Special Interview the Plight of Soviet Refuseniks

The new national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal boarded a plane in Moscow September 4 and returned to the United States. His hosts were unable to book a similar ticket.

Martin Stein of Milwaukee had spent the week visiting 36 Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate. Through his Yiddish, a companion’s Hebrew and the English spoken by many of the refuseniks, Stein heard stories and witnessed events he thought rich in hope and courage.

"You talk to these people, and they laugh and they joke and they talk about someday going to Israel," Stein said, expressing admiration for their "faith that they’re going to make it and the dedication and the community spirit."

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REFUSENIKS

In a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stein recalled some of his encounters, both tragic and inspiring. Many of the refuseniks, but especially Vladimir and Maria Slepak, prove Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev erred when he said no Soviet Jews had refusenik status for more than five years, according to Stein.

He said Maria told him: "We’ve been in refusal now for 17 years… We’re now 60 years old. I don’t know if we’ve got 17 more years to wait."

Tanya Edelshtein also is waiting. Her husband Yuli is serving a three-year prison sentence for illegal possession of drugs, which they claim were planted on him.

Yuli, 45, is ill with kidney complications from an operation on his urethra following an accident at his labor camp. Last year, he broke a femur in another accident and requires physiotherapy on the healed leg, now two centimeters shorter than the other.

Tanya also is worried that the log-splitting and carrying of rough timber assigned to Yuli when he’s well will damage his hands so that he’ll never again be able to perform surgery.

‘NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM’

In another household, Stein met a young girl whose father also is imprisoned. Arriving home from the first day of school, where she had sat silently through the traditional Peace Day anti-American, anti-Zionist lessons, she ripped her red bandana from her neck, "threw it on the ground and stopped on it," Stein said.

At her guests’ request, she made a drawing of the choice. It was of Israel, with "Next Year in Jerusalem" and her families’ names written in Hebrew.

A man told Stein that he began to practice Jewish ritual late in life. His son, who wears side locks and a prayer shawl beneath his clothing, was ritually circumcised 10 years ago at age eight. The procedure took place in the only Jewish apartment in a complex, Stein related, so the boy was told he must not scream. The boy cried, but silently.

When his father asked how he stifled his screams, the boy replied, "When the pain got so it was unbearable, I looked up to the heavens, and I said ‘Sh’mah Yisroel,’ and the pain went away."

Stein met the father at a glatt kosher Sabbath dinner hosted by another refusenik. "We had soup and we had meat and we sang songs… (The host) was a Lubavitcher guy. You would have thought that you were in Crown Heights (N.Y.)," said Stein. "There were pictures of the rebbe around, and there was a Torah in the other room, and they davened every day three times a day in that house."

MESSAGE TO AMERICAN JEWS

The refuseniks advised him that the West could help them by applying economic pressures and embarrassing the Soviet leadership. The refuseniks were not enthusiastic about the recent meeting between Soviet and Israeli delegations, considering it "a real estate deal."

Their message to American Jews was "Not to forget them, and that we’re their only hope. We’re the people that can make the difference for them," Stein reported.

UJA is participating in a national Jewish effort coordinated by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. A petition urging President Reagan "to continue to insist that human rights remains a key issue of East-West relations" will be circulated in the hopes of gaining one million signatures.

And people are being asked to come to Washington to demonstrate on behalf of human rights issues including Jewish emigration during the Gorbachev-Reagan summit there in November.

Stein was UJA national chairman for Operation Moses, which raised $63 million from November 1984-March 1985 for Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel. He said the plight of the Soviet Jews merits the same degree of attention.

"Although it’s different, because people aren’t starving, it is, I believe, as essential, because of the numbers," he said.

About 2.5 million Jews live in the Soviet Union and 400,000 are thought to want to emigrate. Jewish emigration was 896 in 1984, 1,140 last year and is 505 in 1986 through August.