Forward - 08.09.2002

 

 

 

Forward Profile of David Rubenstein

Joshua Rubenstein - "Some Were Poets, All Were Martyrs"

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Forward

An Activist Inspired by Jews' Fate Under Communism

By Lisa Keys, Forward Staff

On the one hand, you could say Joshua Rubenstein is something of a Jewish intellectual hero. He's produced a fat book, "Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee" (Yale University Press, 2001), a study of the so-called night of the murdered Yiddish poets that casts a new light on the persecution of Jews in Joseph Stalin's Russia. The book has made him a hot commodity on the Jewish speaking circuit. This month, on the 50th anniversary of the murders, he's lectured at YIVO in New York and will be appearing next week at a commemorative event in Washington, sponsored by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

On the other hand, as northeast regional director of Amnesty International, he's on a collision course with many Jewish activists, who think the human-rights monitoring group is anti-Israel.

But to the activist and author — and Gene Wilder look-alike — there is no contradiction. "I think my work on Soviet history dovetails very well with my work at Amnesty International," Rubenstein told the Forward. "Obviously I'm aware that many, not all, Jews are sensitive to Amnesty's work. We are critical of particular policies and behaviors of Israel's government. But Amnesty's job is to be tough on anyone."

Many of Israel's supporters were furious last May after Amnesty's annual report singled out Israel for "excessive lethal force" and said the "vast majority" of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces "were killed unlawfully." Amnesty's defenders noted that the report also condemned "widespread" torture in the Palestinian Authority and stated that armed Palestinians "arbitrarily killed 65 Israeli civilians in the occupied territories and 89 Israeli civilians within Israel." Last month Amnesty made news with a report — too little, too late, Israel's supporters charged — that described deliberate killing of Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed groups as "crimes against humanity."

Rubenstein dismissed the criticisms unapologetically. Raised in a "traditional" Jewish home in Connecticut, he continues to maintain a kosher home, and his extracurricular career as a historian is closely linked to Jewish rights. Indeed, he said, his day job with Amnesty is in some ways an expression of his Jewish identity. "I certainly feel my interest, my passion, for human and civil rights is in part an expression of my Jewish values," he said. At the same time, he continued, "I'm also a kid of the '60s, I was involved in the Columbia student revolt of '68, so I'm sure this is all a part of my involvement with Amnesty."

In Rubenstein's view, Jews would have been better off if Amnesty, founded in 1961, had been created sooner. He noted that Stalin's anti-Jewish actions, exemplified by the case of the murdered Yiddish poets, were clear-cut "religious persecution" and would have fallen under Amnesty's mandate if it had been around at the time.

The case of the murdered poets has become something of a crusade for Rubenstein since his book was published last year. In his view (argued in an essay in this week's Forward Arts & Letters section), the affair — 13 Yiddish intellectuals were executed on trumped-up charges on August 12, 1952 — has become shrouded in myths that distort the truth. He's made it a mission to separate the myths from the realities of what really happened in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison 50 years ago next week.

Rubenstein's book on the killings, based on newly available Soviet archival material, including the transcript of the intellectuals' secret trial, makes it clear this was not an attack on Yiddish poets or Jewish culture as such. "What's really shocking about the true story — which no one had really talked about before — is that this case is connected to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Holocaust on Soviet territory," he said.

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was established on Stalin's orders in April 1942 in order to drum up Jewish support for the American-Soviet alliance against Nazi Germany. But, Rubenstein argues, as the atrocities of the Holocaust became known, the committee broadened its functions and began helping survivors. By the end of the war it was a full-fledged Jewish organization. With start of the Cold War, Stalin grew suspicious of the committee and its leaders, despite the fact that they were committed communists carrying out his own orders. Months after the creation of Israel, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and its leaders imprisoned. In 1952, 15 were tried in secret, and 13 of them were put to death. Their fates remained unknown until the Jewish Daily Forward broke the news in 1956.

Still, Rubenstein maintains, the full truth remains largely unknown. "Until we had all these documents, we assumed that these executions were directed against Yiddish culture, Jewish culture in general, in the Soviet Union," Rubenstein said. "That this was yet another episode in official, murderous antisemitism." But, he insists, "The context was not simply that. What made this particular Jewish group vulnerable was their work during the war."

It's true that there was a broader attack against Jewish culture in the Soviet Union during the same period, he said, though it was not directly related to the August 12 murders. "I think it's perfectly appropriate that on August 12 we commemorate all the Jewish cultural figures who were rounded up in the postwar period," he said. "Hundreds of people were arrested, beyond these 15. I do not think we should have a hierarchy of victims and only remember the poets and writers."

Rubenstein's interest in Soviet culture was sparked at Columbia University, where, as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, he studied Russian because he "wanted to learn a language with a different alphabet." A 1970 summer language program brought him to the Soviet Union for the first time, "which reinforced my interest in human rights," he said.

Not long afterward, in 1975, he joined the staff of Amnesty International, where he has remained ever since. He lives in Brookline, Mass., with his wife, Jill Janos, an executive producer at Boston's PBS affiliate, and son, Benjamin, 6.

On the side, Rubenstein said he has been "privileged" to have the time and energy to carve a niche for himself as an independent scholar in Russian history. His first book, "Soviet Dissidents: The Struggle for Human Rights," now out of print, was published in 1990. The follow-up, "Tangled Loyalties" (Basic Books, 1996), was a well-received biography of the iconoclastic and long-lived Russian-Jewish journalist Ilya Ehrenburg. That, he said, led him to train his efforts on "the fate of intellectuals under Stalin and the tragic history of Jews under communism."

As for future plans, Rubenstein intends to remain at Amnesty International while "continuing to write about aspects of the Soviet dissident movement and the Holocaust on Soviet territory," he said.

"Generally speaking, American Jews are not aware of Soviet Jewish history," Rubenstein said. "This was the largest Jewish community in the world for a good part of the 20th century. We've all heard about Babi Yar — the problem is people don't realize Babi Yar was repeated hundreds of times, at other towns, villages, cities where Jews were living when Germans occupied the country. And they occupied half the Soviet Union."

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Some Were Poets, All Were Martyrs

The 50th Anniversary of Stalin's Murderous Assault on Jewish Culture

By Joshua Rubenstein

Fifty years ago, on August 12, 1952, Joseph Stalin's henchmen executed the cream of the Soviet Jewish literary and intellectual world on trumped-up charges of espionage and sedition. The event is remembered in Jewish communities around the world as the Night of the Murdered Yiddish Poets, the culmination of Stalin's murderous assault on Jewish culture and Yiddish literature.

But that is a myth. The truth is less poetic and far more grim. In reality, only a handful of those put to death that day were poets or writers. What the victims of this secret pogrom had in common was that they were all members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the last national Jewish organization permitted to exist under Soviet communism. Their "crime" was that they attempted to speak for their people. Their death was the culmination of Stalin's war against Jewish communal life.

When we understand that this was more than an assault against Yiddish literature, more than just another episode of murderous antisemitism in the Soviet Union, then we can begin to grasp the magnitude of this event in the history of the Soviet Union and its troubled relationship with its Jewish community.

For decades the fact that the victims were associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was unknown or ignored. Today, however, with the opening of government archives in Russia, we have learned the details of the machinery of destruction. We have the transcripts of the trial. We know that there were 15 defendants, not 24 as often stated. We know their names. Only 5 of the 15 were Yiddish poets or writers; the rest were a mix of party leaders, academics and government bureaucrats. The principal defendant was a former member of the Communist Party Central Committee, Solomon Lozovsky. An underground comrade of Lenin and Stalin from pre-revolutionary days, he was a prominent leader in the Soviet Union from its birth and by 1939 was serving as deputy foreign minister. He oversaw the work of the five "anti-fascist committees" created by Stalin in 1941 to cultivate Western support for the Soviet war effort. 

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had its origins in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Two months after the invasion began, on August 24, two dozen Jewish cultural figures, led by the revered Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, issued an international radio appeal to Jews around the world to unite in the struggle against Hitler's Germany. 

This was an extraordinary step for Stalin. Russia and Germany had been allies for two years. America was still neutral. Stalin was trying to make up for his cooperation with Nazi Germany by allowing Jews to appeal to their fellow Jews on the basis of the unity of the Jewish people. Such phrases had not been heard in the Soviet Union since the revolution. 

Over the winter of 1941-1942 Stalin created five anti-fascist committees, one each for women, scientists, young people, ethnic Slavs and Jews. Each had a similar mandate: to drum up Western support for the Soviet war effort. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was chaired by Mikhoels; its members included renowned Yiddish writers like David Bergelson, Peretz Markish and Itzik Fefer, along with leading Russian-language journalists such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.

The committee's best-known undertaking was a seven-month tour by Mikhoels and Fefer of the United States in 1943, with stopovers in Mexico, Canada and England. The tour was a sensation; the pair appeared in a dozen cities, addressed tens of thousands at a mass rally at New York's Polo Grounds and raised millions of dollars for the Soviet war effort. They were greeted with adulation by figures ranging from Albert Einstein and Fiorello LaGuardia to the leaders of Hadassah and B'nai B'rith. It was a stunning propaganda coup for Stalin's Kremlin. 

But while the committee was created to mobilize Jewish support for the Kremlin, it was gradually becoming something very different. The reason was the Holocaust, which profoundly affected the committee's leaders. 

The history of the Holocaust on Soviet territory has never been adequately understood in America. Many have heard of Babi Yar, where more than 30,000 Jews were killed in September 1941 in a two-day spree of machine-gun fire. Few realize that Babi Yar was repeated hundreds of times throughout Soviet territory. Counting only the Soviet Union as it was on the eve of the Nazi-Soviet pact, within its borders of 1939, as many as 1 million Jews were killed. Adding the territory that was annexed to the Soviet Union as a result of the Stalin-Hitler pact — the Baltic states, western Ukraine, eastern Poland — as many as 2 million more Jews are added to that total. In all, between one-third and one-half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust were killed on Soviet or Soviet-occupied territory. In human terms, the Holocaust was a defining experience in Soviet Jewish life. 

There are endless discussions about what the American government knew and when, what the British government knew and when. There is no such discussion regarding the Soviet Union. Soviet journalists, particularly Ehrenburg and Grossman, were the first in the world to understand and describe the full scope and magnitude of the Nazi genocide. By 1943, after the Red Army turned the tide at the battle of Stalingrad, they began discovering the massacre sites. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee learned not only the broad contours of the Holocaust but the fates of their own relatives. Grossman's mother was killed at Berditchev. David Hofstein lost relatives at Babi Yar. Itzik Fefer lost his father, a Hebrew teacher, in the Ukrainian town of Shpola. Every committee member had relatives and friends in the shtetls of Belorussia, Ukraine and the Baltic states.

This deeply affected their work as a committee. They began to develop programs to help survivors, gathered information about the Holocaust and helped people obtain apartments, return to their hometowns, find their relatives and resume their education. They even tried to make contact with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, seeking to send humanitarian supplies on a nonsectarian basis to regions of the Soviet Union with heavy concentrations of Jews.

The activity raised eyebrows in the Kremlin, but it was permitted as long as the war continued. As for the members of the committee, they simply could not resist the appeals of their surviving fellow Jews, who flooded their offices with requests for help. 

One of their main projects was an effort by Ehrenburg and Grossman to assemble a documentary chronicle of the catastrophe while it was still unfolding. Known as the Black Book, it included eyewitness testimonies, first-hand documents that Ehrenburg and other journalists discovered as the Red Army pushed out the Wehrmacht. After the war, Stalin forbade its publication, though a manuscript copy was presented at Nuremberg in 1946. The Black Book itself was not published until 1980, from a manuscript sent to Jerusalem years before.

During the war everything the committee did was under tight rein, like any other institution in Stalin's kingdom. After the war, however, everything it had done was now held against it. With the end of the war a dark curtain of fear and suspicion descended on Stalin's Russia. The Cold War had begun. All contact with the West was cut off. America was now the enemy.

The turning point for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee came with the founding of the State of Israel in the spring of 1948. That September, Golda Meir visited Moscow as Israel's first diplomat and was greeted by cheering mobs. Thousands followed her on her first Shabbat as she walked from the Hotel Metropole, next to the Bolshoi Theatre, to the Central Synagogue on Arkhipova Street. The demonstrations were repeated later in the month, on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, with tens of thousands of Jews pouring out into the streets in celebration and defiance. In Meir's memoirs and other historical accounts, the events are recalled with great emotion. This was a community of Jews who had survived the Holocaust and fought heroically on the Eastern Front. It was natural that they would greet a representative of Israel, the embodiment of Jewish renewal, with an outpouring of enthusiasm. Some observers, however, saw trouble brewing. As Meir's charge d'affaires, Mordechai Namir, wrote in his diary, the Israeli diplomats returned to their rooms that first night overcome with emotion that these Jews remembered who they were and greeted the visitors so warmly. At the same time, Namir wrote, they feared they were witnessing a tragedy in the making. This was not London, Paris, Tel Aviv or New York. This was the Soviet Union. The Israelis were afraid that the Jews of Moscow were forgetting where they lived.

As it happened, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was blamed for these demonstrations. In November 1948 the committee was officially dissolved, its offices boarded up, and the arrests began. Mikhoels was already dead, assassinated on Stalin's orders the previous January. Over the winter of 1948-1949, hundreds more were arrested, among them the 15 who would eventually be put on trial.

For years their fates remained a mystery. Mikhoels's death was presented publicly as a traffic accident, and he was accorded a lavish state funeral in Moscow; nothing untoward was said about him. As for the others, they simply disappeared. Their fate remained unknown until a March 1956 exposé in the Forward by its U.N. correspondent, Leon Kristal, began to uncover the truth. 

It appears the regime intended to conduct an open "show trial," reminiscent of the infamous proceedings against leading Bolsheviks in the 1930s. But things did not go according to plan. During the show trials of the 1930s the defendants had been held for a matter of months, trained for their part, and publicly admitted guilt at trial. But this group of people, held in complete secrecy for three years, did not cooperate. Initially, under horrendous torture, most "confessed" to outlandish crimes of espionage, treason and "bourgeois nationalism," meaning solidarity with Jews abroad. One defendant, the historian Joseph Yuzefovich, would eventually tell the court that after months of torture he would have been "willing to admit being a natural-born nephew of the pope." Several, however, refused to break and continued to defy their tormentors, including Boris Shimeliovich, former director of Moscow's Botkin Hospital. He was beaten so severely that he was brought to interrogations on a stretcher, but he never confessed to any crimes. One by one the others joined him. By 1952 several had formally disavowed their confessions. The regime no longer believed it could handle them in a public trial.

And so the trial was held in secret. It lasted two months, May 8 to July 18. Three military judges presided; there were no prosecutors or defense attorneys, but defendants were allowed to cross-examine one another. Several of the defendants immediately challenged the court, described their torture and insisted they had signed false confessions.

The trial opened with testimony by Itzik Fefer, a Yiddish poet of near-legendary stature who, it was later learned, had been an informer within the committee almost since its founding. In a lengthy mea culpa, he confessed that he and his fellow committee members had been guilty of "nationalist errors," "seeking to unite the Jews of the USSR," building ties to American Jewry and passing state secrets to American "spies." Most serious, he accused the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of conspiring with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to establish a Jewish "republic" in the Crimea as a beachhead to dismember the Soviet Union.

Fefer was almost immediately challenged, first by Lozovsky, then by Shimeliovich, Markish, Kvitko and others. The cross fire between the veteran Yiddish activists, many of whom had known each other for decades and dedicated books to one another, makes for heartbreaking reading even today, half a century later.

Fefer was followed on the stand by Emilia Teumin, the youngest of the defendants, who had worked for the committee in a semi-clerical role. Like Fefer she confessed to "nationalist" crimes and implicated others. She was followed by the Yiddish writers Peretz Markish, David Bergelson and Leyb Kvitko, each of whom denied the accusations and challenged Fefer's credibility.

As the trial wore on, the judges grew increasingly sympathetic to the defendants and skeptical of the charges. The chief judge, Alexander Cheptsov, concluded that the entire case was a fabrication and tried to stop the proceedings repeatedly, but was bullied and threatened by the Ministry of State Security into following it to its predetermined conclusion.

The emotional high point of the trial was the testimony of Solomon Lozovsky, at 73 the oldest defendant. He spoke as a Kremlin insider, someone who had helped formulate Soviet policy from the top. In six days of testimony he demolished the prosecution's case and Fefer's credibility, calling the charges "poetic slander" and "rubbish." "It's like some kind of fairy tale," he said at one point. "There was no Central Committee, no government, just Lozovsky and a couple of Jews who did everything. It's astonishing."

Perhaps the most dramatic moment, however, came at the opening of his testimony, when Lozovsky spoke not as a government official or a founder of the Communist Party, but as a Jew.

"As you know," he told the judges, "my family name is Dridzo. This name cannot be translated into any language. When we asked our father what it meant, he told us that, according to a story passed down from father to son, a distant ancestor of ours was among the 800,000 Jews who fled from Spain in 1492, when the chief inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, issued a decree compelling Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave the country." His father, he continued, was a Hebrew teacher and poet who had taught him Hebrew and Russian. "Anyone who denies his background is a bastard," he said.

The implication was clear: You the judges are no better than Torquemada.

Two months later, he was dead.

Joshua Rubenstein is the northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. He is the co-editor with Vladimir Naumov of "Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee" (Yale University in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001).

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