Washington Jewish Week - 02.01.2001

 

 

 

Also read:

Harold Paul Luks Biography

January 2003 Interview

---

Washington Jewish Week

'You name it, they need it'

NCSJ chair wants to see more help for Jews in former Soviet Union

by Paula Amann, News Editor 

Sometime in the early 1980s, Harold Paul Luks, then a staffer with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, ran into a Jewish activist in the hallway. Barbara Gaffin of the National Council on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) was organizing a luncheon for Capitol Hill aides on Soviet trade. 

That corridor conversation intrigued Luks, leading him to take up the cause of Soviet Jews. 

The North Bethesda resident, an international trade specialist with the District law firm of Feith & Zell, recently became chairperson of NCSJ, which in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, now calls itself NCSJ-Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia. 

"Being in Washington and having international trade as my field, it turned out for me to be a perfect match with the organization," said Luks, 52. 

For his term as chair, he has two overriding objectives. One is to raise the profile of Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) among Jewish groups. 

"This is the third largest concentration of Jews in the world and their needs across the board go from alef to zayin," said Luks. "You name it, they need it!" 

Second, he hopes to help foster the development of independent community organizations throughout the FSU in buildings owned by local Jewry. That will take, he said, improved restitution of communal properties seized during the communist era. 

"Across the FSU, churches have been restituted and the restitution of Jewish communal properties has been a slow, agonizing process," said Luks, who has seen many such buildings converted into a garage, sports hall and factory. 

He is also worried by what he views as recent Kremlin attempts to divide Russian Jewry. As an example, he points to the harassment of media magnate Vladimir Goussinsky, whose Media-Most television station openly criticized President Vladimir Putin's regime. Goussinsky was also associated with a grassroots organization, the Russian Jewish Congress. 

"In the Soviet Union, there was always an attempt to create official Jewish leadership that was pro-Soviet, anti-Western and anti-Zionist," said Luks. "In Russia today, the government has embarked on a policy of intimidating one aspect of the Jewish community -- the Russian Jewish Congress." 

Back in his early days as a lay leader with NCSJ, Luks gained a new awareness of a Jewish population of which he had known little. 

"If we didn't try to bring them [Soviet Jews] back into the mainstream of world Jewry, it would be tantamount to closing eyes to the loss of 1 million Jews," Luks realized then. "The more I became involved in NCSJ over the years, the more I was stunned by the fact that this issue wasn't at the very top of the American Jewish agenda." 

Yet activists like Luks had a ready tool: the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking U.S. trade with human rights. 

The shapers of this legislation, he said, "realized that the U.S. alone had access to its markets as a lever to open the gates of Jewish emigration." 

Jackson-Vanik, said Luks, "sent a message to Soviet Jews: You are not alone. It gave ordinary people extraordinary courage." 

Throughout the years, Luks and his NCSJ colleagues have written letters, memos and position papers and proposed legislation. They have met, he said, with dozens of congressional aides, U.S. senators and representatives and members of various White House administrations. 

Amid the ebb and flow of world events, their lobbying message stayed essentially the same. 

"If it were possible for Jews to achieve a modicum of freedom, it held out the possibility that others would get something," Luks would argue. "That was in America's interest." 

He recalls spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill on behalf of his chosen cause. 

Today, Luks is witnessing a modest revival of Judaism in the FSU, especially Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. He describes a trip to Minsk last October, during which he toured a Judaica exhibit at the state library and attended a program of Jewish music. The concert audience was multigenerational. 

"Everyone was there because something was driving them toward Jewish life," said Luks. "What we take for granted is [for FSU Jews] like Rip Van Winkle Judaism. They've awakened from a very long oppressive sleep." 

Luks's wife, Debra, has shared many such trips over the years. Their son, Joshua, now a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, has served as an informal in-house critic of his father's writings on NCSJ issues. Their daughter, Jordana, who is studying at Brandeis University, took a trip to Kiev and Israel in December. A third child, Ari, aged nine, has get to get involved with the Jews of the FSU, but there is still time. 

With grandparents from Belarus and the Ukraine, Luks feels a personal kinship with the cause he's been fighting for nearly two decades. 

"When you see people [immigrants] here or visit Russia, sometimes you're struck by the facial features," he said. "You feel like you're running into a second or third cousin."