Jewish Exponent - 11.22.2001

 

The Jewish Exponent

‘Silent No More’: Philadelphia Led Efforts to Rescue Soviet Jewry

By Zara Myers 
Jewish Exponent Staff

This article is part of a series of 50 historical articles tracing the past century of Philadelphia Jewish life, from the founding of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia to the present. The series, which is under the academic aegis of Gratz College, is being jointly sponsored by Gratz, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Jewish Exponent. Andrew Harrison, Ph.D.

Special to the Jewish Exponent

In 1973, Philadelphia attorney Joseph Smukler and his wife, Connie, traveled to Israel, where they encountered a Russian restaurant owner who begged them to help his cousin, Irma Chernyak, a brilliant scientist in Leningrad who was fired because of the desire to emigrate to Israel.

Shocked at what they heard, the Smuklers traveled to the Soviet Union in 1974 with Enid and Stuart Wurtman, a couple actively involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. Following that trip, Joseph Smukler and Stuart Wurtman decided that Philadelphia needed a unified agency to aid refuseniks — Soviet Jews refused the right to emigrate — and to improve the quality of life for Soviet Jews.

Meeting in Wurtman’s sukkah in that October, Smukler and Wurtman formed the Soviet Jewry Council, and placed it under the auspices of the Jewish Community Relations Council.

The creation of the Soviet Jewry Council linked Jewish establishment leaders with grass-roots reformers, a feat most American Jewish communities could not accomplish.

Its first major program involved the performance of former refusenik dancers Valery and Galina Panov at the Philadelphia Spectrum. Ed Snider, owner of the Spectrum, allowed for some of the proceeds to fund the council’s activities. The $17,594 netted from that performance, combined with funding from JCRC, provided the Soviet Jewry Council with money to begin its programming.

Education and activism

The group capitalized on every opportunity to inform and educate the public about Soviet Jewry. Sometimes, this involved unorthodox tactics, such as dressing up outside a local cultural or sporting event as prisoners or animals, both of which symbolized how the Soviets were treating Jews.

Soviet Jews who applied to emigrate were often fired from their jobs, beaten, arrested, had their phones disconnected and their mail censored.

Part of the education process involved arousing sympathy by distributing photographs and biographies of refuseniks. This enabled the public to match faces with names.

Typical campaign publicity might read: “This 10-year-old Jewish girl does not have a winter jacket and will freeze this winter. Can you help?”

Within days, a coat would arrive.

Council travelers to the Soviet Union also smuggled in coveted items, such as Jewish calendars and history books, clothes and medicine. They risked their own lives by sneaking out taped and written messages by refuseniks. Their visits boosted Jewish morale and demonstrated to Soviet officials that people in the West cared about them.

One of the group’s most effective ways of developing emotional ties with refuseniks involved its Bar/Bat Mitzvah twinning program. This project symbolically paired an American child during the religious ceremony with a refusenik child in absentia.

To raise money, the council conducted an annual “Silent No More” dinner-dance. Prominent people like Walter Mondale were honored as a way of increasing interest and fundraising. An annual Simchat Torah rally also provided a venue for politicians, former refuseniks and Soviet Jewry activists to raise public consciousness.

Other strengths exhibited by the council involved its skill at working with Pennsylvania politicians on a bipartisan basis, crafting local interfaith alliances, promoting women to leadership roles and incorporating Jewish youth into the movement.

A pivotal point in the Soviet Jewry movement occurred in December 1987, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met with President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C.

Sensing a precious opportunity to advance the cause of Soviet Jews, Philadelphia’s Jewish community mobilized all of its resources for a rally during the diplomatic summit. Philadelphia sent 12,000 people to the event, an impressive contingent among the 250,000 who attended, making a significant impact on the ensuing exodus of more than1.3 million Soviet Jews in the early 1990s.

Andrew Harrison, Ph.D., is a historian/archivist for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J. He is the author of Passover Revisited: Philadelphia’s Efforts to Aid Soviet Jews, 1963-1998.