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
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 standards … 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