Last Exit NOT to Brooklyn

During the 1970s and 1980s an international campaign was waged to "free" Soviet Jewry. Although previous campaigns by Jewish students and others had supported the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union to cultural expression and freedom from persecution, the new campaign focused on the right to leave the Soviet Union. Campaigners widely used the Biblical-derived slogan "Let My People Go!", and it became increasingly clear that the Jews who made this Exodus were expected to head for Israel.
Various groups and tactics were engaged in this campaign, from social fundraising, and lobbying political leaders to harassment of Soviet cultural tours and even (in the United States) terrorism. Not all those involved realised let alone questioned the politics in the background.

The campaign did succeed in bringing large numbers of Soviet Jews to Israel, not all of whom bcame willing right-wing settlers, and many of whom though welcoming political freedom found the Zionist state far from being a Land of Milk and Honey, or the standards of welfare and social justice they had hoped for. Others have made it to the traditional 'Goldiner Medina' in the United States, or even settled in, of all places, Berlin.

Meanwhile the campaign also led to such unpleasant sights - insofar as people have able or willing to see them - as Russian Jews being forced on to an Israel-bound plabe at Schipol, Amsterdam, some of them in handcuffs (so much for Zionist freedom); or of Russian-origin neo-Nazi skinheads,their parents having presumably posed as Jews, roaming  streets in Petah Tikvah and other places in Israel, assaulting Jews and Muslims.
 
The Soviet Jewry campaign has passed into history, and so has the Soviet Union - some like to think their activity in the former contributed to the latter's demise. This article from 1990, critically looking at an aspect of the campaign, is one I am now adding to my collection of Historical Passages.

Towards the end of 1988, it became apparent that the United States government was no longer assuring Soviet Jews refugee status and therefore settlement rights in the US, though it was still pressing the USSR to grant more exit visas. Some officials cited budget difficulties; others pointed to human rights improvements in the USSR to argue there was no longer a "well-founded fear of persecution" .

According to Philip Saperia of the long-established Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (BIAS): 'The policy is causing panic in the Soviet Jewish community here in the US and in the Soviet Union" (Guardian 7 December 1988). The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews claim that ~hundreds of Soviet Jews" had been denied refugee status in the past few months, and threatened that the issue would be an embarrassment for the incoming Bush administration.

In recent months, we have seen a spate of publicity given to Russian antisemitic organisations like Pamyat with its threats of pogroms. Some Jewish publicists affect to see escalating antisemitism even in parts of the Soviet Union where it has never existed,and claim widespread murders of Jews have begun. It would be dangerous to play down the threat of Russian fascism and Black Hundredism - and Jewish Socialist was one of the first publications to expose Pamyat. Of course, even if the threat is as serious as made out or genuinely feared (despite the racists' failure in the last election, though things could look different if the economic depression continues to worsen), our answers might still be different.

Present fundraising efforts emphasise panic and flight - in effect, telling Russian Jews they have no future in the country where they have lived for centuries, and for which they made sacrifices and shed blood, and tapping powerful emotional springs in diaspora Jews, prompting them to help the olim (immigrants to Israel) as refugees.

So what about entry to the United States? On 6 September 1989, the ]erusalem Post reported:

"American Jewish organisations that have been pushing hardest to get more Soviet Jews into the US on refugee status are now ready to accept limits on numbers. They are seeking a compromise with the administration that would channel more US aid to Israel to help it cope with an increased Soviet aliya (immigration to Israel)."

The report quoted Micah Naftalin of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews as saying: "We acknowledge that there are finite limits to how many refugees the US can handle." But Naftalin rejected the policy of giving refugee status only to those with close relatives in the United States.

David Harris of the American Jewish Committee said limitations were inevitable, but the Bush administration was hoping to reach an accord with the Jewish community so as to prevent a fight with Congress, which was considering a bill giving all Soviet Jews automatic refugee status.

HIAS president, Ben-'Zion Leuchner, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that "the majority of federations (Jewish communities in each city) will not fight the government on this because of their own financial problems. Some Jewish communities are nearing the point where they can only fund family reunification cases." However, both Leuchter and Harris said the Jewish community would only support the administration in return for concessions.

Enter Shamir, far right

The Israeli government also had a view on Soviet Jews. Speaking to Likud Party veterans, Shamir declared that mass immigration of Soviet Jews was a "miracle", and that it required Israel to be big as well". They could not think of giving up the Occupied Territories. " We need the space to house all the people," he said, to applause (Jerusalem Post, 14 and l9 January 1990). The call for lebensraum has not gone unnoticed abroad, and not least by the Arabs, of course; but after a period of Intifada, and talk in Israel of a so-called "transfer", a more accurate interpretation might have been that  Shamir's Israel desperately needs more Jews if it is to hold the territories.

Shamir had been pressing the US government for some time to stop Soviet Jews entering, and he also wanted the Soviet authorities to permit direct nights to Israel so that people could not drop out en route.An earlier plan had been to have Soviet Jewish migrants fly to Israel via Bucharest, where Ceausescu might cu-operate in stopping dropouts, but circumstances intervened.

Back in 1982 the Jewish Agency bitterly attacked the Austrian government for placing a Russian language information poster at the Vienna transit centre, telling migrants the addresses of Jewish and non-Jewish organisations which would help them go to destinations other than Israel.'The Israeli ambassador in Vienna persuaded the Austrians to remove the poster. The Agency also sought the collaboration of US Jewish organisations in ensuring that only Soviet Jews with "first degree" relatives in the USA should be helped to go there (Jewish Chronicle, 15 January 1982).

Pressure was put on HIAS. and the Joint Distribution Committee to stop them helping Russian Jews. After attacks from the chair of the Jewish Agency, Arye Dultzin, and Anya director, Raphael Kotlowitz, HIAS, which had earlier claimed it was helping the "drop-outs" only to stop them falling into the clutches of the Satmar Hassidim {ultra orthodox anti-Zionists) or non-Jewish organisations, caved in to a plea from Begin. The board of governors of the American Society agreed by 13-3 to accept that it should help only those with close relatives in the US

(Jewish Chronicle, 9 Oct, 6 Nov, II Dec 1981).

Rich Uncle in the States?

Having said they couldn't afford to fund the settlement of Soviet Jews in America as one reason they backed down from challenging Bush over restrictions, American Jewish leaders are now calling upon their communities to cough up the cost of settling the Jews in Israel.

Likud Knesset member Michael Kleiner, chairman of the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee, told the Jerusalem Post's Asher Wallflsh on 14 January that Shamir and Pores must go to the US to raise the money for settling Soviet Jews in Israel. Criticising Jewish Agency targets of $1 billion from American Jewry (twice what they'd originally set) as inadequate, Kleiner said Israeli and diaspora Jews should agree to meet the eventual cost, whatever it was. Admitting that it could rise to between $6 and $10 billion, he said that Israel would have to shelve all national and municipal development budgets (hard luck, Hatikvah quarter) and that diaspora Jews must come in 50:50 (Jerusalem Post, 14 Jan 1990) .

At a press conference in New York attended by Natan Sharansky, honouring an announced $20 million housing fund for Soviet Jews in Israel set up by investment banker Joseph Gruss, David Sacks of the United Jewish Appeal said the Appeal might raise its $350 million pledge over one year, instead of three as originally planned. Asked about the overall $500 million, Sacks said: "I can see the possibility of doubling that figure."

Last February the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), at its General Assembly in Miami, pledged that its members would deliver its financial commitment to Israel "whether or not we are successful in raising the full amount", according to executive director Don Felstein, who explained that if necessary federations would have to borrow the money, or cut other budgets. The U}A had meanwhile upped its target, to raise $420 million in one year (Jerusalem Post, 9 February 1990).

Rescue or aliyah?

According to Felstein, some delegates at the CJF's Assembly were concerned about Shamir's remarks on the need for a big Israel". The leadership had managed to calm their fears, saying that less than 1% of Soviet}ews were settling the West Bank.

Felstein said that what had helped convince delegates of the need to deliver the money was a set of articles in the New York Times about the growth of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. There was a general realisation in Miami that American Jewry has a chance in 1990 to do what it failed to do in 1939 (]erusalem Post, 9 Feb 1990).

This last remark is significant. We all know of the Jews who were turned away from America's shores in 1939 and after. In 1981 a commission was set up to examine the way American Jewish organisations had behaved during the years of Nazi mass extermination of the Jews of Europe. Among the questions posed was whether these organisations might not have saved thousands of lives if they had put pressure on the Roosevelt administration. The commission broke up in disarray at the end of 1982 without completing its work (Daily Telegraph, 5 }an 1983).

However, a privately circulated interim report stated: "In retrospect, one incontrovertible fact stands out above all others: in the face of Hitler's total war of extermination against the Jews of Europe, the Jewish leadership in America at no stage decided to proclaim total mobilisation for rescue" (New York Herald Tribune, 5 }an 1983) .

Whether pressure on Roosevelt might have worked, we can only guess. The American Jewish community did not feel so confident then. There was fear that America's own antisemites would use the prospect of mass Jewish immigration to stir up hatred against those already there. Later, American Jews would vent their feelings on Britain for restricting entry to Palestine. Leon Uris could write Exodus and Hollywood make the movie.

One can understand the remark about not repeating 1939, but have Don Felstein or the Jewish Federation read the history properly? Weren't guilt pangs over bowing down to the antisemites during the War assuaged by listening to other arguments?

"If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channeled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda . . . If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestine problem we are risking the existence of Zionism," wrote David Ben Gurion in a letter to  the Zionist Executive in  1938, concerned lest other territories be found to take Jewish refugees (The Other Israel by Arie Bober, published by Matzpen).

The Goldberg commission's report noted that established Zionist organisations were "riveted to post-war plans" for a Jewish state and this was another reason not to demand entry for Jews to America. And today?

"Could Israel morally survive the appearance of 500,000 Jewish refugees heading for another galut(diaspora) were the gates of the USSR opened?" asked Mikhail Agursky and Alexander Libin, in the ]erusalem Post (6 October 1982). "The drop out phenomenon corrupted and demoralised Soviet Jewry", they claimed. The Zionist writers rejected any move to grant refugee status to Soviet Jews wishing to enter America.

More recently, Isi Leibler, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and a leading Zionist figure in Australia (doubtless another over-populated little country that couldn't possibly find room for more }ews), said; 'The Soviet Jewry movement is not a travel agency, and transfer of one diaspora to another, even from a Communist society to a democracy, is not a pressing national Jewish objective. This is especially true if the overwhelming majority of Jews wanting to leave - currently over 90% - do not want to go to Israel."

Double bind

One problem with these arguments is that the Soviet Union today, whatever it is, is not Germany in 1939.Far from having been systematically persecuted and driven from public life as German  Jews were by state policy from 1933 on (and more especially from 1938), Soviet Jews are enjoying a new flowering of cultural and political freedom. The antisemites are menacing, but not yet much  more. There is violence, but not much greater than in, say, the United States (or, in a different way, in Israel). The Russian Nazi groups'votes were derisory.

This  is not to recommend complacency but to suggest that antisemitism in Russia can be fought and beaten. But in order to squeeze huge sums out of Jewish communities already facing cash  problems, the Zionist movement has had to hype up the Russian situation to make it sound as though Auschwitz is round the comer. "Shadow Of The New Nazis" screamed the headline to an article by Jane Moonman of BIPAC (Jewish Chronicle, 9 Dec 1988). "Never Again 1939" is the kind of sentiment being tapped into in the States.

The snag is, if people really believe it's that bad, mightn't they decide that what's needed is rescue rather than aliyah to Israel? Mightn't they press for open doors and refugee status?

On 15 February, Israel's Absorption Minister, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, shocked Zionist opinion by naively declaring; "Should the escape route of the Soviet Jews lead them to Western Europe or the United States, this is better than they they should stay in the Soviet Union." (Peretz is a member of the non Zionist orthodox Shas Party.) Shamir promptly told the Israeli press: 'There is no need to take note of the remarks made by Absorption Minister Yitzhak Peretz" (Ha'areiz, 16 Jan 1990).

Michael Kleiner, of the Knesset' s Immigration and Absorption Committee, complained that Peretz's remarks would be used by "HIAS officials, who don't care about the well-being of the Jews", but merely wish to keep going as an organisation by "disseminating untruthful propaganda about Israel and about the condition of Soviet Jewry . Kleiner went on to claim the Absorption Minister had "fallen victim to the propaganda and fear-spreading campaign conducted by vested interests who are striving to reopen the gates of the United States to Jewish immigrants" (Ha'aretz, 15 Feb 1990).

Jewish Agency chairman, Simha Dinitz, had revealed on 11 February that the Agency had approached American Jewish leaders some weeks before to ask them to stop HIAS opening an office in Moscow which might help Jews going to America and "sabotage immigration to Israel".

On 18 February, Michael Kleiner proclaimed; 'This cancerous growth called HIAS must be totally eradicated." Claiming that HIAS lobbying had persuaded the US government to grant 8,000 more refugee-entry permits to Soviet Jews, Kleiner accused the Jewish organisation of doing this just to maintain 'bloated bureaucracy and corrupt officials".

Furthermore, he accused; 'HIAS is preparing the ground for an upsurge of antisemitism in the United States," because, by "luring Jews who really want to settle in Israel to go to America instead," it was leading to the day when American Jewry would be accused of stealing the places of others" (]erusalem Post, 19 Feb 1990).

So how did the American Jews respond to this belligerent language and the threatening suggestion that Jews are to blame for a rise in antisemitism? Ben Zion Leuchner of HIAS denied that his organisation had asked the US to increase its ceiling on Jewish refugees. He pointed out that HIAS was actually reducing staff. He denied that it sought to persuade anyone to go to America: "To the contrary, our staff members are instructed to tell the relatives of Soviet Jews that the quickest way for their family to be resettled in freedom is to go to Israel" (]erusalem Post, 4 March 1990).

Martin Kraar, of the North American Council of Jewish Federations, reassured Kleiner that the 8,000 Jews who were being assisted had already been allowed for in October and that there was no intention of increasing the entry quota further. He further assured Kleiner that his Council would be keeping an eye on HIAS to "ensure it didn' t divert Soviet Jews to any other destination save Israel."

So once again language that would be rightly denounced as antisemitic on the lips of others is considered acceptable from Israeli leaders. And once again diaspora Jewish leaders kowtow to Israeli leaders, protesting their innocence of any charge that they are making demands on their own government to assist fellow Jews find freedom! No longer are they demanding: "Let My People Go," but: "Don't Let My People In"!


A useful memorandum on Soviet Jewish migration has
been produced by the Committee to Open Borders. Send a
large sae to Jewish Socialist, BM3725, London WCIN
3XX, for a copy.

Midnight in Moscow

ITZIK FEFFER (l) and SHLOMO MIKHOELS(r) with ALBERT EINSTEIN, who wrote preface to Black Book on Nazi crimes. Their trip to West aimed to mobilise support for Soviet war effort, but Kremlin would later accuse them of conspiring with US millionaires.

On August 12, 1952, 13 members of the Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist    Committee were executed in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Among them were the poets Itsik Feffer, Leib Kvitko and Peretz Markish, the writers David Bergelson and Shmuel Halkin; Solomon Lozovsky, a former general secretary of the Red Trade Union International and government minister, and Benjamin Zuskin, a leading actor at the Moscoll State Jewish Theatre.

The theatre’s director, and chair of the Jewish People’s Committee, Shlomo Mikhoels, had been murdered on January l3, 1948, in a hit and run accident outside Minsk believed to have been arranged by the secret police.

The Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist Committee was launched with official backing in April 1942 to win worldwide Jewish support for the Soviet war effort.

Stalin approved this turn although he had signed the death warrant for the two men who first proposed enlisting Jewish energies against the Nazis -Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich, leaders of the Jewish Workers’ Bund from Poland. Alter and Erlich had defended left wing opponents of Stalinism. But worse, from the Kremlin’s point of view, they were ‘premature anti-fascists’, having proposed anti-Nazi resistance while the Soviet government was loyally maintaining its pact with Hitler.

In 1943, Shlomo Mikhoels and Itsik Feffer toured the United States, Mexico, Canada and Britain, addressing enthusiastic Jewish audiences, Feffer in his full uniform as colonel of the Red Army.  They raised millions of dollars for the Soviet war effort, as well as fervent political support. The Jewish People’s Committee had its own Yiddish newspaper, Eynikayt (Unity). Bergelson wrote regularly for it, and for the NewYork Morgn Frayhayt. Soviet Yiddish writers and poets were published in English too.

Jewish people around the world rejoiced at Soviet military triumphs. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz,’ they told each other. The Jewish People’s Committee persuaded Soviet authorities to provide a list of decorated Soviet Jewish war heroes, both to refute antisemitic jibes and to raise Jewish morale. 

When Foreign Minister Gromyko, referring to Jewish suffering in Europe, gave the Soviet Union’s blessing to Zionist aspirations and the UN’s November 1947 Palestine partition resolution, the rejoicing seemed complete. The USSR was the first power to recognise the new State of Israel in 1948, and helped it with arms.

Yet even during World War II, harsh winds were forming that would blow asunder Jewish hopes in the Soviet Union. From `socialism in one country’, official ideology moved on to waging the `Great PatrioticWar’. Although surviving purged Red Army officers were released to lead their units in battle, old Czarist heroes and generals came back into favour in patriotic literature.


Historians rediscovered that Czarist Russia’s expansion and conquest of subject peoples was ’progressive’. Even while Red Army troops were chasing German invaders out, special detachments were sent to deport peoples like the Crimean Tartars and the Chechens, accused of being ‘collaborators’, and living in the wrong place. 

Call it collective punishment, or 'ethnic cleansing’, it set a brutal precedent, even if the world was too busy celebrating the defeat of Hitler’s fascism to notice its sinister reflections.

In 1946, the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee launched a drive against writers who did not conform. Beginning under party secretary A A Zhdanov, this became a drive against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ accused of grovelling to western culture and belittling Russian achievements.

In 1949 Pravda reported a speech byAnatoly Sofronov of the Writers’ Union, denouncing an anti-patriotic group of theatre critics’, rabid ill-intentioned cosmopolitans, people without kith and kin, who had been undermining the foundations of culture for a long time’ by criticising patriotic plays. In contrast to criminal trial reports where papers always gave the real names’ of the accused, Jev\sh novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was told to make his characters’ names more Russian.

It became obligatory to claim that Russians had made all important scientific discoveries and inventions, and that foreign’ science was inferior. Such ignorant boasting detracted from genuine Soviet achievements, rendered the propaganda ridiculous and obstructed vital work in science and medicine. But it was a golden opportunity for jealous mediocrities and humbugs to rise up, and denounce their colleagues and critics as unpatriotic’.What right had cosmopolitans without kith and kin’ to hold influential positions, barring the way to genuine Russians?


A witch-hunt began, parallel to the anti-Communist witch-hunts in the United States, where coincidentally many of those victimised for alleged un-American activities’ came from the same ethnic background as Russia’s 'rootless cosmopolitans’. Russia’s witch-hunt spread through colleges and factories, army bases and hospitals. People were accused of plots, dismissed from posts, and arrested. Jewish choirs and drama groups were disbanded. Books vanished from shops and library shelves as their writers disappeared from their homes.

In the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, a vast library of Yiddish works was destroyed. The plates for a Black Book on Nazi atrocities were smashed. The Jewish People’s Committee had published an English edition during the war, but evidently it was for export only.

Unlike blacklisted Americans, many of Stalin’s victims did not live to tell their tale. The Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded in November 1948, as were other wartime bodies set up to win support in the West. Not satisfied with liquidating the Jewish Committee, Stalin had 15 of its members arrested, taken to the Lubyanka punishment cells and tortured to make them sign confessions. One, hospital director Boris Shimeliovich, refused to confess to anything despite being given 100 lashes every day for a month.

Yet rather than proceed to a show trial, as they had done with Bolshevik oppositionists and Red Army officers in the 1930’s, the Stalinist authorities took four years trying to break the resistance of the Jewish prisoners before a tribunal behind closed doors.

Everything was stood on its head. Jewish internationalism, once praised by Lenin, and a proven asset to the communist cause, was now ' rootless cosmopolitanism’, a deadly enemy. Mikhoels and Feffer’s tour in the West on the Soviet Union’s behalf was portrayed as a trip to conspire with American millionaires. By extolling the mighty Soviet war effort they had betrayed state secrets! A proposal to settle Jewish Holocaust sulvivors and displaced persons in the Crimea was a Jewish nationalist plot to detach the region from the Soviet Union - the same Soviet Union whose representatives had so eloquently supported Zionist claims to Palestine!

My nationalist tendencies came out in the following ways,’ Feffer told the tribunal: I said that I love my people. Is there anyone who doesn’t love his people? I wanted my people to have what all others had. And when I saw that everything was being closed dowll, everything being eliminated, this pained me and made me rise against the Soviet power. This was what motivated my interest in the Crimea and Birobidzhan.’ He reminded the judges that US President Roosevelt had been to the Crimea (for the Yalta talks) but he did not ask for Mikhoels and Feffer to brief him on the strategic peninsula!

PAUL ROBESON in 1942. When he went to Moscow in 1949 he asked after his Jewish friends. But back home as Cold War threatened to turn hot, Robeson kept quiet about what he had learned.
One American who did ask after his friends Mikhoels and Feffer was black singer and Communist Paul Robeson. When he arrived in Moscow in 1949. Mikhoels was already dead, but Feffer was hastily fattened up, scrubbed, and brought from jail to the singer’s hotel room. Signalling to Robeson that the room was bugged, Feffer managed to convey that Mikhoels had been killed and that he was facing death too.

At his concert, Paul Robeson spoke about his Jewish friends, before singing the Yiddish Partisan Song, Zog nit keynmol az du geytstdem letsten veg. . . .’ Never say that that you are walking your last road. The applause was huge. But on the reissued recording of the concert you call still hear the blip where Soviet censors cut out his little speech about Miklloels and Feffer. Back in the United States, Robeson censored himself, confiding only to his son what he’d been told, and insisting to reporters that he had seen no sign of antisemitism or racism in the Soviet Union. Maybe Robeson’s loyal Stalinism had been disturbed, but he was afraid to say anything that could be used by US warmongers or further endanger his friends.

Maybe if the US government had not taken away his passport. . . As it was, Robeson’s silence did not help his friends.
Paul Robeson's Moscow concert

A book out last year, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, evokes the flavour of the hidden trial. Under interrogation one woman had stated that under Lozovsky the [Soviet information bureau} had been turned into a s\lagogue`. But during the trial, prisoners retracted or altered confessions. Lozovsky said his judges knew how confessions were obtained. "You took note of the fact that all of the accused testify using one and the same phrasing. So this means tilat someone conspired to come up with this language. Who? Those under arrest? I don’t think so. That means that it was the investigators who conspired."

He compared General Alexander Cheptsov, who presided over the tribunal, to a Spanish inquisitor. In fact, at the end of the trial Cheptsov asked party leaders to reopen the investigation. Party
Secretary Georgy Malenkov was indignant. "Do you want us to kneel before these criminals?’ he demanded. " Carry out the Politburo’s resolution!’ As one of the five-man defence council which oversaw the Soviet war effort inWorldWar II, Malenkov knew the contribution made by the Jewish People’s Committee. His daughter had married Lozovsky’s grandson, Vladimir Shamberg, and the two men were close. But days before Lozovsky’s arrest, Malenkov rushed through his daughter’s divorce, saying he did not want `a relative of an enemy of the people’ in his house.

After Stalin’s death, Malenkov became party leader, then Prime Minister until was elbowed aside by Khruschev. In 1957, accused of leading an anti-party group’, he was sent off to manage a power station in Kazakhstan - a gentler end to that to which he’d helped consign Lozovsky

Vladimir Shamberg never contacted his ex-father-in-law again, but says of his behaviour: As a human being I cannot approve it, but as a political scientist I understand what he had to do.’

Of the 15 members of the Jewish People’s Committee who had been tried, one died in prison. Another, Latvian-born medical scientist Lina Stern, who had gone to work in the Soviet Union in 1926, was exiled to Kazakhstan. The remainder were executed.

Later that year, Stalin got his show trials in Prague, where former Czech Communist Party general secretary, Rudolf Slansky, and 13 longstanding party members (including three genti1es for good measure) went on trial accused of Zionism, Trotskyism, Titoism. . . All confessed their "guilt". A11 were executed and three sentenced to life imprisonment.

Then on l3th January 1953, the Soviet news agency, TASS announced the arrest of a group of 'killer doctors’, accused of plotting to murder public figures. Referring to 'Trotskyite conspiracies’ including the death of Gorki, it claimed the dead Shlomo Mikhoels had orchestrated a huge terror plot in league with a Zionist espionage agency, 'the Joint’ (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee).

All over the Soviet Union, Jews feared pogroms or the knock on the door from the KGB arranging their 'protective' arrest and deportation to Siberia. But then, on l5th March 1953, came the news that Stalin was dead. The charges against the doctors ~were dropped. The Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist Committee was soon to be admitted innocent too. Khrushchev acknowledged publicly in 1955 that during the war the Committee was 'indispensible to the interests of the Soviet state, our policies and our Communist Party,’ In his 1956 'secret speech’ he attacked Stalin’s persecution of nationalities. It was too late to save the murdered Jewish intellectuals or the victims of the show trials. Nor could references to Stalin’s 'personality cult’ satisfy Jewish people around the world, shocked and disillusioned with the kind of 'socialism’ that could permit such a monstrosity.

A legendary sage, the Baal Shem Tov, said remembrance was the first step to redemption. Without an honest reckoning with the past, we cannot hope to restore faith in a socialist future.

 (first published in Jewish Socialist no.46, Spring 2002)

Opening the Way for Operation Torch

COLETTE ABOULKER decorated with Croix de Guerre
 

ON November 8 1942,  Allied forces invaded North Africa in  Operation Torch. Mongomery's 8th army had defeated Rommel's Afrika Corps at El Alamein and begun driving Axis forces back from the borders of Egypt. Landing in the west, at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, the Allies would commence a pincer movement,  driving Rommel out through Tunisia, and preparing to invade southern Europe.

The United States hoped the Vichy French, bitterly anti-British since their fleet was sunk at Mers el Kebir, might be won over if Torch was presented as an American operation. The overall commander was General Eisenhower. Secret approaches had been made to senior French commanders.

In Algiers, not everyone relied on these. On the eve of the Allied landings, less than 400 poorly-armed rebels set out to seize strategic buildings, throttle Vichy communications, and open the city to the invaders.  More than half the insurgents  were Algerian Jews. 

Jews had lived in the Maghreb countries of north-west Africa since antiquity. The 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote of mountain Berber tribes that adhered to Judaism.  Later came refugees from Spain,  and merchants from Italy, who  prospered under Ottoman rule.

  The French invasion in 1830 brought destruction and disease to Algeria. The indigenous population declined by nearly a third, but 50,000 Europeans emigrated to Algeria. Settlers obtained land confiscated by the French army. Modern agricultural technique increased  its productivity. But this did not benefit uprooted felaheen.

For Algerian Jews a major change took place after French Justice Minister Adolphe Cremieux  introduced a decree on October 24, 1870
The Israelites native to the departments of Algeria are declared French citizens; consequently, their real status and their personal status shall be, dating from the promulgation of the present decree, regulated by French law, with all rights acquired until this day inviolable.

The Jews of Algeria accepted becoming French as a way to emancipation and progress. But they were by no means embraced by the settlers. Big land owners wanted cheap labour, and opposed anything which raised the aspirations of the natives, Moslem or Jew.  Europeans lower down the scale, a mixture of Italians and Maltese as well as French, cemented their identity with racism, jealously guarding their status with imported hatred against the Jew.

In 1881, on the eve of elections, Europeans attacked the Jewish quarters at Tlemcen.  Jews fought back with sticks and stones. In 1896, antisemites gained control of the city council at Constantine, and sacked Jewish employees. Jewish sick were denied admission to the hospital, and children put out of schools. The explanation was that "The young Israelites bring to school all sorts of contagious diseases and constitute a danger to classmates. "

 In January 1897 rioters attacked Jewish premises in Algiers, killing two men and severely injuring over 100 people. In May there were anti-Jewish pogroms in Oran. The police did little to intervene. In January 1898,  the Dreyfus Affaire divided France, and fuelled antisemitic riots in Algiers. In May that year,  Edouard Drumont, author of Le France Juive, was one of four antisemitic deputies  elected in Algeria.

In the First World War, at least 2,000 Algerian Jews died for France on various fronts. The Algerian Jews organised both religious and secular institutions. A social survey in 1931 found them in varied occupations, from day labourers (1,172) and ordinary workers (18,032) through skilled trades and salaried commercial employees to the professions, and 7,987 employers.

Antagonism began to come from more than one direction. In Constantine on August 5, 1934, a rumour  that Jews had defiled a mosque led thousands of Muslims to attack Jews. The police did nothing to stop them.  Some 25 Jews were killed in this outburst. Besides worsening social conditions, and jealousy of Jews' status, external influences were at work. Nazi propaganda was reaching the Maghreb as well as the Middle East.

The French press presented the Constantine pogrom as an expression of centuries-old hatred between Muslims and Jews. Algerian Jews denied this. Maurice Violette a governor of Algeria told the French senate in 1935  "If there is antisemitism in Algeria, you can be sure that it is the Europeans who activate it".

In the Autumn of 1938 Jacques Doriot, a former Communist turned fascist, toured Algeria and convened a congress of his Parti Populaire Francaise (PPF).  "We have launched the mot d'ordre of abrogation of the Cremieux decree because the mass of Jews are making a bloc with the parties of the Left, imperilling the sovereignty of the colonial French,  the men of Empire".  Doriot solicited funds and weapons from fascist Italy.

From The Fall to Resistance   
 
Following France's surrender on June 22, 1940, its northern half fell under Nazi occupation. Marshall Petain's government at Vichy retained control of the south and overseas territories, including the colony of Algeria and protectorates in Morocco and Tunis. Petain's government adopted the Statut des Juifs in October 1940, aimed at removing Jews from public life and employment.  On October 7, 1940 the Cremieux Decree was abolished.  In August 1941, Xavier Vallat, a member of Action Francaise,  appointed  head of the Commissariat-General for Jewish Questions, arrived in Algiers. A delegation of wounded and decorated Jewish ex-servicemen appealed to him as an old soldier to mitigate the antisemitic policies. To no avail.

On September 15, 1941 it was announced that anti-Jewish legislation would be applied as strictly in North Africa as in metropolitan France.  This was hard to enforce in Morocco and Tunisia, which had fewer colonists and were only protectorates.  Morocco's King Mohammed V announced that the Jews of Morocco were his subjects and not subject to French law.

Vichy's man in North Africa, General Weygand, signed an order excluding Jewish pupils from schools. Some teachers taught Jewish pupils at home. There was even an underground university running courses until the authorities clamped down on it. Some Jewish pupils were accepted at Muslim schools.

Whatever resentment there was towards Jews among the Muslim population,  politically educated Arabs were not impressed by the French measures. Ferhat Abbas, who had once hoped Muslims could obtain equality as French citizens, took  abolition of the Cremieux Decree as confirming that Algerians must seek their own freedom, and not trust the French.

"That which you do to the Jews of Algeria, so perfectly assimilated to French civilisation, is of your own intitative and not that of the enemy who never sought the abrogation of the Cremieux decree. Your racism goes in all directions. Today it is exercised against the Jews. It is exercised every day against the Arabs"


According to Jose Aboulker, a leader of Jewish resistance:
"They didn’t take part in the war. It wasn’t their war. With the Jews, they were perfectly all right. Not only did they refuse to participate in the anti-Jewish abuse the Germans and the Vichy government tried to push them to do, but, while the colonists were fighting over the Jewish possessions, they even resisted the temptation to buy them at low price and make huge profits. The instructions were given in the mosques: the Jews are going through hard times, they are our brothers."

The French authorities blamed  Arab disaffection on Jewish incitement.    In fact, apart from a few communists, and individuals prepared to identify with Arab nationalism, the majority of Jews in Algeria remained French patriots, despite everything they had suffered. But that did not mean they would not fight back.

In October 1940 a group of young Jews who had been demobilised from the French forces acquired a 4.5 ton cutter, intending to sail it to Gibraltar, and enlist with the Free French. Their plan was discovered and the French admiralty seized their boat.  Dr. Raphael Aboulker, a surgeon and son of a leading Jewish family, persuaded them they would be needed in Algeria. This group  would all play their part in the November 8 1942 rising.

Raphael and Maurice Aboulker were members of a Jewish aid committee formed to help those ousted from their jobs or professions. The committee organised its own  schools and services. A former boxer called Geo Gras provided premises for a gymnasium. A self-defence organisation was  set up there, enlisting about 250 Jewish youth. From training as defence squads they turned to modest resistance. "V" for victory signs appeared on walls overnight, followed by anti-Vichy posters. News received by radio from London was transcribed into clandestine leaflets. There were acts of sabotage on the docks.

In Oran, Roger Carcassonne, in trouble in his army unit for distributing De Gaulle's June 18 1940 call for Resistance, was demobbed on August 28. He  set about heading for England via Gibraltar together with his brother Pierre. But the Vichy police and navy had the coast well guarded. So like the young men in Algiers, the brothers turned to forming an underground group. In March 1941, a friend introduced Carcassonne to Henri d'Astier de la Vigerie, a military intelligence officer and former Royalist who had become anti-Nazi and wanted to organise resistance. Then in August, in Algiers, Roger Carcassonne met his cousin, 20 year old medical student Jose Aboulker. They agreed to keep in touch, and to turn from propaganda to preparing armed struggle. 

Carcassonne, diverted funds from his company to the resistance. Jose Aboulker made contact with Roger Maria of  the underground Communist Party of Algeria. Many of its members were in Saharan concentration camps. The party secretary, Kadour Belkaim, had died in a dungeon in July 1940.    Though worried at first that young Aboulker's plan might prove an adventure, the Party promised 60 combattants.

Bernard Karsenty , born in 1920 in Oran, was a soldier in Marseilles when France surrendered. Heeding De Gaulle's appeal in June 1940,  he returned to Algeria in November 1941, hoping to reach Gibraltar from there. Instead he joined the resistance network formed by Roger Carcassonne and José Aboulker.

Uncle Sam Enters the War

The United States, not yet at war when France fell, recognised the Vichy regime as the legitimate government of France. When the Free French navy seized the islands of St.Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland, from Vichy control, on December 24, 1941, the US State Department wanted Canada to restore the Vichyites.  There was a public outcry, and the US backed off. But it still would not trust De Gaulle.

The US consul general in Algiers, Robert Murphy negotiated with the antisemitic governor Weygand, agreeing that United States goods could be shipped  to the Vichy French in Algeria, through the British naval blockade. Murphy complained that the British press was "waging a campaign" against US relations with (Vichy) France.

After the United States entered the war, and accepted British plans to invade north-west Africa, Murphy was instructed to  meet some different Frenchmen. Lieutenant Colonel Germain Jousse was gathering intelligence, and arms, to assist an Allied invasion. His  Committee of Five formed in 1941 to support resistance, included Astier de la Vigery, who was in touch with the Jewish resisters.

On the night of October 22, 1942 the conspirators met at a farmhouse west of Cherchell, on the coast. Bernard Karsenty was responsible for security. They were joined by General Charles Mast, commander of the garrison in Algiers.  Eisenhower's deputy, General Mark Clark, came ashore by kayak from the British submarine Seraph, bringing with him a US carbine that was handed to Bernard Kansenty, with promises of more weapons to come. After this, resisters went down to the beach on several nights, but the supplies never arrived.

Rising up on Saturday Night 

Algiers resisters had been meeting at a store owned by the Calvet brothers. It stood on a flatiron corner between two streets, so people could enter by one entrance and leave by another, confusing surveillence. Guy Calvet-Cohen, a former police officer, was a leading member of their conspiracy.

However the Aboulker family home at 26 rue Michelet was to be the headquarters for the rising on the night of November 7-8. An American technician had installed a radio transmitter. As the volunteers arrived, often needing a rest and a bite to eat before they were briefed, Colette Aboulker, the daughter of the house, her room lined with maps, was like a 'guardian angel' .

The plan was for 800 volunteers to set off in groups to seize strategic buildings, neutralise port defences, and paralyse communications. They would be facing altogether 11,000 Vichy troops plus 2,000 members of the Service de L'Ordre Legionaire militia, and several hundred of Doriot's PPF fascists.

Colonel Jousse had provided VP (civil militia) armbands with which the rebels hoped to confuse the opposition. Jose Aboulker had obtained blank order forms signed by General Mast, on which he typed letters authorising them to take over buildings.  Some old buses would take the rebels to action.

 By zero hour fewer than 600 volunteers had showed up. Many melted away as they realised neither the numbers nor the promised weapons had arrived. In the end about 377 rebels went into action, including  200 Jewish volunteers. Among others who distinguished themselves that night were a detachment of pupils from the Lycee Ben Haknoun, led by a cadet called Pauphilet.

Despite setbacks the operation proceded largely according to plan. Paul Ruff and fifteen men took over the central telephone exchange. Maurice Hayom, a young lawyer, led the group which took the Palais d'Ete, seat of the governor general. Jose Aboulker, with his 20 men, took over the Central Police station.

GUY PILLAFORT
By 3am on Sunday morning Algiers was lagely in the hands of the insurgents. Outside the head post office a Vichy unit under white flag approached Lieutenant Jean Dreyfus, and argued who should surrender to whom. As Dreyfus returned to his side, a Vichy sniper shot him in the back. The man responsible was decorated  with the croix de guerre. At the central police station, Guy Pillafort, a Free French captain who was with Jose Aboulker's group was gunned down from a  passing car by a Vichy colonel.

The Allied forces were delayed.  General Mast had promised his forces would not fight back, but his command did not extend to Oran, or to the navy. Two British destroyers trying to enter Algiers harbour with US rangers came under heavy fire.  Along the coast several US units had landed on the wrong beaches. Colonel Jousse and General Mast met the US 34th Infantry Divsion, urging them to hasten into the city before Vichy forces regained control.

General Henri Giraud was picked up from Toulon by the British submarine HMS Seraph, disguised as a US vessel, and taken to Gibraltar to meet General Eisenhower, who wanted him to assume command of French forces in Algeria.  Giraud stalled, waiting to see what happened. By the time he flew  into Algiers on November 9,  someone else was in charge.

The Admiral and the Duke of Windsor's Friend

Students from the Ben Aknoun lycee had surrounded the Villa des Olives and captured General Alphonse Juin, commander in chief of French forces in north Africa. With him was Admiral Francois Darlan, the number two in the Vichy regime, who was in Algiers to visit his son in hospital.

Robert Murphy brought a message from President Roosevelt inviting General Juin to order surender and come over to the Allies. Juin said they should give this to Darlan. Darlan asked permission to send a message to Marshall Petain, care of Admiral Leclerc. In it he ordered Vichy forces to resist, and to alert the Germans.  Darlan's message was intercepted by the resistance, but Murphy gave him another go. Thus Vichy naval forces received the order to attack US commandos landing in the harbour. Vichy gendarmery recaptured the Villa, freeing Juin and Darlan. It was another two days before Darlan was persuaded to negotiate a surrender, one which let him become governor of Algieria.

Darlan was not the only prize visitor taken that night.  Millionaire industrialist Charles Bedaux, who had introduced the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Hitler, was in Algiers to supervise construction of a trans-Saharan pipeline for the Germans. Having capured Bedaux, Guy Calvet had all his business papers collected, and photographed. The documents disappeared. US agents who came to take Bedaux, an American citizen, back to the United States admitted they had the originals but insisted Calvet also hand over his copies. Bedaux committed suicide in prison in Miami, Florida, while awaiting a grand jury investigation.

Plus ca change,....

Algeria had changed hands, but anti-Jewish laws remained in place.  On November 15, Giraud ordered conscription of Jewish youth. but only to labour battalions, so they could not bear arms. Jewish children remained forbidden to attend schools, and professionals not alowed to practice. Over 1,000 Jews were in camps, along with Spanish republicans, Algerian nationalists, International Brigaders and communists.

At Hadjerat M'Gull there were 170 prisoners who had suffered forced labour, hunger, disease, torture and murder.  Two of the nine prisoners killed there were Jews, one of them a young refugee from Germany.  His parents, who were in London, committed suicide.

At Djelfa, on an empty plateau 1,100 meters above sea level, under a blazing sun by day and freezing at night, were 4,000 internees, mostly former International Brigaders. Living in tents until huts could be built, most slept in their work clothes because they had nothing else to wear. Insects swarmed around the open latrines, and because of the lack of hygene prisoners had chronic diarrhoea. Many had ulcers on their arms and legs. To make up their lack of food, the prisoners caught rats, but they were punished if caught lighting a fire for heat or cooking. Commandant Caboche ordered machine guns trained on the road after November 8, to hold up American liberators. He needn't have worried.

They did not come.

On the afternoon of December 24, 1942, 20-year old Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle entered Darlan's headquarters in Algiers and shot the Admiral dead. The young man was executed by firing squad on December 26. General Giraud, who took over Darlan's position as Commissioner,  had resistance members, including Jose Aboulker and his father, rounded up, and thrown into the Saharan camps.

Arthur Roseborough, the head of the OSS desk in Algiers, went to see Robert Murphy, begging him to help get them released. "American honour is at stake".
"Art old fellow," Murphy replied, " if you have nothing better to do in Africa than to worry about those Jews and Communists who helped us, why don't you just go home?" 

(Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread.  Downes was an American journalist working with the OSS in North Africa).

Giraud claimed the "conspirators" had planned to assassinate Robert Murphy too. Fortunately, Colette Aboulker had escaped, and managed to contact  Murphy, who did nothing, but she also spoke to  British journalists in Algiers.  Churchill had already written privately to Roosevelt on December 9, voicing disquiet that fascist organisations remained active in Algeria while Allied sympathisers were imprisoned.

Prisoners in the Sahara camps begged to be freed to join Allied forces. In March 1943 a Red Cross officer came to Djerba, and later US Quakers brought used clothing, rice, sugar, and condensed milk. In April 1943 a British officer, Major Brister was able to get internees released for the Pioneer Corps, among them 65 Jewish internees.  Eventually, as a result of international concern and the replacement of Giraud's regime by De Gaulle's Free French, steps were taken to close the camps, and release the prisoners, and the anti-Jewish measures were gradually phased out.

Was it worth it?

 Unlike fellow-Jews who rose up six months later in Warsaw, those who rose in Algiers were not choosing a martyr's death over extermination. They fought alongside non-Jewish allies in the name of France, and freedom. But by helping the Allies,  they stopped the Nazi genocide spreading, and helped bring its end nearer.

At the Nazis' Wannsee conference in January 1942, North Africa was not directly mentioned. But the figure of 700,000 Jews to be deported from "France, unoccupied territory" indicates that the Jews of the Maghreb were to be included. Theodore Dannecker, head of the Gestapo's anti-Jewish section in Paris, planned to deport the Algerian Jews to Auschwitz, but was thwarted by shortage of transport.
               
In July 1942, a month after Rommel's tanks entered the Libyan port of Tobruk, and threatened Egypt, SS-Standartenführer Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chamber for killing Jews and partisans on the eastern front, arrived in north Africa  entrusted with a similar mission. 
 When the Nazis were forced back to Tunisia, Rauff's einsatzkommando concentrated its work there. Some 2,500 Tunisian Jews died in slave camps, mainly from typhoid, while the Nazis plundered the Jews of Djerba island and other communities. Had the Nazis not been driven back from the gates of the Middle East and the Maghreb they could have finished what they started.

JOSE ABOULKER
 
What happened to....?

Freed from captivity, Jose Aboulker went to London to join the Free French. In October 1943 he was despatched secretly into occupied France, to organise medical services for the Resistance.  Later, representing the Algerian Resistance in De Gaulle's Provisional Consultative Assembly, Jose Aboulker proposed changing the electoral law in Algeria to allow the election of Muslim deputies, who had never previously been admitted.

Thousands of Muslims fought in de Gaulle's forces and took part in the liberation of France. On May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated victory over Hitler, Arabs who turned up with their own banners at demonstrations in Setif, Algeria, were fired on by French gendarmes. This led to riots, in which settlers were killed. French forces retaliated by killing thousands of people in the area. Back in France, Jose Aboulker, who joined the French Communist Party, tried to tell people what had happened.  He told the French National Assembly that Algerians wanted independence. Later, Abouker resumed his medical studies in Paris, going on to become a professor of neurosurgery.

Colette Aboulker, having worked in a military hospital in Algiers, was awarded  a Croix de Guerre for her wartime activities. She gained an international reputation in psychology and alternative medicine. Married to a scientist, and with two sons, one of them a professor at the Sorbonne, she died in 2003 in Jerusalem.

Robert D. Murphy held various diplomatic postings after the war, and was President Eisenhower's personal representative during the 1958 Lebanon Crisis.  After a stint at the State Department in 1959,  Murphy was an adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In 2006, he was featured on a United States postage stamp.

Walter Rauff the Nazi responsible for  killing 100,000 people, escaped justice after the war, and served various governments, including the Syrian secret police and, it is said, MI6 and Mossad. Working for Pinochet's secret police DINA, in Chile, Rauff died there peacefully in 1984.

In the 1950s and 1960s  the Jews of Algeria found themselves caught between French settler intransigeance and the Algerian independence struggle. The Front de Liberation National (FLN) urged Jews to throw in their lot with their fellow Algerians, but  indiscriminate terror attacks, and the adoption of Islam as part of national identity did not encourage confidence. Israeli agents coming to assist Jewish security may have had the opposite effect, particularly when some sided with the settlers' OAS. The great majority of Algerian Jews left the country, ending centuries of history, to try their chances in France or Israel.  Some fared better than others.  But the real loss was to Algeria.

(article previously published in Jewish Socialist  no.65, Winter 2012-2013)