Special Interview the Plight of Soviet Jewry

A Westchester Jewish businessman and activist has returned from a brief visit to the Soviet Union, during which he managed to meet personally with some 20 Jewish refuseniks, with the conviction that their situation was hopeless, a conviction he said would spur him to even greater efforts to try to help get them out of the USSR.

Leonard Kesten of Bedford, N.Y. described his visit and his concern for the future of the Jewish refuseniks in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, expressing the fear that they could be in physical danger. He said he went to the Soviet Union as a member of a group of seven tourists, which included his wife, another couple, a single woman and two young American Jews.

Kesten, 49, who was on a commercially-organized tour, was not simply a visitor in search of new tourist experiences. He is well-informed and has a solid background on the status and problems of Soviet Jewry through his work in HIAS of which he is a board member; the United Jewish Appeal in which he is very active; and through other American Jewish organizations.

But he stressed to the JTA that he had not made his visit to the Soviet Union as a representative of any American Jewish organization, though he and other members of his group brought with them names and addresses of refuseniks because they wanted to talk to some.

Kesten said he was convinced that he and the other American Jewish visitors were under constant surveillance by the KGB. He said that while the refuseniks he and the other American Jewish visitors met and talked to showed no signs of fear about such meetings, both the refuseniks and Soviet Jews he saw, but did not meet directly, occasionally showed signs of paranoia which he come to feel was amply justified.

A TYPICAL EXPERIENCE

He said he and other Jews in his group met with about 20 refuseniks in Leningrad and about 30 in Moscow. He said it was a typical experience to meet Russian Jews, both young and old, who had immediately lost their jobs when they applied for emigration to Israel. In a society in which government is the sole employer, a substitute source of income is a severe problem, he observed.

Kesten said that, after two days in Leningrad, the Americans proceeded to Moscow where they remained until they left the Soviet Union on October 10.

Kesten said the refuseniks repeatedly asked the American visitors what help American Jewry could provide them to enable them to live as Jews in the USSR. He said that the frequency of that appeal left him with the impression that the refuseniks had reluctantly accepted the conclusion they would probably never be allowed to emigrate.

Kesten related that impression to the drastic drop of a peak of 50,000 emigrating Jews in 1979 to around 250 in September. Kesten’s group was the first to visit the Soviet Union to learn about the impact of that drastic drop in emigration rates and emigration hopes of Russian Jews who had planned to leave.

On a visit to the apartment of one of the refuseniks, Kesten related, three other young refuseniks came to the apartment to meet the Jewish visitors from America. Each time one of the visiting refuseniks rang the doorbell for admittance, such was the paranoia of the host couple that “their heads just spun around,” Kesten said.

He said “it was like viewing a movie film about the 1930s; one would think of what had happened in Germany, every time there was a knock on the door or the doorbell rang” in that apartment.

Kesten, who is also a member of the Board of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the visitors encountered many moving experiences. One involved a visit to the Moscow home of a refusenik denied emigration 10 years previously.

The refusenik had a map of Israel on a wall of his apartment, which he indicated to his visitors was the closest he ever expected to get to Israel. Kesten said that meeting took place on a Saturday and that he and his wife expected to be enroute Monday to Israel.

He said it was “a very tough feeling” to know their host would probably never get there. But, when the Kestens told him about their pending visit to Israel, it appeared “comforting for him to know that here were two Jews in his apartment who in two days were going to be in Israel.”

A ‘CATCH-22’ SITUATION

Kesten said he agreed with the viewpoint of concerned Jews that it was as much a duty of world Jewry to try to make it possible for Russian Jews who could not or did not want to leave the Soviet Union to be permitted to live freely as Jews, as it was to try to get those out who wanted to leave.

Asked whether his experiences had left him with a feeling that Soviet Jews could neither leave as Jews nor live as Jews, Kesten responded “that’s correct.” He said it was a “catch-22 situation.” He said the refuseniks asked the American Jewish visitors for help “in the sense that if a husband or breadwinner is incarcerated, they need help to get an attorney, or help to support the family while the father is incarcerated.” He added, sadly, “they don’t know how we can actually help them.”

Asked if he and his fellow-visitors found any evidence to support any possibility that the Jews forbidden emigration can live freely as Jews in the USSR, Kesten replied “the young Jews we talked to don’t think so.”

‘HEROES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE’

Kesten said that while he and his fellow visitors had talked only to refuseniks, he had the impression that the majority of Russian Jews followed a policy of “keeping a low profile; they don’t make waves.” Nevertheless, he added, despite the harassment visited on the refuseniks, there is a minority who are “in the forefront of continuing with Jewish education, with teaching their children Jewishness,” despite formidable difficulties.

He expressed astonishment that, with all the abuse that their elders — the Russian Jews in their late 60’s or early 70’s — have known, there are still Jews now, in their 20’s and 30’s, who are starting to subject themselves to the role of behaving as Jews, “knowing that they are going to be harassed and knowing that they are going to be outcasts in their own society” and yet are willing to “pop up and are willing to associate with and be involved with a Jewish movement.”

Kesten called such young Russian Jews “heroes of the Jewish people who, for whatever reasons, are standing up to be counted with the Jews of the world.”

He said he had returned home more than ever determined to extend and strengthen Jewish efforts here for Soviet Jews. He said he had learned from his work for Jewish causes that there are Jews active in the UJA and the Federations who are highly philanthropic but that they do not “truly understand the complexities of the organization and what the end product is and the people the organization does touch.”

He said such American Jews have heard about Soviet Jews, they have heard about refuseniks, but “it’s been words and newspaper accounts” and “it has not really touched them.” He said he was convinced that he had touched them because, he said, when he spoke to 300 Jews recently at a UJA inaugural campaign in Westchester, he asked his listeners to prepare postcards addressed to Secretary of State George Shultz, on behalf of Anatoly Shcharansky, who is being force-fed during a hunger strike he started last Yam Kippur to protest his incarceration in Chistipol prison near Moscow.

Kesten said 205 members of his audience filled out the cards, which he collected on the spot, stamped and mailed to Shultz.