IJS conference looks at impact of Soviet Jews

By JENNIFER DIRECTOR KNUDSEN

article created on: 2008-10-01T00:00:00

Portland’s—and, possibly, the nation’s— first ever conference on the impact of émigrés from the former Soviet Union on our country and Israel recently wrapped up at Portland State University.

An event organized to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Judaic Studies and co-sponsored by PSU’s Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies, the three-day conference drew about 100 people to panel discussions, keynote speeches, a short-story reading, the documentary “Refusenik” and more, all held in PSU’s Broadway Building.

The conference, six months in the planning, drew local and farther-flung guests, including human rights scholar, author of myriad articles and eight books, former director of B’nai B’rith’s United Nations Office and expert on Soviet Jewry, William Korey, Ph.D., of New York.

He also served as B’nai B’rith’s director of international policy research and has taught at numerous colleges, including Columbia University, where he once was history faculty. And in 1973, Korey wrote the seminal book, “Soviet Cage: Anti-Semitism in Russia,” the first work bearing witness to the plight of Soviet Jewry and Korey’s singular goal.

“Getting out Jews—this was my life,” he said during the conference’s first panel discussion. “This was the central focus of my life.”

His work eventually sparked a movement among American Jews.

Over the course of the conference, “The impact of the émigrés from the former Soviet Union on the United States and Israel,” Korey, 86, peppered some comments during panels and keynotes with Yiddish phrases and only once glanced at notes—hand-written on a sheet of lined paper he pulled from a shirt pocket.

The octogenarian focused his expansive and energetic remarks on Soviet and former Soviet Jews’ impact on and relationship with America and American Jews.

Korey noted the great wave of Russian Jewish immigrants from the late-1800s and early 1900s—many attendees’ grandparents and great-grandparents—left a lasting, if false, impression on the imagination of today’s American Jews.

But a lot changed in four generations,Korey emphasized during his first keynote address.

“They were not the ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Jews” from the shtetls, Korey said of a flood of Jews—possibly as much as 700,000—from the FSU into this country from the 1970s through the 90s. (About 1,000 settled in Portland, he reported.) Rather, they were highly urbanized, educated, cultured and irreligious.

American Jews had to rejigger their thinking about who these FSU Jews were.

Jews in the Soviet Union comprised less than 1 percent of the country’s population. And yet, Korey said, 9 percent of all Ph.D.s were Jews, as were 11 percent of Moscow-based scientists.

Simultaneously, American Jews were learning—thanks to the work of Korey and top-level U.S. government officials and those from national Jewish organizations—of their Russian counterparts’ persecution and suppression.

American Jews in the 1970s began organizing mass protests—for the first time ever, Korey said—to alert government officials to the plight of Soviet Jews.

“Jews had never assembled like that, even for Israel,” Korey said, referring to one massive protest in December 1987 involving 250,000 Jews in Washington, D.C.

American Jews’ strong will can be traced to the Holocaust; many carried with them an acute sense of guilt due to their parents’ “failure” to help a suffering and vanishing European Jewry during World War II, Korey said.

FSU citizens must carry internal passports. For the Jews there, whether practicing or not—and most were not—their official document noted their Jewish status.

“It kept the Jews as Jews, even if they wanted to escape it, they couldn’t,” Korey said.

Officials used this information to deny Jews their due—chief among them, education.

Whereas FSU Jews’ roles in academia and the sciences played a major role in the health of the Russian economy, their government in the early 1970s imposed on them a veritable “education tax.” Too costly to pay, many instead sought to leave, Korey said.

According to Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society statistics, in 1977, 28,000 Soviet Jews left for the United States; the year after, 51,000 departed.

Today, nearly a quarter of a million formerly Russian Jews are settled in 44 states and Washington, D.C., including some unlikely places like Anchorage, Ala., Korey said.

And yet, he added, despite HIAS’ numbers there is relatively little documentation on and about the FSU Jews now in this country.

This contrasts with more comprehensive documentation about FSU Jews who fled to Israel, according to Zvi Gitelman, panelist and University of Michigan Judaic studies scholar and author.

The “first wave” of Soviet Jews arrived in the early 1970s in Israel while Gitelman was teaching at Tel Aviv University, he said during a panel.

With access to hundreds of Jews who’d fled, he conducted more than 600 interviews about their experiences. Gitelman’s work on this topic, focusing on their impact on Israeli politics, continues today.

In this country, however, Korey said, “We are faced with almost a blank.” His latest book, “Shattering the Soviet Cage,”—due for publication in his 89th year—will, among other content, shed more light on the Soviet émigrés making America home.

Jewish Americans like Sergey Brin.

Because he’s a Jew, Russian officials denied Sergey’s father his desire to become an astronomer. That was but one reason he and his family in 1979 left Russia behind; Sergey was 6.

Here, Sergey’s parents both are math professors and clearly influenced his academic path. Sergey earned his master’s from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and, soon thereafter became—and remains—highly influential.

Korey said, “You may not know his name, but surely you know what he does.”

In 1998, Sergey co-founded Google; today he’s worth $15 billion, Korey reported. (According to Wikipedia, it’s closer to $19 billion.) “He’s the most important symbol we’ve had of FSU Jews to reach the U.S.”

Korey said Sergey once said to his father, “Dad, you can’t imagine what you did for us.”

Innumerable insights like Korey’s, new to many who attended the conference, were fitting for the IJS’ 25th anniversary, said Congregation Neveh Shalom’s Rabbi Emeritus Joshua Stampfer in the days leading up to the event.

Stampfer said he founded the IJS, housed at Neveh Shalom, in part to expand local Judaic studies, such as at PSU and other area colleges and universities.

Stampfer now is the IJS’ executive director; Sylvia Frankel, religious studies instructor at Lewis & Clark College, runs the IJS’ lecture series; and Merridawn Duckler directs the Portland Jewish Film Festival, co-sponsored by the IJS.

Of the Soviet émigrés who quit Russia by the hundreds of thousands between 1970 and today, Stampfer said: “This event after the Holocaust (and founding of Israel) was probably the most important event in modern Jewish history.”

At least one conference attendee bears witness: Svetlana Taycher, her ex-husband and son in 1994 settled in Portland with assistance from Havurah Shalom member Joan Weil. A pediatric neurologist in the Ukraine, Taycher struggled to learn English, among other great challenges.

Now in family practice at Adventist Medical Center, Taycher declined discussing living with stark anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Instead, she paused, then offered, “I feel very good as a Jew here. … The worst day of my life here still is not like life there.”