This week marks the seventh anniversary of the start of the first Leningrad trial which culminated in the death sentences for Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov and lengthy prison terms for the other defendants. After protests from the west, those death sentences were commuted to 15 years in strict regime labour camps. The Leningrad prisoners … Read more
SIXTY years ago, one of the most momentous events to influence the destiny of the Jewish people took place in Petrograd. The Russian Revolution occurred within a few days of the Balfour Declaration, and both events have, in hindsight, deeply permeated Jewish consciousness and caused many to flock to either one of the utopian … Read more
To the English courtroom, he was Victor Ben-Ari. To the judge, the charge was a simple case of obstruction. To the audience, he be another foreigner making a nuisance of himself. The pedestrians of the Bayswater Road knew better. They had seen a small mustachioed klbbutznik starve himself for over a week near the Soviet … Read more
I first met Ilana Friedman two years ago in Tel Aviv. Seeing her in the Anglo-Saxon civility of a Hampstead flat, I was struck by the uncanny resemblance she bears to her famous sister, the Moscow refusenik, Ida Nudel. At 43, Ilana is three years younger than Ida and is her only living relative. She … Read more
The formal opening takes place in Belgrade next week of the follow-up conference of those states which signed the Helsinki in the summer of 1975. The agreement, officially titled “The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe”, was designed to represent the west’s formal recognition of the ideological division of Europe … Read more
Soviet Jewry, like the Soviet Union itself, is not ,simply one unit, but a collection of communities within Judaism. Best known are the Ashkenazim who live on the western borders, to where a large proportion of Anglo-Jewry traces its origin. The Republic of Georgia, on the other hand is the home of a fiercely independent … Read more
Why did you involve yourself in an attempt to recreate Jewish culture in the USSR? My friends and I realised that one of the main problems of Soviet Jewry now is the problem of survival. Our activities were not so much directed at recreating Jewish culture but at helping those who wished to know something … Read more
Activists in Moscow believe that a mass show trial of Helsinki watchdog committee activists might soon take place if the hard-line policy of the Kremlin against its critics continues. Such a trial could follow the pattern of the notorious Moscow show trials of the 1930s. The news that Professors Benjamin Fain and Mark Azbel have … Read more
NO JAIL FOR THOUGHT, by Lev Kopelev. 268 pages. (Seeker and Warburg) £6. Lev Kopelev is best known in the west not so much for his own writing but for his friendship in the camps with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was Kopelev on whom the great author based the character of the idealistic Jewish Communist Rubin … Read more
There have been ominous developments in the case of Anatoly Shcharansky, the arrested Jewish leader and human rights activist. Among Moscow Jews who have been taken for interrogation to Lefortovo prison, where Shcharansky is being held, is Professor Benjamin Fain, who was asked for details of Shcharansky’s work within the Jewish movement. The line of questioning … Read more