Although the Kremlin’s harsh repressive policy in the first half of the 1980s, which was accompanied by numerous threats, interrogations, searches and arrests of activists, dealt a serious blow to refuseniks’ activities, it did not succeed in crushing the Jewish movement.The powerful accomplishments of the late 1970s, the significant increase in the number of refuseniks and the appearance of new activists in their midst, as well as the steady and ever stronger Western support helped the movement to withstand the hardships.It retained the basic goals of the struggle, seeking to attain the rights to free emigration, national culture and religion, Hebrew study, professional self-expression, and the right to educate Jewish children in the framework of national culture.

Emigration

After the invasion ofAfghanistan, the total number of exit visas issued was sharply reduced.Having reached a peak in 1979 of 51,331, the amount fell to21,648 in1980, the year of the Olympics, and in the following year it went down to 9,448.To a considerable degree, the comparatively high figures in 1980 and 1981 were the result of applications that had been received earlier.After the Afghan invasion, the authorities made the procedure for accepting documents more complicated, dragged out the processing period to two years or more, and sharply increased the number of refusals.Under such conditions, the number of people wanting to apply for exit visas also declined. In 1982 the number of visas issued fell to 2692; in 1983 to 1314; and in 1984 to 896 people.

In May 1982, Yurii Andropov, a member of the Politburo who was also chief of the KGB from 1967-82, replaced Leonid Brezhnev as head of the CPSU and of the state. Under his leadership, the already fierce ideological struggle against Zionism became even harsher.On April 1, 1983, the press published an appeal for the creation of an Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public that was signed by eight Jews: D.Dragunskii, M.Kabachnik, G.Gofman, S.Zivs, B.Sheinin, G.Bondarevskii, G.Zimans, and A.Kolesnikov.On April 21, 1983, after a three-week propaganda campaign, the committee was established.

Commenting on the declining figures of Jewish emigration, the deputy chairman of the committee, Samuil Zivs, declared at a press conference on June 6, 1983 that “the process of Jewish emigration from the USSRis practically completed.”[1]

I’d like to add a personal digression here. In December 1988, at the height of the perestroika period, I met Zivs personally.He was attending some official event at the Moscow Movie House at the same time as we were holding a meeting with an Israeli consular delegation at our Jewish caféVltavaopposite the Movie House.Zivs looked unhappy and lost.“Mr.Kosharovskii, I heard a lot about you,” he said and offered his hand.I involuntarily withdrew mine.I then looked into his deeply suffering eyes, at his trembling lips, wrinkled old face and … I shook his trembling, cold fingers. He stepped closer to me, almost dropped his head onto my shoulder, and tears flowed from his eyes.Then he almost whispered into my ear: “God bless you, you don’t even know how right you were.Those swine killed my only son.”

To return to the 1980s. None of the activists doubted that Zivs was lying.Emigration had been reduced by forceful measures.At the same time, the circles of refuseniks and those close to them had been expanded considerably by the addition of people who, having freed themselves of the suffocating fetters of Soviet ideology, were completely ready to emigrate. These people wanted to get together and to study Hebrew and Jewish history and tradition. Most importantly, however, they wanted a renewal of emigration, and they were prepared to fight for that goal.

Those who by that time had already spent seven to ten years in struggle and refusal presented a different picture. Some of them were serving time in prison or camps, others had just been released from imprisonment, and still others had such a weighty dossier at the KGB that the least addition could tip the balance to arrest; they no longer had the resources to continue their activity of the 1970s. Moreover, some of them simply were tired, burned out, and no longer wanted to take a risk. Others became involved in underground work.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of refuseniks continued as before to write and sign protest letters, participate in discussions, and meet with foreigners.

In addition, the open struggle in the “action” style beloved of Western correspondents continued: demonstrations, collective visits to institutions of power, and so forth. Now, however, it was the youth who followed that path.

On December 11, 1980, agroup of 150 Jewish activists held a demonstration in the reception room of the Supreme Soviet, demanding exit visas.[2] One of the organizers and a participant in the demonstration was Aleksandr Shipov, a mathematician who had applied for an exit visa in 1979 and had not received any reply.

How many people were with you? I asked Shipov.

We had a rather large group, around one hundred people. These were primarily not refuseniks but people in the so-called category of extensive waiting. We had not received any reply for a year or two─that’s what started to happen inMoscowin 1980. We led groups of people to the Supreme Soviet, the prosecutor’s office, and to the reception room of the Council of Ministers, each time to submit letters. The most active year was 1980.

Who were we?

There was Makar Limanov and Yura Shtern was involved in it. It was a little separate from the general refusenik movement.

The majority of the organizers of those demonstrations, including Shipov himself, received exit visas in 1981.

On December 21, 1981, the first day of Hanukah, fiftyMoscowand sixty Odessa Jews held a sit-down demonstration near the Lenin Library inMoscow.

Every December 24, demonstrations were held in solidarity with the prisoners of Zion. In 1980 the demonstration took place near the Lenin Library. Five participants were arrested for fifteen days.[3] Hunger strikes in protest against the refusal of exit visas were held in those years by Jews in Kishinev (thirteen people in May 1981), Kiev (the Cherniatskii family in September 1981), in Kharkov (Yurii Tarnopolskii, a long hunger strike in October 1981), Moscow (the family of Boris Gulko, October 1981) in Leningrad (Nadezhda Fradkova, December 1983), and in other cities. On March 15, 1982 a group of Kiev refuseniks began a series of revolving hunger strikes: each family in turn fasted for 24 hours and sent a letter to the authorities demanding a review of its visa application and the release of arrested activists. On April 22, six Odessa refuseniks joined the Kievans’ revolving hunger strike, and on April 29, another twelve Moscow refuseniks joined the chain. [4]

On February 28,1982, astudent, an eighteen-yearLeningradrefusenik named Mikhail Tsivin went toRed Squareto protest his refusal. The only son of an ordinaryLeningradengineering family, he was held back by his parents’ objection to his departure. He held up a poster saying “Let me go toIsrael” and was arrested for ten days. A month and a half after the first demonstration, he chained himself to the railing of Saint Basil’s Cathedral inMoscow’sRed Square. He was arrested again for fifteen days. In 1987, he received a visa and left forIsrael.

Going to Red Square with a placard was a desperate act at any time but in 1982 it was like suicide. What were you counting on? I asked Tsivin.

That ultimately they would let me go. Earlier, a refusenik did the same thing; he was arrested for fifteen days and then allowed to leave. I was just eighteen years old….

You chained yourself to St. Basil’s Cathedral?

Yes. A chain and lock. The poster was made of tin with paper. It folded up like a harmonica so that I could hide it under my clothing and it wasn’t torn during the demonstration.

How long did you manage to stand there?

I think a couple of minutes until the nearest policeman ran up to me.

Seminars

The authorities did not manage to close all the seminars. In place of the Leningrad Kanovich-Vasserman-Utevskii humanitarian seminar that had been dispersed in the summer of 1981, Mikhail Beizer organized a cultural-historical seminar with a restricted number of participants and closed sessions. The seminar thus successfully operated in the gloomy 1980s, ceasing to exist after Beizer’s aliya to Israelin 1987.[5]

In Moscow, the Hebrew teachers’ seminar was replaced by a dibur set up in 1982 under the direction of Yulii Edelshtein, which functioned up until his arrest in September 1984. Lev Gorodetskii ran another seminar on Hebrew teaching methods that operated until the beginning of the 1990s. Both the dibur and the seminar retained the traditions of the previous seminar and allotted time to reports on historical, religious, and general cultural topics.

TheMoscowphysics seminar, officially called the Seminar on Collective Phenomena, was able to keep going despite Viktor Brailovskii’s arrest in November 1980. “The number of people attending the seminar declined. Around two dozen attended,” I was told by Aleksandr Yoffe, an active participant in the seminar. “In those years the meetings were not as large as in Viktor’s time. Foreign guests used to come, but they were prevented from entering.”

The Fifth International Seminar on Collective Phenomena, which had been scheduled for the end of September 1981, had to be cancelled. The sixth such seminar was held in Stockholm, not Moscow. It took place on December 1 and 2, 1983. Inthe authors’ absence, the reports of the refusenik scientists Viktor Brailovskii, Yakov Alpert, Naum Meiman, and Aleksandr Lerner were read aloud. [6]

In 1979-1980, the New York Academy of Sciences, one of the oldest scientific societies in theU.S., began to issue certificates of membership to refuseniks with a scientific past. It was done not only to include us in the academy’s informational space but also to afford refuseniks an additional degree of defense against, among other things, charges of hooliganism and parasitism. In our situation the second was, perhaps, more important than the first.

Culture

On March 1, 1983, several hundred Soviet Jews conducted a hunger strike in solidarity with the convicted Hebrew teacher Yosif Begun.[7] One of the most consistent and original Hebrew culture activists, Begun was loved and respected for his uncompromising character, unbelievable bravery, and remarkable ability to withstand all tribulations. He served three prison terms but that had no effect on his participation in the struggle. Begun joined a protest demonstration the day after he was released from his third term.

Although it became extremely dangerous to publish periodicals, Aleksandr Razgon published in Moscow from 1982-85 adigest of the Soviet press on Jewish topics; in Leningrad the Leningrad Jewish Almanac, which was popular in Jewish circles, was put out from 1982.[8] A considerable amount of material of a cultural-historical and instructional nature was published in samizdat in Moscow and distributed around the country.[9]

In the cities that had been occupied by the Germans during World War II, activists honored the memory of the Jews who had been shot by the fascists. They would regularly visit the sites of the mass slaughter of the Jewish population at Rumbuli (Latvia), inOdessa, andKievand place wreaths there. The regime was opposed to the visits of Jews from various Soviet cities to those sites, and activists were frequently subjected to administrative arrests of ten to fifteen days.

As mentioned earlier,[10] the week of the biannual Moscow International Book Fair was a genuine holiday for those interested in Jewish culture. The incredible popularity of the Israeli pavilion was a resounding slap in the face to the government-sponsored anti-Israel propagandists.

Through our own channels, we received information about the approaching fair, but Western radio stations publicized it even more. Jewish activists from various cities around theUSSRwould take vacations in order to attend both the fair and the numerous meetings that were organized for members of the Israeli delegation.

The regime’s efforts to prevent the Israelis’ participation in the fair were rebuffed by the fierce resistance of the American delegation, which threatened to boycott the fair if the Israelis were not allowed to participate. The Israelis utilized this additional protection in full measure.

The Israeli delegation permitted visitors to take books from the exhibition stands, and if they were caught with “the goods” at the exit, the Israelis affirmed that they had given the book to the visitor. During the delegation’s two week stay, there were many meetings with refuseniks. The delegation always included interesting figures─poets, musicians, singers, and academics. The popular singer Sarah Sharon, who came with the delegation in 1981 and 1983, sang together with us and taught us new songs.

The Israeli organizer of their exposition, Dita Gurevich, a senior worker in the Israel Export Institute, was an energetic, elegant Sabra with Russian roots. With her quick comprehension of a situation, she won us over when she came as head of the Israeli delegation in 1985. As the local coordinator with the Israeli delegation, I worked with Dita and we have remained friends ever since.

In 1977 our participation in the fair was minimal, Dita told me. We had two delegates, not too many books, and our pavilion was small. In 1977, theUSSRdidn’t even want to let us in but the Americans interfered, saying that if the Israelis weren’t allowed in, they also wouldn’t come.

Was it taken more seriously in 1979?

The delegation was doubled and we brought considerably more material. In 1985, when I headed the delegation, we had a normal-sized pavilion of145 square meters. I brought 3500 books with me.

We took away about 2000 of them.

Yes, but we had to carry them on our backs to the hotel. The KGB agent assigned to me, a young fellow named Volodia, said to the members of our delegation, “How can you let the lady carry such heavy bags?” He knew, of course, that we were transferring books.

In 1987 it was already the period of glasnost and perestroika but we continued to give away our books as before although it bothered the KGB less. In 1989, representatives of forty publishing houses accompanied me and we brought 12,000 books. Then it was no longer necessary to re-direct them. We openly left them for activists and didn’t bring anything back toIsrael.

The process of transmitting books to refuseniks is worthy of a detective novel. Long before the book fair, agreement was reached on the items of particular interest to the refusenik community. Generally it was instructional material, Israeli songs, slides and postcards with views ofIsrael, and souvenirs. Each day the Israeli delegates would bring books to their rooms in the hotel. In parallel with the Israeli delegation, several pairs of tourists would come toMoscowwhose sole task was to bring the books from the hotel to the refuseniks’ apartments. They did that every evening. We prepared about ten “clean” apartments, that is, unknown to the police, to which we would bring the books. At night, a specially prepared team would forward the books to three to four even “cleaner” apartments. After some time, the books in those apartments were sorted out and sent to Hebrew teachers and activists inMoscowand other cities.

Religion

Even in the 1980s, the regime put less pressure on the religious channel than on other ones. Evidently, it did not believe in the possibility of a serious religious revival in an atheistic country, even with respect to other religions.

The refuseniks treated religion more seriously. Even for the secular refuseniks, Judaism and its attributes were among the attractive and basic elements of national identification; religious holidays were carefully marked, many adult activists underwent circumcision, and there was mass attendance at synagogues on Simhat Torah and Yom Kippur. A galaxy of talented fellows appeared who observed religious precepts and immersed themselves more and more in religiosity. Among them were many activists who taught Hebrew (Shakhnovksii, Edelshtein, Kholmianskii, Lidskii, Kontorer, Geizel, and others), participated in publishing journals (Essas, Vasserman), organized seminars and other public measures (Nudler, Vasserman), put on Purimspiels (Geizel, Gurevich), wrote and signed protest letters, and so forth. I have already mentioned the three streams in the religious revival─Habad (Rozenshtein, Shakhnovskii), the Lithuanian direction (Essas), and religious Zionists (Dashevskii, Kara-Ivanov, and Polonskii).[11] Their activity continued even in the difficult 1980s in almost full measure, and the religious Zionists managed to get started and develop in this period. I spoke on this topic with Pinhas Polonskii, an activist of the religious revival in the USSR and now a lecturer in Judaism at Bar Ilan University and the editor-in-chief of the Machanayim publishing house.

My first teachers of Judaism were Misha Shneider and Reb Avrom Meller; I used to go to as many underground Torah lessons as possible in Moscow. Gradually, I, like many others, began to observe precepts, and the current Machanayim organization evolved out of our group of Jewish school and student friends.[12]

Pinhas, you didn’t have any intellectual conflict with Judaism?

None. I feel strongly that if there is no meaning in the world, then I have no meaning either. I chose the position that the world has meaning, and therefore I am religious.At the same time, understandably, I greatly respect and value science.I deal with the issue of harmonizing religion and science.Science can explain many things very well but there are several fields that it principally doesn’t touch.

We organized the study and teaching of Judaism inMoscowin the following manner.We had an internal lesson attended by ten to fifteen people at which we studied by ourselves on the level of the Talmud and commentaries.Every participant prepared, read an excerpt of the Talmud and the commentaries on it, and gave a report.Each of these people was involved in another one or two lessons a week that we coordinated. One person, for example, conducted a lesson for beginners and the other for more advanced.Each person was aware of the general picture and accordingly would send students to the others.There were about fifteen lessons a week in our system, and it functioned, one could say, like an underground yeshiva.About two hundred people in total studied in our system from 1984 to 1987.That was the first part of our work.The second part was cooperation with Hebrew teachers.We would go to them to study Hebrew and they would come to us to study Judaism.We sent our teachers to them on various holidays and we also set up an underground publishing house as an aid in the preparation of Judaism instructors.Vitia Fulmakht, Grisha Levitskii, and Natan Brusovania dealt with preparing and distributing this literature and I did the writing.

My editing and publishing activity began in 1980 when there was a demand before the Passover holiday for a guide to celebrating the festival.As there are two Seder nights in the Diaspora, on one night you go to a teacher and on the second, you conduct it yourself for relatives and friends.We conducted the Passover Seder with commentaries in Russian: we took an existing translation of the Hagadah and wrote commentaries to the translation on the basis of Hebrew sources, typed it all up, and photocopied it.Our direction was modern orthodox and religious Zionism.At the time, there were no conservative or reform Jews inMoscow. There was a strong Habad group with whom we were friendly but we didn’t belong to it.

Did the KGB harass you in Moscow?

We were young and crazy and didn’t think much about dangers; we tolerated the KGB visits to our apartments to disrupt lessons and other forms of pressure such as tailing and visiting work places with a grain of humor.At some stage they intensified the pressure.In theUSSRit was forbidden to teach religion to minors and they threatened to arrest me.We then decided on a protective move: I stopped teaching Judaism to children and began to write books at home.When we would be summoned to the KGB, we usually declared that we had no disputes with them; we simply wanted to leave the country.

How would you divide up the stages in your group’s development?

The first stage was when we were students and engaged in visiting the synagogue and celebrating Jewish holidays.That was up to 1980.Then we became a separate organization and began to conduct our own underground yeshiva and publishing house.That was until1987. In1987 we established the legal Machanayim organization in Israel.

Who belonged to the Machanayim group during the refusenik years in Moscow?

The basic group of activists consisted of Zeev and Tania Dashevskii, Ira Dashevskaia and her husband Misha Kara Ivanov, Leva and Marina Kitroskii, Yasha Belenkii, Leva and Ira Genkin, Boria Yusin, Misha and Yulia Stoliar, Semen Yantovskii and his wife Erlena Matlina, Vitia Galperin, Reuven Degtiarev (Ben Shalom), Meir Levinov, Grisha and Ida Levitskii, Natan and Ania Brusovania, Dov Kontorer, Grisha Kantorovich and Tania Manusova, Sasha Beskin, Yura Lugovik (Frumkin), Mark and Ira Zelikman, Misha Tuvin, Valia Lidskii, Mark Shvartser, Ania Grinberg, Misha Golosovskii, and many other active people around. Also my wife Nehama and myself, Pinhas. Zhenia Yaglom and David Karpov started together with us.

We arrived inIsraelin August1987. InRussiaI never thought that I would deal with Judaism inIsrael; I thought I would return to programming.Mendelevich met us and said that here, too, that kind of work was needed and together we began to organize Machanayim. He then went to study in a yeshiva and withdrew from our activities. When we arrived, half of our group was already in Israel and the second half remained back there─hence the name Machanayim (from Biblical Hebrew for two camps). Now I would say that we have more students inAmericathan inRussia. Every September I travel toAmericafor a month and a half and cover 25 cities, delivering some 50 lectures to Russian-speaking Jews.Practically nothing remains of Mahanaim inRussia.

Pinhas, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a personal question: how many children do you have?

Eight children and eleven grandchildren.

There were certain charismatic figures in the refusenik community that didn’t really belong to any one of the three basic religious streams in the refusenik community. One of the most striking individuals was a graduate of MGU’s philology department, Boris Berman.A broadly educated, charming person with a deep knowledge of secular and Jewish culture, he possessed an immeasurable pedagogical talent. At the age of twelve, he read Graetz’s History of the Jews, which became a turning point in his life.

“At age 25, Berman was a professional philologist, a specialist in Russian and English literature, a philosopher and a pedagogue,” I was told by Mikhail Yakhilevich, a well-known Jewish artist and one of his former students.“In the mid 1970s he discovered the world of Torah; he then studied Hebrew and Aramaic independently and at the beginning of the 1980s, he began to teach the Bible to his friends.Word of his brilliant lectures spread quickly among theMoscowcreative intelligentsia.Twice a week, writers, artists, art critics, and directors used to travel to Berman at the outskirts ofMoscow. It was the first attempt to enlighten people in the creative professions about Judaism.His striking and free interpretations of the weekly Torah readings helped to reveal the unexpected meaningful connections concealed during an ordinary reading.”

Another student of his, Zoia Kopelman, a doctor of philology and a teacher atHebrewUniversityinJerusalem, shared her impressions with me:

Boria was not the only Torah teacher in Moscow, but his method was unique.He didn’t come to reveal some Truth to us that we, in our unenlightened state, did not possess.He didn’t reject, either openly or by implication, our cultural baggage and did not devalue it in the face of some other “true knowledge.” He didn’t study Torah with us in order to transform our daily life.He shared with us what he himself was drawn to and what aroused his creative thought.He demonstrated that understanding the Scriptures is interesting, demands intellectual tension, arouses the soul, and invites creativity.For Boris, reading the Torah was always a process leading to discovery.He succeeded in … stimulating an impulse whose effect was lasting.Even if one didn’t manage to make it to the next lesson, the thoughts aroused by Boria and the mysteriousness and depth of the Torah that he revealed lived inside you, perturbed you, and urged you to return to the text and start reading it again.It seems that the meaning of the eternal reading of the Torah consists precisely of this.

Berman received an exit visa and left forIsraelin 1988.Quickly achieving recognition from rabbis and academics, he obtained a teaching position inBarIlanUniversityand in the prestigious Har Etsion Yeshiva in Alon Shvut, where he organized a seminar for the Russian-speaking intelligentsia.It is difficult to say what heights this unusual and gifted person might have attained if his life was not cut short by a tragic automobile accident on February 20, 1992.He was just thirty-four years old….

Some activists penetrated deeply into the field of Jewish knowledge and became professional religious functionaries. Mikhail Khanin, a graduate of the philosophy department of MGU, defended his candidate’s dissertation [roughly equivalent to a Ph.D.in the West] on the sociology of reading in 1976.Inparallel with his work in the sociology sector of the Lenin Library, he worked as a guard at the Moscow Kauchuk factory, where he met the Jewish movement activist Mikhail Nudler.He had no previous acquaintance with Jewish culture and he was ashamed of his Jewish origin.After coming in contact with the culture of his people, he felt how much “the Soviet regime had robbed me, spiritually decapitated me and distorted my notion of my own people.”[13]

Khanin recalls:

After I had studied Hebrew for several months, Nudler brought me to Ilia Essas’ seminar on the Torah.In the philosophy department at MGU, I had been taught to work with primary sources and therefore I wanted to read Jewish texts not in translation or a paraphrase but in the original, in Hebrew.I began to study with Essas and he directed me at first to Misha Schneider’s Bible lessons and then to Volodia Shakhnovskii to study the Bible with Rashi’s commentaries.I then used to go to Uri Kamyshov for several years to study the Talmud.I began to teach Hebrew in 1979, while remaining a senior worker at the Lenin Library for another two years.

Naturally, when I started going to the synagogue, studying Torah, learning Hebrew and also visiting groups of conversational Hebrew, a file was opened on me.I found a plausible excuse, however, explaining that as a sociologist, I was interested in Hebrew culture and was studying the language and Jewish tradition.Of course my explanation didn’t convince my boss, but I was not dismissed from work in exchange for the promise not to emigrate to anywhere or to submit an application. Toward the fall of 1980, after the second Koktebel seminar, I worked out a final version of the methodology that I had been cultivating for seven years while teaching Hebrew.

Starting in 1980, I tried organically to combine the teaching of conversational Hebrew with the study of the foundations of Judaism.Among those who studied with me were Yosif Begun, Valera Prokhorovskii, Boria Berman, David and Inna Kvartin, Boria Ginis and his wife, and Yuri Yurev, who became a Habad leader on the level of Grisha Rozenshtein.I was fortunate that I was able to occupy an intermediary, neutral position between the original two and later more numerous groups of people who had turned to faith.

How many years did you teach?

Seven years, and I was in refusal practically seven years, including the two years that I waited for an official invitation.I applied at the beginning of 1981 and left in1985.In1979 and 1980, I already had advanced groups after the two seminars in Koktebel.

There was a problem in reviving destroyed communities: in order to establish minyanim [minimal group of ten males required for public prayers] and set up all the traditional Jewish social institutions, one needed to overcome the shortage of qualified people necessary for the communities’ existence such as a shohet, mohel, melamed, and sofer stam (scribe of holy writings on parchment). I started to study to be a sofer stam secretly in 1981-82 with two old men, the last scribes in Moscow─Reb Sholom Krimenets and Velvl Shakhnovetskii. Later, I was joined by Mark Lisnevskii and my student Sasha Bark. Starting in the early 1980s, the Jewish community of England and the U.S. Agudat Yisrael would regularly send to Moscow and Leningrad rabbis and professional religious emissaries who taught baalei tshuva (the newly religious) the specialties of shohet and sofer. In 1983 Reb Sholom Krimenets suggested that I write religious bills of divorce (gittim) in the synagogue. For decades there had been no rabbinical court (Beit din) in the USSR. The Beit din that arose in the early 1980s at the Moscow Choral synagogue consisted of two men: Avrom Shaevich, who had studied at the Neolog yeshiva in Hungary, and Rav Yisroel Shvartsblat. I studied the religious divorce laws at the level of a rabbinical court and I consider my participation in the rabbinical court for a period of three years as a most important function. It was the only place in the USSR where Jews could divorce according to religious law and solve related problems. There were many requests from traditional communities─dozens and perhaps hundreds. I have in mind not only refusenik families but also communities in the Trans-Carpathian area, North Caucasus, Caucasus, and Central Asia. We gave not more than a dozen or a dozen and a half gittim in a month.

As the last accredited sofer in the USSRduring the year and a half before my departure, in addition to writing gittim, I had to deal with checking and correcting tefilin, mezuzahs, and Torah scrolls. In 1985, inview of my activity, the KGB decided to get rid of me.I arrived in Israeland in December 1985, I was asked to represent Soviet baalei tshuva at a Agudat Yisrael convention in New York. Essas was then still in refusal. Back in Israel, a few months later I preferred my new specialty of a sofer to the old one of sociologist. Having received the appropriate local certification of my professional qualifications, I did an additional course of practical work and continued to improve my qualifications. I have been engaged in this activity for over 25 years.

Did you find yourself a political party or religious home?

In the old days I was not accepted into graduate school at MGU because I didn’t belong to the party.That’s how I have remained!

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