Colin ShindlerWe will wait for months and years. We will wait all our lives if necessary, but we will not renounce our faith or our hopes. We believe: our prayers have reached God. We know: our appeals will reach people. For we are asking: let us go to the land of our forefathers. WHEN GOLDA MEIR … Read more
Ten years after the Leningrad Trial : Part 2 the Plot is Foiled Shortly after the Six-Day War, in. the groundswell of pro-Zionist activity among Russian Jews, Mark Dymshitz, a former pilot, hit on the idea of taking an aircraft and, with other Jewish activists, escaping from the USSR. H enlisted the help of Hillel … Read more
Since the Revolution, there have always been Soviet Jews wishing to repatriate to Israel. The trauma of the Holocaust spiritually created small groups of young assimilated Jews blindly searching for an explanation. The establishment of the state of Israel provided an interpretation and a visible goal. Such clandestine groups evolved with the political thaw that … Read more
WITHIN THE past few days opponents of apartheid commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre when South African police gunned down 67 Africans (graphically pictured above). Afrikaanerdom would not bow before the winds of change or even sway in the breeze. Sharpeville was a political watershed, for it turned South Africa into a feared … Read more
Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovitch ed. Solomon Volkov No Travel like Russian Travel: by Nora Beloff For decades, Dmitri Shostakovich was presented as the personification of all that was best in Soviet culture. On his death in 1975. the accolades from the high and mighty cattle cascading down in a torrent of grief. Behind the … Read more
IN 1947, the Soviet Union supported the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a sovereign Jewish national State. It promoted the cause of a new Israel with great vigour within a de facto recognition of the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem. In November, 1947, stating the case for a Jewish State, Andrei Gromyko … Read more
Throughout the centuries Jews have been associated with the struggle for human rights – not only for themselves, but in spirit, and more often in practice, for the community in which they lived. This was, perhaps, an outcome of the ethical teachings of Judaism that, in the depths of persecution and personal suffering, a Jew … Read more
While I appreciate Zeev Ben-Shlomo’s general review of my book, “Exit Visa,” I cannot accept the .contention that the Moscow Helsinki Committee did not play an important role in the life of the Jewish emigration movement between 1976 and 1978. Jewish participation in the committee’s work was not the action of a few isolated desperate … Read more
The trial of Iosif Begun is scheduled to begin tomorrow (Friday) in Moscow. He is charged with parasitism and could receive one year’s imprisonment. He has been on hunger strike in his cell in protest against the charge. Begun ‘was arrested the day before the publication of the Izvestia article in which seven Jewish activists … Read more
The acting president of the Board of Deputies, Mr Greville Janner QC MP is to be commended for his condemnation of the Orlov trial at last week’s meeting of the deputies. This is the first time that a leader of Anglo-Jewry has officially spoken out on a Jewish platform on behalf of a Russian democrat … Read more