One of the celebrated Women in Black, the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, Sylvia Becker, who has died aged 93, spent the 1970s committed to the cause before moving to Israel in 1980 and fading back into family life. Leeds-born Sylvia Rosenhead studied dispensing at Leeds University and was evacuated to Stoke Poges and … Read more
The fact that no state in western Europe could ensure the elementary rights of the Jewish people or defend them from the violence of the Fascist executioners, explains the aspiration of the Jews to set up a state of their own. It would be unjust if we were to reject the right of the Jewish … Read more
The nerve agent attack in Salisbury — synthesised at the Skhikany Institute in the city of Volsk, by the river Volga, in 1973 — continues a century long tradition. Last June, Vladimir Putin gave an address to mark the founding of the illegal intelligence service in 1922. He read out a roll-call of legendary Soviet … Read more
Last Sunday Masha Slepak was buried in Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery alongside her husband, Vladimir. For virtually the entire duration of the Soviet Jewry campaign in the UK, they were the central figures among the Moscow refuseniks. For Jewish “tourists” to the USSR, their apartment on Moscow’s Gorky Street was a fixed destination. Masha’s name … Read more
EIGHTY YEARS ago this month, Boris Ginsburg was arrested while walking along a street in Proskurov, a city in western Ukraine.Mr Ginsburg was one of the last leaders of the underground Zionist movement in the USSR. It is believed that he died under interrogation by the GPU, the forerunner of the KGB, in Kaminets-Podolsk. He … Read more
ON CHRISTMAS Day 1970, a few Jewish students and some British members of Menachem Begin’s Herut party, stood shivering in the snow outside the Soviet Embassy in London’s Bayswater Road. We had gathered at short notice to protest against death sentences meted out in Leningrad to two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, the … Read more
Review of Revolutionary Yiddishland By Alain Brossart and Sylvia Klingberg Verso, £16.99 Not all Jews who emigrated to Israel in the last century were Zionists. Some Trotskyists, Bundists and loyal Communists went to Israel as a refuge from the Nazi inferno and Stalin’s gulag. Scarred by such murderous regimes, these survivors of Red Yiddishland represented the … Read more
Review of Where the Jews Aren’t by Masha Gessen (Schoken 2016) pp.171. When should the Jews leave and when should they stay put? This is the general question which the gay, Jewish, American-Russian writer Masha Gessen asks about her own life. She was beaten in primary school, ostracized at secondary school and barred from university in the USSR because of her Jewishness. Her … Read more
”I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947.” So noted the newly emerged diary of Ivan Serov, head of the KGB between 1954 and 1958 during the post-Stalinist thaw, regarding the fate of the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in wartime Budapest. It seemed to confirm that Raoul Wallenberg had not … Read more
The Last Days of Stalin Joshua Rubenstein Yale University Press, £25 When Stalin died on Purim, in 1953, beggars in Jerusalem rattled their tin cans and cried “Haman is dead!” In the USSR, there were public tears and private joy. Huge, inconsolable crowds appeared in the streets and many participants were crushed underfoot in the … Read more