At the recent national conference in Moscow of the Vaad, the federation of Soviet Jewish organizations, delegates expected to deal with the almost routine matters of organizational structure after last year’s historic first conference.
But as Soviet troops threatened to open fire again in the Baltic states and Iraqi missiles fell on Israel, those attending the Jan. 21-25 conference found themselves vainly trying to predict their future as Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union.
Some of the delegates from the three Baltic states — where almost 30,000 Jews live — did not attend the conference, fearing further military action in Riga and Vilnius.
Other delegates left the conference early to change their large-denomination ruble notes before the new Soviet policy banning the currency took effect.
According to reports from American Jewish observers attending the conference, along with those monitoring the Vaad from the United States, the Soviet Union’s apparent fall from its much-touted democratic reforms reaffirmed for many the belief that the Soviet Union is no place for Jews.
“We have no way of predicting even what will happen in the next seven minutes,” said Pamela Cohen, national president of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, who received reports from delegates.
“I think it would be pretentious for any organization to ignore the possibility of a sweeping catastrophe,” she said.
LONG LINES AT CONSULATE
This view, reflected by some of the delegates to the loosely organized Vaad, was borne out by the still-long lines of hopeful emigrants snaking around the newly opened Israeli Consulate in Moscow, despite the missiles landing in Tel Aviv almost nightly, said Kalman Sultanik, who attended the conference as vice president of the World Jewish Congress.
But despite the tension of local and world events, the conference’s more than 1,000 delegates, representing close to 400 organizations from 78 different cities across the Soviet Union’s vast territory, tried to hammer out the vision and the structure of the Vaad in the best loud and lively Jewish tradition.
“It was chaos,” remarked one person monitoring the conference from New York, who asked not to be identified. “But it showed that Jewish politics are going on alive and well in the Soviet Union.”
One reason for the friendly chaos was the conference’s attempt to draw out a single Vaad vision from the varying views reflected by the group’s three co-presidents: Michael Chlenov from Moscow, Samuel Zilberg from Riga and Yosef Zissels, from Chernovtsy (Chernovitz) in the Ukraine.
All agreed on one thing: that the most important issue facing the Jewish community is the facilitation and continuation of the massive exodus now under way, and the need to preserve the freedom of emigration.
But from that point they diverged on the issue of what future, if any, the Soviet Union holds for Jews and thus, what role, if any, the Vaad should play in maintaining and developing Jewish communal life.
The ongoing events around them only added to the uncertainty, observers said.
At the conference’s end a decision was made to keep the Vaad as it was, a sort of federation ceding autonomy to local communities and retaining control over issues affecting the whole Jewish community.
A SPLIT OVER THE FUTURE
Still, this did not eradicate one of the central issues of disagreement among the three co-presidents: the Soviet Union’s ability to provide a safe and free haven for Jews, where they can develop as free Soviet citizens and Jews, observers said.
Sultanik and other said Chlenov’s view — that a Jewish community will always remain and that therefore an organized Jewish structure is needed for maintenance and development — was at gentle odds with the thinking of Zilberg and Zissels.
Both these men believe there is no future for a Jewish community in the Soviet Union and that all efforts must be oriented toward emigration, although Zissels thinks Jewish educational programs should be organized to help decrease assimilation.
“The camps are split,” said Martin Wenick, national director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.
“But regardless of your rate of emigration, with the number of Jews in the Soviet Union, there will be Jews there for the next 15 to 20 years,” he said.
Estimates of the Jewish population run between 3 million and 7 million, while at least 1 million have already applied to emigrate, and 200,000 arrived in Israel last year.
“On the other hand, it’s a very unstable period in the Soviet Union, and in the face of the potential for all sorts of problems, including interethnic conflicts, one would feel the Jewish community in the Soviet Union continues to be one that remains at risk,” Wenick said.
Still, there were some positive signs amid the resurgent hard-line attitude of Soviet authorities, observers said.
‘WILL THE DOORS CLOSE?’
The Vaad is yet to be officially recognized, but an exchange of letters between the co-presidents and Soviet officials is thought to amount to tacit recognition, said Sultanik.
New York state Attorney General Robert Abrams, who attended the conference and gave the Raoul Wallenberg Address, said he was over-whelmed by the “flowering of Jewish cultural life, the Hebrew day schools, cultural centers, the Israeli flag proudly lofted (at the Israeli Consulate) and blowing in the wind.”
But Abrams, who spent nine days in the Soviet Union, added that “hovering over this is uncertainty. Will the doors close? Will this all suddenly come to an end?”
These questions “leave the continued mission of Jews around the world to continue to be vigilant and to be supportive of Soviet Jewry, and to keep the maximum amount of pressure on the Soviet government to ensure that all that has been done in the last couple of years will continue in the future,” he added.
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.
