Anatoly Sharansky lingers in his Moscow prison cell, but plans are going ahead here for a major demonstration calling for his release and condemning the charges of espionage leveled against him in the Soviet press.
Organized under the auspices of the National Council for Soviet Jewry, it will be supported by a host of other Jewish bodies, illustrating the community’s overall solidarity with its brethren in the USSR.
Nevertheless, Sharansky’s case has revived a long-standing debate with the campaign here as to how closely it should associate with the general human rights struggle in the USSR. This is partly because Sharansky himself had a foot in both camps. Besides being an aliya activist, he was a member of the Moscow Human Rights Committee to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki agreements.
The controversy was sparked when the Women’s 35 Group, Anglo-Jewry’s most effective campaigners, issued a statement on Sharansky which was also signed by Vladimir Bukovsky and Ludmilla Alexeyeva, two prominent exiled Soviet democrats.
SAYS IT WILL CONFUSE THE ISSUE
This earned the displeasure of establishment circles who fear that involvement with other movements in the Soviet Union will weaken rather than strengthen the Jewish struggle. “It will confuse the issue,” said Alan Gold, director of the National Council for Soviet Jewry, to which, incidentally, the 35 Group belongs.
An Israeli, working here on behalf of Soviet Jewry, said the most important factor was the immediate effect on Sharansky himself. The Soviet authorities had learned to live with the issue of Jewish emigration to Israel, but it was much harder for them to swallow direct challenges to the nature of their regime, he added.
The 35 Group is reluctant to enter a verbal controversy. Nevertheless, Doreen Gainsford, their leader, said they did not regret the joint statement with Bukovsky and Alexeyeva. They believed it was a good statement and would do it again, she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
MUST NOT REJECT NON-JEWISH HELP
Michael Sherbourne, one of the main British telephone contacts with Soviet Jews, backs the 35 Group to the hilt. He told fellow activists last week, “We must not reject the help of some of Sharansky’s closet friends even though they are not Jews and are not concerned solely, as we are with the question of Jewish emigration from the USSR.”
Sherbourne added that Vladimir Bukovsky, before his expulsion, was an ardent advocate of the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate freely. It was Bukovsky, he recalled, who organized a relay of couriers to convey instant news from the courtroom of the first Leningrad trial in December, 1970 and later helped to organize a series of telephone contacts with the West.
According to another local expert, the information provided by Bukovsky played a major part in the Kremlin’s decision to commute the death penalty pronounced on Eduard Kuznetsov.
Colin Shindler, who first began campaigning for Soviet Jewry here while still a student in the mid-1960, recalled that an appeal by Bukovsky first drew the attention of Western psychiatrists to the internment of Jewish democrats in mental institutions. Soviet Jews, he said, had reciprocated by demonstrating outside the courtroom during Bukovsky’s own trial.
CRITICIZES LACK OF SUPPORT
Like Sherbourne, Shindler is deeply critical of the Jewish establishment’s lack of public support for Andrei Sakharov, despite all he has done for the Jewish people. He said the establishment also ignored the exiled Ukrainian dissident, Leonid Plyusch, when he came to London last year. Plyusch, he said, had stood outside the Kiev court during the trial of Boris Kochubiyevsky, one of the bravest and first Jewish activists after the Six-Day War, and informed friends in Moscow about Kochubiyevsky’s fate.
Shindler attributes this caution partly to the influence of the Israel government in discouraging actions which smack of interference in internal Soviet political affairs. He and other critics of Israeli officialdom say they realize, too, that the debate on links with the wider Soviet human rights struggle might be exploited by Soviet propagandists if it went too far. Nevertheless, they note, it is basically a difference only on tactics and not on strategy and a sign of the strength, rather than weakness, of solidarity with Jews in the USSR.
One activist quoted from Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
