Do you want to know why the campaign for Soviet Jewry has gone to bed, slumbering away in indifference and apathy? Does the question of why Jewish activists appear to be no longer in the news ever cross your mind? Do you and your friends sometimes say to each other: Why is it that the JDL is so quiet lately? Good questions that deserve a good answer.
If you want to know where all the activists have gone, you might try thinking about a trial in Federal Court that is due to begin around the middle of February. Three young Jewish activists are going on trial then. They represent tens of others who have been harassed, followed, framed and tried by the government of the United States, whose debt to the drive for coexistence with the Soviet Union extends to using all means to crush the only people who pose a genuine threat to détente. And so the orders went out a long time ago from the firm of Mitchell, Kleindienst and partners to “get” the JDL, its leadership and its activists. And if that does not bother you, then think of it in these terms:
When they “get” the activists, the ones who will suffer most – far more than the youngsters and their families – will be the Soviet Jews for whom so much was done by the militants. They may “get” the activists, but they also strike a body blow at the drive for freedom on the part of Soviet Jewry.
Our memories are so short. We forget so rapidly how things once were. All the rich UJA leaders who are now able to greet 300 Soviet Jews on one plane at Lydda airport: do they – and do you – remember when it took one YEAR for that number to arrive? All the rabbis who are now in the “forefront” of the struggle: do they – and do you – remember the deafening silence and lip service – at best – of our pulpits? All the signs that now sprout in front of Chicago synagogues and the ADL office on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan: do they – and do you – remember the decades and decades when no one spoke about Soviet Jewry, or at best paid homage to the problem with once-and-twice-a-year formal banalities? Do we remember the days when there was just a trickle of emigrants and when the Russians laughed at the protests because they were so few and ineffective? And are we capable of understanding what brought about the miracle, the great difference today? Are we able to realize what makes the difference between 300 Jews a year and the 34,000 that arrived last year alone?
The difference is those three youngsters who are on trial in Federal Court on trumped-up charges of bombing the office of one of the most ignoble and infamous Jews of them all – millionaire Sol Hurok, whose contribution to the drive for Soviet Jewry was to make money for himself by bringing over Soviet cultural propaganda. It was those three young people and hundreds like them who spit in the eye of the Russians and who ignored the frantic protests of the Jewish Establishment Golem. They broke the silence, they smashed the barricades, they beat up Russians and attacked their offices – but they did not have anything to do with the attack on hapless Sol Hurok’s office. They – not the rabbis and “leaders” and organizations who never spent a day or a minute in court; who never risked their skins or energies for their brothers and sisters in the USSR – broke the dam and started the wave of emigration.
And they did it in the one way – the only way – that it could have been done: by risking their careers and future, by risking the trumped-up charges of a government that places friendship with the Soviets over truth or the lives of three young Jews.
Where are all the militants? Some are in jail; some are on tough probation; some, like the Hurok three, face sentences of 25 years in federal prison. Where are all the militants? They are the targets of the federal government which understands far better than all the Golemcrats of the Jewish Establishment, just who are the really effective fighters against the Soviets. They are the targets of the apathy, indifference and impotence of the Jewish community, which never shows interest in a trial of militants whose names are not spelled A-N-G-E-L-A.
Do you know what is happening? The militants are being destroyed by the powerful forces of the government. Those who are left are afraid of doing things in the knowledge that no one among the Jews for whom they fight will lift a finger for them. New, potential activists are frightened away at the news of courtroom trials and sentences. And so, soon there will be no militants, no activists, no JDL worthy of the name and all the nice Jews will be happy; no vigilantes to upset law and order – and no one to protect Jewish neighborhoods; no disgusting, irresponsibly loud and vulgar assaulters of Soviet property – and no meaningful opposition to the Soviet tyranny; no one to disturb our peace of mind by talking about the danger and reality of anti-Semitism – and so we can go to sleep, soundly and perhaps permanently.
Stuart Cohen, Sheldon Davis, Sheldon Siegel – three activists guilty of a great deal of harassment of the Soviets; guilty of caring about Jews so much that they have done the kinds of things all of us should have done, had we had the courage; guilty of loving Jews and being forgotten by them; guilty of all these, but innocent of the absurd and vicious charges levelled by the Kleindienstites. Will they be found guilty and will they go to jail for twenty-five years or fifteen or ten? The answer, in large measure, depends upon you. They need money, these Jewish boys, YOUR BOYS. They need money for lawyers, good ones. As good as Angela’s and Huey’s and Abbie’s. They need money for investigations and transcripts and all kinds of things your children will never know about. And children about whom the Soviet Jews will never know, either.
Will these words help? I doubt it. In the end, we do not really care and we destroy those who – alone – could help us. The result is that we are repaid measure for measure. We destroy those who might have saved us and the disaster follows as night does day. Stuart Cohen, Sheldon Davis and Sheldon Siegel: three Jewish militants. Jew: you who read this, can you spare a dollar? They gave a great deal more.
14 Adar 5733 – February 16, 1973