patients with antisemitic attitudes and, 95, 96, 109n23; as secularized blood libel, 94; as Stalin’s “final solution,” 71; three stages of, 93 doyikeit (hereness), 4, 21 DP (Displaced Persons) camps, in postwar Germany, 11n16, 38, 114 Dreifuß, Alfred, 113, 115 Drizin, Israil, 93

Index 261 Dumitru, Diana, 3 Dymshits, Valery, 3, 5 Dzierżoniów (Poland), town of, 15, 20, 23, 25, 30; Jewish Committee, 26; Jewish culture ­after the Holocaust, 19; Jewish farms in area of, 23–24; Jewish population of, 17; Yidishe Yishev in, 16–17; Zionist movement in, 21 DZWUR (Lower Silesian Radio Factory), 23 East Berlin, Jewish Community in, 114, 117, 154, 158, 164, 173n73; transnationalism and, 165; Yiddish theater and, 158–159. See also GDR [German Demo­cratic Republic] Egit, Yaacov, 22, 28 Egorov (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 94 Eisler, Gerhart, 126n16 Eisler, Hanns, 164, 166 Elenevskaia, Mariia, 56 El mole rachamim ( Jewish prayer), 157, 164 Engländer, Tibor, 238 Enlightenment, 4, 22 Erős, Ferenc, 238, 248 Esbenshade, Richard S., 244 Eschwege, Helmut, 116–117, 123 Esther Rokhel Kaminska State Jewish Theater, 168 Estraikh, Gennady, 1, 8 ethnic cleansing, 49 ethnonationalism, 205, 208 Etinger (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 91 Every­thing Was Forever, ­until It Was No More (Yurchak), 228 Eynikayt [Unity] (newspaper of JAFC), 68n21, 96 Fadeev, Alexander, 187 Farkaš, Rabbi Bernard, 42, 45 fascism, 154, 167, 246 Fast, Howard, 183, 184 Federation of the Jewish Communities in the Bohemian Lands, 43 Fefer, Itzik, 73, 75, 76, 180 Feistmann, Rudolf, 112, 118 Feldman (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 91 Feuchtwanger, Marta, 124 Feuerlicht, Cantor Victor, 48 Fialkova, Larisa, 56 Field, Noel, 118 Fink, Wilfried, 172n50

262

Index

Fockler, Alfred, 85, 90n66 Folkism, 4 Folks-­shtime [­People’s Voice] (Warsaw Yiddish newspaper), 177, 182 Forverts [The Forward] (U.S. journal), 29, 180 France, 85 Freies Deutschland (journal), 112 FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] (West Germany), 46, 49, 84, 113, 153, 169n2 Friedman, Perry, 164–165 Funke, Otto, 167–168 Gadó, György, 239, 240, 244, 246–247 Galushka, Luka Matveeich, 97 Gazun, Andrei, 80 GDR [German Demo­cratic Republic] (East Germany), 1, 113, 150n75, 153–155; antifascist narrative of, 115, 157–158; antisemitism and, 120; Cold War Jewish antifascism in, 155–157; Committee for Antifascist Re­sis­tance Fighters (formerly VVN), 159, 167–168; constitution of, 121, 129n77; differences with other Eastern Eu­ro­pean countries, 4; GDR antifascist ideology made Jewish, 157–158; German Jewish Communists as “fighters,” 115–116; Jewish Communist lieux de memoire in, 161–163; Jewish population of, 154, 169n2; memorial culture of, 154, 156, 157, 169; musical rituals of Cold War Jewish antifascism in, 158–161; opposition to Israel and Zionism, 118; party purges in, 119; Slánský show trial and, 119–122, 153, 156; Soviet Occupied Zone (SBZ), 105, 113, 114, 116, 126n19; transnational Communist Jewish community and, 164–168; Volksbühne (­People’s Theater), 113; Warsaw Ghetto uprising commemorated in, 159, 169, 170–171n24. See also East Berlin, Jewish Community in; SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands] Gebirtik, Mordechai, 158, 164 Geertz, Clifford, 56 Gel’shtein (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 gender, 6, 196 Genis, Alexander, 219 German language, 47, 164 Germany, East. See GDR [German Demo­ cratic Republic] Germany, West. See FRG [Federal Republic of Germany]

Gershenovich, Rosa, 80 Gersherson, Olga, 145 Gessen, Esther, 224, 227 Gilman, Sander, 143 Ginzburg, Lydia, 227 Gitelman, Zvi, 56, 132, 136 Glikl of Hameln Demands Justice (Bauman play), 158–159 Globke, Hans-­Maria, 161 Goldschmitt, Harry, 172n56 Goldstein, Kurt, 115, 117 Golomb, Mikhail, 96 “Gordonia” organ­ization, 24, 84–85 Gorovets (Horoverts), Emil, 188, 189 Gott, Karel, 44 Götting, Gerald, 160 Granovetter, Mark, 231 ­Great Patriotic War, Soviet, 68n21, 135, 215. See also World War II Gromyko, Andrei, 85 Grossman, Vasily, 174 Grossmann, Atina, 11n16 Grűnbaum, Yitzhak, 25 Grundig, Lea, 115 Gutman, Mordechai, 179 Gysi, Klaus, 121, 122 Haganah (paramilitary units in Palestine), 25 Halkin, Shmuel, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188 Hapoel HaMizrachi, 21 HaShomer HaDati, 21 HaShomer HaTzair youth movement, 21, 24 Hasidim, 47 Hausner, Gideon, 163 Hebrew language, 21, 52n21, 83 Hegerová, Hana, 44 Heinrich Heine Club, 112 Heitlinger, Alena, 35, 44, 46 Hernádi, Gyula, 242 Herrnstadt, Rudolf, 128n59 Herškovič ­family, 48 Heydrich, Reinhard, 162 Hírmondó [Messenger] (Hungarian samizdat journal), 236, 239, 240, 245 Hirsch, Baron de, 165 Hitler, Adolf, 39, 104, 105, 111, 112, 202. See also Nazis/Nazi Germany Hoffmann, Malvína Adlerová, 45 Hofstein, David, 180 Holocaust/Shoah, 2, 5, 19, 29, 35, 37, 38, 86; as alleged end of Jewish history in East

Central Eu­rope, 9; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 42, 45, 46; Doctors’ Plot and, 104; in Hungary, 239; Jewish Communists, 123; Jewish identity and, 6–7; Jews subsumed ­under “victims of fascism” narrative, 77, 88n31; Judenrats ( Jewish councils in ghettos), 109n43; memorialization of victims of, 8, 56; memory of, 6, 7; Soviet Jews and, 71; in Soviet Ukraine, 80; survivors, 15, 16, 18; Vinnitsa ghetto and, 104 Holzer, Charlotte, 114 Honecker, Erich, 168 Horthy, Miklós, 246 Hungarian In­de­pen­dent Jewish Peace Group (Magyar Független Zsidó Békecsoport). See SALOM group Hungarian language, 41, 47 Hungary, 1, 4, 8, 44, 248–249; Magyar Zsidó [Hungarian Jew] (samizdat journal), 7, 243–248; marginalization/exoticization of Jewish history in, 9; népi (folkist, ruralist) movement, 242–243, 244, 247–248, 251n39; as primary node of Judaism in Communist Eu­rope, 163–164; SALOM group, 237–243, 244, 245, 248; surviving Jewish population of, 249n2; urbánus (urban, internationalist) movement, 243, 247–248, 251n39 Ichud, 24, 27 ICOR (Organ­ization for Jewish Colonization in Rus­sia), 141 identification documents, rejection of, 139–140, 148n44 identities, Jewish, 35, 239, 240, 248, 249; of “Accented Jews,” 145; acknowl­edgment of, 140; defined in national terms, 139; defined in religious terms, 237; hidden or denied, 47; Holocaust as shared experience, 7; Hungarian identity and, 244–245; in Hungary, 236; Jewishness contrasted with, 112; “passive,” 132; per­sis­tence and transformation of, 5–7; quest for authenticity and, 231; refusenik milieu and, 230; Six-­Day War (1967) and, 237; Soviet, 1; as “thin culture,” 226 intelligent­sia, 70, 133; assimilated Soviet Jewish, 215, 219, 226, 228; dacha life and, 222, 223, 224, 225; Hungarian, 242; Moldavian, 70; Rus­sian, 226, 230; Yiddish, 135 International Federation of Re­sis­tance Fighters, 168, 173n73

Index 263 interwar period, 5, 18, 29, 47, 71 In the Shadow of the Shtetl (Veidlinger, 2013), 56 In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews ­after 1945 (Heitlinger, 2006), 35 Isaacs, Bernard, 193n74 Israel, State of, 7, 9, 45, 54, 119; Cold War and, 83; Communist countries’ relations with, 8; Communists in, 156; creation of, 72, 154; Declaration of In­de­pen­dence (1948), 25; as insurance policy against genocide, 155; Maccabiah Games in, 220; as site of Jewish rebirth, 162; Soviet campaign against, 55; Soviet Jews’ emigration to, 87n2; Stalin’s policy ­toward, 29; ties to Soviet Jews, 87; Yiddish culture/language in, 189. See also Polish Jews, migration to Israel; Six-­Day War; Zionism Italy, 84, 199 Iushchinskii, Andrei, 110n50 Izsák, Andor, 160 Jacobson, Israel, 39 Jakubovič, David, 44–45 Jaldati, Lin, 7, 8, 121, 123, 158, 172n56; in North Amer­i­ca, 165–166; Ravensbrück memorial concert (1959), 162; transnational Communist Jewish community and, 164–165; Warsaw Ghetto uprising commemoration and, 159, 170–171n24 JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), 8, 35, 38, 39–40, 42; Agro-­Joint organ­ization, 89n39; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 44, 49; Jewish Communists in Soviet-­occupied Germany and, 114; Soviet state accusations against, 85 Jewish Agency, mi­grants’ debts to, 203, 211n48 Jewish Anti-­Fascist Committee ( JAC), 54, 68n21, 72–78, 155; members arrested and killed, 78, 184; parent organ­ization of, 178 Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR), 5, 78, 132, 175–176; difficulty of early years in, 133; establishment of (1934), 134; as failed experiment, 131; situation for Jews compared with rest of USSR, 140–142. See also Birobidzhan Jewish Chronicle (London), 185, 186 Jewish Inter-­Party Committee, 22 Jewishness, 206, 224; as ethnic versus religious category, 226, 248; hidden or denied, 249; Holocaust and, 6; as stigma, 35

264

Index

Jewishness, German Communism and, 113, 117, 118, 122, 123–125; antifascism and, 112, 114, 124; “Non-­Jewish Jews,” 123; of non-­Jews, 119 Jewishness, of Birobidzhan, 132, 133, 136, 138, 142; maintained within self and ­family, 144; Rus­sian non-­Jews immersed in, 146; as unchangeable point of reference, 143 “Jewish Question,” 54, 82, 103, 215; in Hungary, 236; socialism as solution to, 117 “Jewish Question, The” (Ginzburg, 2012), 227 Jewish Settlement in Lower Silesia, The (documentary film, 1947), 22 jokes, 223 “Jőnnek” [They Are Coming] (Spiró), 247 Jubilee Synagogue (Prague), 40, 43 Judaism, 21, 62, 111, 116, 124; Budapest Rabbinic Seminary, 163, 172n50; rejection of, 122; status in Soviet Union, 134; Judeo-­ Bolshevism, myth of, 2, 78 Jungmann, Erich, 112 Kádár, János, 241, 245, 246, 247 Kaddish recitation, 65 Kafka, Franz, 42 Kaganovich, Lazar, 85 Kaganovich Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater, 136 Kahn, Siegbert, 116 Kalinin, Mikhail, 141 Kalinka, Emanuel, 189 Kaminger (Bricha leader), 86 Kaminska, Ida, 155, 158 Kantorowicz, Alfred, 121, 124, 129n80 Karner, Stefan, 90n66 Katz, Dovid, 55 Katz, Otto, 112 Kazakevich, Emanuel, 179 kehila ( Jewish Community), 5 KEMT (Birobidzhan Jewish Chamber ­Music Theater), 142 Kerler, Dov-­Ber, 55 KGB (Soviet Committee for State Security), 106, 220, 221, 241 Khrushchev, Nikita, 60, 174, 176, 181, 188, 189; campaign against religion (1960), 217; Holocaust/Shoah survivors and, 73; speech at XX Party Congress (1956), 42; visit to United States (1959), 186 kibbutzim (collective farms), 21, 23, 24

Kielce pogrom (Poland, 1946), 16, 17, 27, 28 Kijek, Kamil, 3, 5 Kirchner, Peter, 168 Kis, János, 240, 245 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 42, 112 Kishinev, city of, 80, 82, 84 Klemperer, Victor, 122 Klub der Jugend und Sportler (GDR), 164 Knepler, George, 172n56 Koch, Anna, 7 Kogan, B. (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 91 Kolesnikova, Olga, 93 Komsomol (Communist youth organ­ization), 62 Kondakov, N., 74 Konrád, György, 242, 252n64 Kopelowitz, Lionel, 168 Korchminsky, Naum, 178 Kornfeld, Leonid, 80–81 kosher meat distribution, 8 Kostyrchenko, Gennady, 72, 92, 174 Kosygin, Alexei, 237 Kotlerman, Boris, 133 Kovács, András, 238, 248 Kraków (Poland), city of, 27 Krassó, György, 244 Kraus, František R., 42, 44 Kraus, Tomáš, 42 Kristallnacht (November 1938), commemorated in GDR, 54, 155, 158, 159–160, 170n20; former Nazis participating in, 161; fortieth anniversary of (1978), 168; thirtieth anniversary of (1968), 163, 164 Kruman, Shaia, 80 Krupnik, Igor, 137, 139 Kuczynski, Jürgen, 121, 128n54 Kushkova, Anna, 231, 232n9 Kvitko, Leyb, 76, 180, 184 Landerer, Samuel, 42 Latour, Bruno, 208 Leikina, Elenka, 100–101 Leningrad, city of, 59, 77 Leo Baeck Institute, 49 Leonhard, Rudolf, 124 Lessing, Doris, 183 Levi, Carlo, 183 Levy, Hyman, 181 Lewandowski, Louis, 160 Lidice (Czecho­slo­va­kia), village of, 162

lieux de memoire (sites of memory), 156, 161–164 Life and Fate (Grossman), 174–175 Lifshitz (Lifshitsaite), Nehama, 188, 189 Lithuania, 55 Liubomirsky, Isaiah, 182 Łódź (Poland), city of, 21, 25 Lorand, Cantor Marlon, 160, 164 Lovász, Ferenc, 238 Lovell, Stephen, 222 Löw ben Becalel, R. Jehuda (the Maharal), 49 Lower Silesia, 5, 15, 19, 21, 163; concentration of Polish Jews in, 16; Jewish Committee, 28; productivization in, 22–24; Religious Zionism in, 21–22 Lozovskii, Solomon, 74 luftmensch (impractical person), 22 Lugosi, László, 164 Lurie, Noah, 179 Lutskii, V., 81 Lutwak, Alice, 37, 38 Magyar Zsidó [Hungarian Jew] (samizdat journal), 7, 243–248 Majdanek extermination camp, 19 Maksimowska, Agata, 3, 5 Malakhovka (suburb of Moscow), 3, 232n9; history of, 216–217; Jewish dacha subculture in, 222–231; “refusenik” gatherings near, 219–222; synagogue and Jewish community in, 217–219, 224, 232–233n17 Malenkov, Georgii, 74, 75, 80, 84 Malenkov, Grigory, 92 Markish, Peretz, 180, 182, 184 Markish-­Lazebnikova, Esther, 182 Markovič ­family, 48 Masur, Kurt, 163 Matuška, Waldemar, 44 matzah, 8, 62, 217 Mayer, Hans, 113, 124 melameds ( Judaism teachers), 22, 64 Menorah (German-­speaking Jewish refugee organ­ization), 112 Merker, Paul, 118, 120, 121, 123 Mexico, German Jewish refugees in, 112, 113–114 Meyer, Ernst Hermann, 172n56 Meyer, Hannes, 140 Meyer, Julius, 114, 120 MGB (Soviet Ministry of State Security), 85, 92 Mi­khoels, Solomon, 73, 75, 76, 91, 110n52, 136

Index 265 Mikoyan, Anastas, 186 Miller, Buzi (Boris), 138, 176 mimicry, identity and, 145–146 Minsk, city of, 84 minyan (prayer quorum), 30, 40, 62, 218 Mizrachi Party, 21, 22 modernism, 141 Mogilev-­Podolskii, city of, 59, 63, 68n36; Jewish Community institutions in, 65; Kirov Plant, 60–61, 66 Moldova, 55, 57; Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), 80, 81, 84, 85; remnants of Yiddish culture in, 215 Molotov, Viacheslav, 73, 75, 83, 84 “Moorsoldaten” (German antifascist song, 1930s), 161, 162, 171n28 Moravia, Alberto, 183 Moravia-­Silesia, 35, 36, 40 Morgn-­frayhayt (New York Yiddish newspaper), 178, 179, 182, 183, 185 Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears [Moskva slezam ne verit] (film, 1979), 230 Moscow Guberniya Memorial Books (Pamyatnye knizhki), 216–217 Moykher-­Sforim, Mendele, 189 ­music, Cold War Jewish antifascism and, 158–161 Natan, Simkhe, 19 nationalism, Jewish, 4, 28, 29, 76 nationalism, Ukrainian, 79 nationalities, Czechoslovak, 38 nationalities, Soviet, 75, 84, 85, 132; Doctors’ Plot and, 95, 107, 108; in GDR, 125; Soviet Jews as diaspora nationality, 83 Naumov, Vladimir, 72 Nazis/Nazi Germany, 77, 86, 89n39, 104, 121; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 48; denazification policy in GDR, 113, 126n19; genocide of Eu­ro­pean Jews by, 78, 154, 155; Hungary in war­time alliance with, 246; Israel compared to, 237; Jewish Communists’ flight from, 111, 112; Nuremberg Laws (1941), 111, 161, 246; persecution of Jews and Communists ­under, 115; Soviet POWs tortured and murdered by, 77, 89n37; Soviet role in defeat of, 71; Ukraine occupied by, 83 “Neolog” Jews, 40, 52n22 népi (folkist, ruralist) movement, 242–243, 244, 247–248, 251n39

266

Index

Neues Deutschland [New Germany] (GDR newspaper), 120, 158–159, 167, 168 Neuhaus, Rudolf, 161 Neumann, Abraham, 168 Nezlin (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 Niether, Hendrik, 156 Nixon, Richard, 175 NKVD (­People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), 73, 109n43 Noel Field Affair, 119, 121 “Non-­Jewish Jew, The” (Deutscher), 12 Nora, Pierre, 156 Notowicz, Nathan, 172n56 Novick, Paul (Peysekh), 178–179, 188 Nyushko, Fyodor Kirrilovich, 95–96 October/Rus­sian Revolution (1917), 57, 58, 71 Odessa, city of, 79 Old-­New Synagogue (Prague), 40, 49 Öllős, László, 240 Oneg Shabat group (Hungary), 238 “Open Letter to Hungarian Society and Hungarian Jewry” (SALOM, 1984), 239 oral history, 3, 56, 59, 107, 218 Organ­ization of Victims of the Nazi Regime, 116 ORT (Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews), 23, 32n38 Orthodox Chris­tian­ity, 226 Orthodox Judaism, 36, 37, 45, 124 OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants), 38 Other/Otherness, 145, 146 Ötvös, Attila János, 244 Ovrazhki “refusenik” gatherings, 219–222 Oyslender, Naum (Nokhem), 180–181 OZET (Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land), 141 Pale of Settlement, in Rus­sian Empire, 57, 215, 217 Palestine, 21, 25, 83, 84, 115, 217; founding of Jewish state in, 113; Jewish emigration to, 86 Palestine Liberation Organ­ization, 167 Pappenheim, Bertha, 117 Passover, 62, 64, 133, 136 Pat, Yaacov ( Jacob), 19 Patriotic ­People’s Front (Hungary), 241, 250n32 Peretz, Yitskhok Leybush, 189 Petersburg Judaica Center (Eu­ro­pean University at St. Petersburg), 56, 59

Peysakhovich, Zunya (Semion Petrovich), 97–99 photo ­albums, 3, 35, 49 Pieck, Wilhelm, 114 Poalei Zion, 23, 25, 27 Podolia (Vinnytsa Oblast of Ukraine), Jewish settlement of, 58–59; “illegal” religious and economic activities, 61–63, 68n39; Cooperative Shechita, 63–64; synagogue congregants in, 64–65; traditional forms of social prestige/hierarchy in, 59; transformation of Jewish Community, 65–67 podriads (seasonal matzah bakeries), 62, 63 pogroms, 27, 81, 165; Kielce pogrom (1946), 16, 17, 27, 28, 199; Przytyk pogrom (1936), 158. See also Kristallnacht Poland, 1, 3, 7, 43, 84; anti-­Jewish policies of regime, 2; antisemitic campaign (1968), 29, 207; Border Protection Troops (Wojska Ochrony Pogranicza), 206; co­ali­tion government (1945–1947), 28; collapse of Stalinism in, 30, 197–198; Communism as forcefully imposed foreign import, 18; differences with other Eastern Eu­ro­pean countries, 4; “Exhibition of Regained Lands” (1948), 29; harvest campaign (1945), 26; Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), 206; marginalization/ exoticization of Jewish history in, 9; nationalistic historiography on Communist period, 2; non-­exit migration policy, 197; pogroms in, 16, 17, 27, 28, 158, 199; Second Republic, 18, 19; security ser­vices, 207; Warsaw Yiddish theater, 187. See also Lower Silesia Polevoy, Boris, 178, 183, 188 Polish Jews: antisemitism and, 26; in Bohemian Lands, 38, 49; Communists, 28; concentration in Lower Silesia, 16; in GDR, 157; old and new po­liti­cal culture and, 18–22; Orthodox, 21; productivization and Jewish cooperatives, 22–24; repatriated from Soviet Union, 200–201; in the Soviet Union, 224; “surviving remnant” ­after Holocaust, 15; transnationalism and, 24–26 Polish Jews, migration to Israel, 29, 30, 195–197, 207–208; “­family reunification” discourse and, 198, 199, 204, 205; female perspective on disputed right of return, 200–206; individual agency and, 206–207; male

perspective in ­family discourse about, 197–200; non-­Jewish spouses and, 203–206; reasons ­behind individual decisions to emigrate, 196; special status of, 210n28 Polish Socialist Party, 29 postage stamps, antifascist memorial culture and, 159–160, 171n28 PPR [Polska Partia Robotnicza] (Polish Workers Party), 28, 29 Prague, city of, 35, 36, 38, 40, 50; Fefer and Mi­khoels in, 76; secular Jews in, 44 Prantner, József, 237 Pravda (Soviet newspaper), 91, 92, 93, 105, 139; Birobidzhaner Shtern as copy of, 177 prayer books, 8 Preobrazhensky (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 PROCOR (Society to Assist the Productivization of the Eco­nom­ically Ruined Jewish Masses in the Soviet Union), 141 Przytyk pogrom (Poland, 1936), 158 public sphere, 18 PZPR (Polish United Workers Party), 29 Ra­bino­vich, Semen (Solomon/Shloyme), 178, 179 Rafes, Julian, 95, 96, 105–106 Raj, Rabbi Tamás, 238 Rákosi, Mátyás, 245 Rappoport (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 Ratman, Abram, 27 Ravensbrück concentration camp, 161, 168 Ravensbrück memorial concert (1959), 159, 167 Rebling, Eberhard, 161, 164, 165 Rebling, Jada, 161 Redlich, Shimon, 72, 73 Reform Judaism, 37, 52n22 refusenik milieu, 3, 219–222, 228 Reichenbach (Rychbach), town of, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21 Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964 (Altshuler), 55 “restratification” programs, 22 Riesenburger, Rabbi Martin, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164 Robeson, Paul, 188 Romania, 4, 7, 44, 84, 86; diplomatic relations with Israel, 8, 237; Hungarian minority in, 240–241; marginalization/exoticization of Jewish history in, 9

Index 267 Romani ­people, 7 Romanova, Elena, 183 Romm, Mokhail, 174 Roo­se­velt, Eleanor, 161 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 156 Rosenblüth, Leo, 168 Rosenzweig, Franz, 237 Rosh Hashanah, 136 Rothschild, Recha, 117 Rubenstein, Joshua, 106 Rus­sia, 95, 107 Rus­sian archives, opening of, 72 Rus­sian language, 56, 137, 138, 143, 144–145, 187 Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 161, 162, 167, 168 Salamon, Ervin, 163 Salgo, Laszlo, 168 Salisbury, Harrison E., 177 Salnikov, Nikolai Evgenievich, 102 Salogor, Nikita, 80 SALOM group (Hungary), 7, 237–243, 244, 245, 248 Sandler, Boris, 188 “S’brent” [It Is Burning] (Gebirtnik song), 158, 164 Scheiber, Sándor, 238 Schneiderman, Shmuel Leyb (Samuel Leib), 19, 23 Schramm, Katharina, 39 Scott, James, 141 SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands] (Socialist Unity Party), 114, 116, 117, 124; antisemitism and, 121, 123; ZPKK (Central Party Control Commission), 117, 118. See also GDR [German Demo­cratic Republic] (East Germany) SEFER Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization (Moscow), 56, 59 Seghers, Anna, 112, 114, 124, 164 Selbiger, Fritz, 115 Shapiro, Fedya, 96 Shapiro, Moisei, 93 Shcherbakov, Aleksandr, 74, 80, 92 Shereshevsky (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 Shilman, Berta, 136 Shkiriatov, Matvei, 76 Shmeruk (Szmeruk), Chone, 181 Shneer, David, 1, 7, 8, 121, 123, 145 Shoah. See Holocaust/Shoah

268

Index

shochet (kosher butcher), 8, 27, 63, 218 Shoshkes, Chaim (Henry), 182, 184 Shternberg, Yakov, 182 Shternshis, Anna, 1, 3, 43, 57, 134 Shtetl, the 21st ­Century (edited collection), 59 shtetls, former, 55, 57, 58, 63, 66, 225 Shul’man, Evgenii, 100, 101 Shul’man, Gennady, 101–102 Shulshteyn, Moshe, 19, 23 Siberia, 92, 93 Sicher, Chief Rabbi Gustav, 43 Silber, Marcos, 7 Simchat Torah festival, 181, 220 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 187 Singer, Ödön, 164, 172n50 Six-­Day War (1967), 43, 138, 237, 239, 249 Skriabin, Konstantin, 100, 101, 109n33 Slánský, Rudolf, show trial of (1952), 41, 42, 47; GDR and, 119, 120, 121, 122, 153 Šlitr, Jiří, 44 Sloterdijk, Peter, 145 Slovakia, 39, 45, 48, 240 Slovak Jews, 35, 49 Sloves, Chaim (Henry), 178, 182 sociology, relational, 229 Sovetish heymland [Soviet Homeland] (Yiddish journal), 136, 189 Soviet Jews, 54–56, 86–87; “Accented Jews,” 145; as “community of fate,” 132; derogatory terms for, 142, 149n59; disenchantment of, 71; “fifth point” and discrimination against, 174–175; foreign connections seen as alarming by Soviet state, 83–86; as “Jews of Silence,” 55; lishenets status (stripped of civil rights), 217; “Odessan humor,” 145 Soviet Union (USSR), 1, 25, 44; antisemitism opposed in interwar period, 78–82; blat (connections), 223, 229, 235n76; changing socioeconomic structure of Jewish society in, 56–58; Communist holidays, 135; deportations of minorities, 92; eugenics in, 140–141; Far East, 5–6; former shtetls on territory of, 55, 57, 58, 63, 66; German invasion of (1941), 58; ­Great Terror, 83; “internationalism” of, 139, 143; Jewish emigration from, 15, 87n2; NEP (New Economic Policy), 57; perestroika era, 62, 65; Politburo, 78; “publics of svoi” in, 228, 230, 231, 235n71; repatriation from Czecho­slo­va­kia to, 38, 51n11; repatriation of

Polish Jews from, 21; “shadow” economy of, 55, 60, 66, 67; SMERSH (Death to Spies Department), 97, 109n27; territorial expansion of, 78–79; World War II victory of, 106. See also Birobidzhan; Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR); Malakhovka Soviet Writers Union, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183; Vergelis as Yiddish frontman at, 185; Yiddish publishing and, 189 Sovinformburo (Soviet Information Bureau), 74, 75, 76, 178, 179 Spartacus League [Spartakusbund] (German socialist group, 1914–1918), 117, 128n49 Spiró, Győrgy, 247 Sputnik tret’ego festivalia evreiskoi pesni (Companion to the Third Festival Song), 220 Srebnik, Henry, 167 Stalin, Joseph, 2, 80, 84, 181; death of, 30, 71, 106, 133; Doctors’ Plot and, 71, 91, 106; evolution of antisemitism and, 72, 83; ­Great Purges of, 124, 133, 217 Stalinism, 4, 8, 16, 29, 60, 82; antisemitic campaigns and, 223; collapse of, 197–198; de-­Stalinization, 136; fears of betrayal by Soviet Jews, 87; in Hungary, 245, 246; purges and, 176; regime on brink of collapse in World War II, 78 Stasi (East German security/intelligence ser­vice), 124 State Yiddish Theater (Warsaw), 158 Steinberger, Nathan, 124 ste­reo­types, 82, 143, 245 Strauss, Richard, 161 Studená, Věra Herškovič, 45, 53n42 Suchý, Jiří, 44 Suller, Chaim, 180, 182 summer camps, international, 8 Surkov, Aleksei, 182, 188 Suslov, Mikhail, 85, 181–182, 186 Świątkowski, Henryk, 200 synagogues, 5, 21, 169; in Birobidzhan, 133, 134; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 40, 41, 45; destroyed ­under Nazi regime, 44; Dohány Street Synagogue (Budapest), 163–164; in Dzierżoniów, 22; Leningrad Synagogue, 181; in Malakhovka, 217–219; Moscow Choral Synagogue, 220, 221; in the Soviet Union, 55, 60, 62, 64–65 Szabó, Miklós, 236, 240 Szántó, Gábor, 244

Talmud, 60 Talmud Torah, 65 Teleisin, Zinovy (Ziama), 181 Tenenbaum, Joseph, 19 Tenner, Günter, 119 Teplice, city of, 41, 46 Thaw, post-­Stalinist, 30, 197, 219 Thayer, Robert H., 175 Theresienstadt/Terezín concentration camp, 7, 46–47, 162 “thin and thick cultures,” 56, 57, 216 Timashuk, Lydia, 91–92, 93, 94, 105 Timm, Angelika, 116 Timofeevna, Mariia, 105 Tkachev report (1950), 84–85 Torah, 63, 66, 134, 218–219 Torah Va’Avodah (Torah [Study] and ­Labor), 21 Toronto ­Labour League, 165 “totalitarianism,” 18 transnationalism, 7–9, 15, 24–26 Transnistria, 58–59, 79 Treblinka extermination camp, 19 Triolet, Elsa, 183 “Trotskyists,” 119 Tsanin, Mordechai, 189 Tsipkin, Boris, 93 TSKŻ [Towarzystwo Spoleczno Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce] ( Jewish Socio-­Cultural Association), 30, 43 Turkey, 84 Turkow, Jonas, 27 Tushunov, A., 85 UJPO (United Jewish ­People’s Order), 165, 173n62 Ukraine, 55, 57, 63, 95; alternative medicine and legacy of Doctors’ Plot in, 107; antisemitism in, 79–80; Communist Party of, 73; Jewish agricultural colonies in, 89n39; Nikolaev Medical Research Institute, 97; NKGB of Ukrainian SSR, 79, 80; remnants of Yiddish culture in, 215; southwestern Podolia, 58–66; Ukrainian SSR, 83. See also Podolia Ulbricht, Walter, 118, 124 United Kingdom (UK), 84, 85, 86 United Nations (UN), 23, 237; Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 39, 84, 89n59

Index 269 United States, 9, 24, 54, 84, 154; decline of antisemitism in, 155; emigration of Polish Jews to, 196; House Un-­American Activities Committee, 126n16; Jewish relatives in, 45; Rebling ­family tour in, 166–167, 168; socialist and liberal Jewish press in, 29; State Department, 118; US intelligence agents/ser­vices, 85, 90n66, 90n71, 91, 92; Workmen’s Circle activists in, 185 urbánus (urban, internationalist) movement, 243, 247–248, 251n39 USO (United Ser­vices Organ­ization), 166 Ústí nad Labem (Czecho­slo­va­kia), city of, 36, 37, 41, 42, 45, 46, 50 Vail’, Petr, 219 Valter, Naum, 189 Vanis­hing Diaspora (Wasserstein, 1996), 35 Veidlinger, Jeffrey, 1, 55, 56, 92; on assimilated Soviet Jewish intelligent­sia, 215; on Jews of USSR as diaspora nationality, 83 Vergelis, Aron, 180, 182, 183, 185–186, 188, 189–190 Věstník židovské náboženské obce v Praze [Bulletin of the Jewish Community in Prague] (journal), 47, 48, 50 Vinogradov, Vladimir, 92 Vladimirski, Boris, 189 vnye (outside), 228 Vovsi, Miron, 91, 106, 110n52 Vyshinskii, Andrei, 85 Vysotsky, Vladimir, 215, 224 Wagner, Richard, 161 Waitz, Robert, 88n31 Wallenberg, Raoul, 241, 242 Warsaw Ghetto, 19, 199 Warsaw Ghetto uprising commemorations, 159, 166, 169, 171n24 Wasserstein, Bernard, 35 Weinberg, Robert, 131 Wendroff, Zalman, 179–180 Western Jewish institutions, 29 White, Harrison, 229–230 Winter, Jack, 165 Winter, Lotte Fleischhacker, 111, 124 WKŻP [Wojewódzki Komitet Żydów Polskich] (Voivodship Committee of Polish Jews), 16–17, 23, 26; transnationalism and, 24; Zionists purged from, 29

270

Index

Workers International Relief, 111 World and American Federation of Polish Jews, 19 World Jewish Congress, 29, 83, 243 World War II, 7, 8, 9, 49, 77, 164; as fight between fascism and antifascism, 246; Hungarian Jews saved during, 241; as legitimizing event for Soviet statehood, 71; Romanian occupation zone in Ukraine, 58. See also Communist Party, Soviet; ­Great Patriotic War, Soviet Wroclaw (Poland), city of, 25, 29 Yekelchyk, Serhy, 174 Yiddish culture/language, 4, 6, 25, 29; Aleichem and, 185–190; antifascism and, 7, 8; antifascist concerts, 159, 161–162; Birobidzhan and, 133, 136–139, 144–145, 176; cultural diplomacy, 8; cultural diplomacy and, 175; in Czecho­slo­va­kia, 41, 47; fieldwork interviews in Yiddish, 56; folk ­music, 167; in GDR, 157, 158–159, 168; German Jewish Communists and, 123; last native speakers, 55; literacy in, 57; newspapers, 19; in Poland, 155; in Romania, 155; songs, 158; Soviet policy on lit­er­a­ture, 179–186; in the Soviet Union, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 175; theater, 19, 182

YKUF (Argentinian Jewish Cultural Association), 183 Yom Kippur, 62, 133, 134, 135, 218 Yugo­slavia, 4, 8, 9, 43, 44 Yurchak, Alexei, 145, 216, 228, 235n72 Yuzefovich, Eleazar, 222 Zawadzki, Stanislaw, 203 Zelenin (accused in Doctors’ Plot), 93 Zelenina, Galina, 3 Zeltzer, Arkady, 1, 55, 60 Zhdanov, Andrei, 76, 91–92 Zionism, 4, 6, 24, 120, 168, 227; as code word used by Soviet media, 92; Communist opposition to, 28, 72, 79, 85, 138, 238; Doctors’ Plot and, 91; German Jews’ support of, 155; “Gordonia” organ­ization, 84–85; Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, 21; Left Zionism, 4, 23; migration policy and, 201, 202; “refuseniks” and, 220; Religious Zionist movements, 21–22; secular, 22; Soviet official discourse on, 55. See also Israel, State of “Zog nit keymol” [Never Say] (Glik song), 158 Zorin, Valerian, 85 Zuckermann, Leo, 112, 113–114, 121, 128n59 Zweig, Arnold, 121, 124 Zylberberg, Bezalel Moshe, 27