During U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz’s visit to Moscow in April 1987, the dialogue on human rights reached a new level: groups headed by the U.S. and Soviet deputy ministers were created under the auspices of the two foreign ministries to discuss specific humanitarian problems and their solutions.

During his visit, Shultz attended a Passover seder for refuseniks at Spasso House, the American ambassador’s residence. “The determination of the Refuseniks amazed me,” Shultz recalled. “We held a seder to encourage them but I realized that they have given me far more strength and resolve than I could possibly have given them.”[1]

On the following day Shultz met with Gorbachev, who said to him, “How is it that every time you visit here, you meet with those nasty Jews? Why don’t you meet with other people? We also have nice Jews here.”

“I told him,” Shultz recalled: “You don’t like them. I have a business proposition for you. We flew here in an enormous plane and there isn’t one person in my delegation who would not be willing to yield his place for them. Let’s load them on that plane and get rid of them for you.”[2]

The two deputy foreign ministers were both remarkable personalities. Richard Schifter, born in 1923 into a Jewish family in Vienna, had encountered manifestations of Nazi antisemitism from childhood. After the Nazis came to power in Austria, his parents needed to leave the country immediately but because there were entry quotas to the U.S., he was sent there alone at the age of fifteen. The entire family that remained in Austria was subsequently annihilated by the Nazis. Schifter managed to complete law school in the U.S. and participate in World War II. His personal fate to a considerable degree influenced his interest in human rights, which he had been dealing with for several years before he was offered the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Many years later, in 2010, when refuseniks organized a meeting in the Knesset to thank Jewish activists in the West for their support, the 87-year-old Schifter came for the occasion. He said that for him this meeting represented the restoration of the links of time that has been broken by the Nazis: every person that he was able to aid in attaining freedom helped ease the wounds of his terrible past. When he said this, his voice trembled and there were tears in his eyes.

Anatolii Adamishin, a professional diplomat and talented individual who had no previous experience in the field of human rights, understood that he was indebted to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnaze for his appointment.

 

“Before Shevardnadze it was absolutely clear that I couldn’t go higher than what we called the working level,” recalls Adamishin. … “His request [for Adamishin’s appointment] remained unanswered for a long time. One evening while the case was still pending Shevardnadze turned to me and asked: ‘Tell me please, Anatoly Leonidovich, but frankly: Are you a Jew?’ I rarely have good answers to unexpected questions but that time I did: ‘If I were a Jew I would be proud of that.’

“Then why does everybody say that you are a Jew?” he asked. ‘Maybe because I’m so clever,’ I joked.”[3]

 

Both had complex relations with the bureaucracy in their own ministries. Schifter frequently clashed with the Soviet Union division, which contained officials who had been dealing with issues of humanitarian cooperation long before his own appointment. Adamishin’s situation was even more complicated. The CSPU Central Committee, the KGB, and the collegium of his own ministry─each had its own opinion on humanitarian issues and the level of freedom permissible in the “country of victorious socialism.” As Adamishin notes, when he and Schifter began their discussions on human rights:

 

I didn’t realize how far we were below international standards or how strongly Soviet ideology rejected the notion of civil liberties, which were deemed to be a hollow concept in contrast to substantive economic and social rights. …[4]

Within our small group, we had clear ideas as to what persons prepared a draft of such and such document. After some discussion and editing, I would forward the draft to Anatoly Kovalev, first deputy minister, who would masterfully polish our suggestions. He would then send it to Shevardnadze, who as a rule didn’t soften our initiatives unless he decided, knowing the political climate in the highest reaches of the system, that it was not a good time to “tease the geese.” Shevardnadze would sign the document… either by himself or with other agency chiefs, which was then sent nominally to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but in reality to its departments.

Often, before submitting a memo, the minister would consult with Gorbachev. As far as I remember, Mikhail Sergeyevich did not always readily accept our radical proposals, although he spoke well of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He apparently did not want to traumatize society, particularly the party bureaucracy. He probably remembered Khrushchev’s fate. As a rule, Shevardnadze did not protest very strongly, in part because he wanted to avoid doing anything to undermine Gorbachev’s authority. In retrospect, it is clear that this tactic was an erroneous one. Many things failed to be done just because the top leadership avoided bold steps and abrupt breaks with the past. This encouraged the conservatives in the Central Committee departments who when they had to process our memos, would water down our far reaching proposals. Ultimately, a draft became a decision that required action by the secretariat of the Central Committee or the highest authority, the Politburo. Mostly they approved what they received.[5]

 

In 1987 the number of exit visas issued climbed upward. Whereas 904 people left in all of 1986, in 1987 the number reached 8155, eight times greater. In that year the number of prisoners of Zion and long-time refuseniks who were released also increased. Among those who received visas were Ida Nudel, Semyon Shnirman, Vladimir Tsukerman (March), Nadezhda Fradkova (April), Yurii Fedorov, Yulii Edelshtein, Semyon Borovitskii (June), Evgenii Aizenberg (August), Yosif Begun, Vladimir Brailovskii, and Vladmir Lifshits (September). The prisoners of Zion Lev Elbert and Vladimir and Maria Slepak also received visas. The regime tried to expedite their departure in order to create an atmosphere of real progress on the eve of the Washington summit set for December 7-10. Several well-known long-time refuseniks joined the list including Pavel Abramovich, Aleksandr Yoffe, Solomon Alber, Yakov Rakhlenko, Mark Lvovskii, and Yulia Ratner. Immediately after the summit, Feliks Kochubievskii received a visa to be followed by one of the most famous refuseniks, Professor Aleksandr Lerner, and the prisoners of Zion Leonid Volvovskii and Lev Shefer.

The departure of long-time refuseniks only added oil to the fire. Those who had been refused on grounds of secrecy began to demand written replies indicating what, in fact, was restraining them─their enterprise, the ministry, the KGB, or other power structures. If they managed to receive a reply, they tried by legal means to clarify whether the secrecy restrictions were justified. They also demanded that detention on secrecy grounds be restricted to a maximum length of five years. The “poor relatives” strove to obtain the abolition of the requirement that remaining relatives consent to their departure or at least the admission of other proof of remaining relatives’ lack of material claims. The “second generation” group, with their parents’ support, worked to attain the possibility for the independent emigration of children whose parents were refused on secrecy grounds or for other reasons. Activists demanded more simplified procedures for assembling and submitting documents for emigration and the adoption of procedures used in other countries that had signed the Helsinki Accords. They also criticized the law on emigration adopted by the Supreme Soviet. The number of various actions increased to such a degree that it’s impossible to describe all of them in the format of this work.

The year 1988 represented a watershed. Significant, if not decisive, progress was achieved in several processes that were occurring in parallel: the liberalization of emigration policy created the feeling that by the end of the year emigration would become practically free; the dropout level (neshira) reached 90 percent, and Israel introduced flights via Bucharest and Budapest; the major U.S. Jewish organizations began to realize that expenses for Jewish immigration to the U.S. could significantly exceed the allocations foreseen by the governmental budget and also exceed the budgetary capacity of the Jewish organizations. A direct consequence of that understanding was the adoption of a series of decisions by the end of the following year including the separation of the streams of immigration to Israel and the U.S. and the introduction of an entry quota to the U.S.

Now let us look in these processes in greater depth.

 

Liberalization of emigration.

“When did the U.S. succeed in convincing the Soviet Union to relinquish the framework of family reunification in favor of free emigration?” I asked Richard Schifter?[6] “It was one of the first changes, and it occurred in September 1987,” he replied. “I exerted pressure regarding this issue on my discussion partners in the Soviet Foreign Ministry─on Reshetov, who was a Jew but was opposed to it, and on Glushkov and Adamishin. I let them understand that Shultz was very sensitive to this issue, which truly was the case. My partners conveyed the message to Shevardnadze, who, in turn, attained the necessary support against the opponents of free emigration.”

A few months after that discussion, the changes reached OVIR. According to the new rules, Jews were able to submit applications without invitations from first degree relatives. Moreover, “from the first days of March 1988, new application forms for going abroad were introduced in OVIR. The record of work experience was limited to the fifteen years preceding the application and it was not necessary to have the application certified at one’s workplace or residence. Some questions were shortened but one still had to indicate the workplace of relatives, including those who were not applying to leave. The head of the Moscow OVIR, S. Aplatov, also declared that restrictions had been removed on visits to Israel at the invitation of former Soviet citizens and on short-term visits from Israel to the USSR.”[7] “Almost 1400 Soviet Jews visited Israel between January and April 1988.”[8]

Refuseniks on secrecy grounds decided to test the significance of the fifteen-year limit on work experience in the new application. “On March 16, ten activists who had been dismissed from their respective enterprises over fifteen years earlier visited UVIR of the Soviet Interior Ministry, where they were received by the deputy director of UVIR, Mikhail Udovichenko. In response to their inquiry, Udovichenko answered that the change had been introduced in order to simplify filling out the questionnaire and was not related to any maximum term for regime restrictions.[9] The new rules were better than the previous ones but still had many defects and “on May 12, the leading Moscow activists submitted to Soviet authorities proposals regarding the currently revised emigration law.”[10]

In May 1988, a historic Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting took place in Moscow. For the first time in Soviet history, Reagan was allowed to mingle openly with various categories of Soviet citizens, including dissidents and refuseniks.

 

Drop-outs

The figures on emigration climbed steadily upward after the summit. The numbers arriving in Israel, however, remained at the previous level. The growth in emigration was entirely on account of the increased number of immigrants that did not go to Israel, which evoked serious concern in the government of Yitzhak Shamir, a firm opponent of neshira.

In 1987 only a quarter of the 8155 emigrants chose to live in Israel. In 1988 emigration grew to 18,961, but aliya constituted 2173 people. On the national plane this was a catastrophe. The movement for a Jewish national revival, whose ideological basis was Zionist ideas of national revival and the reinforcing of national statehood, but whose formal framework remained the departure on Israeli visas for reunification with relatives in Israel, had degenerated into a mercenary flight from the country. Israel began to prepare countermeasures. At the end of 1987, so-called semi-direct flights via Bucharest, that is, flights that went only to Israel, were organized.

 

Direct flights

The activity of Pamiat and other antisemitic nationalist groups had intensified to such a degree by the summer of 1988 that rumors of possible pogroms were circulating. There was a sound basis to those rumors. The first mass outbreak of ethnic violence in recent Soviet history occurred in Sumgait (Azerbaijan) on February 27-28, 1988, although in that case it was Armenians, not Jews, who were massacred. In the Baltic countries, national fronts had already been formed that were demanding greater cultural and political independence. The KGB was well aware of eruptions of popular dissatisfaction that had appeared in other places as well. The Jews were only too aware of the traditional great temptation in Russia to channel popular anger against the Jews, the more so because the ground had been well prepared by decades of poisonous Soviet propaganda. Requests for invitations from Israel numbered in the tens of thousands a month and quickly increased; in 1988, 100,000 invitations were requested and in 1989─300,000. The rapid rise in the number of invitations requested in combination with the liberalization of emigration policy suggested that emigration could quickly reach hundreds of thousands a year.

When, in your opinion, did a real breakthrough in Soviet emigration policy occur? I asked Richard Schifter.

It happened in September 1988. I was in Moscow and decided to proceed from there to Israel. I requested a meeting with Prime Minister Shamir and told him that I had just arrived from Moscow and I had the feeling that the gates of emigration were opening. Moreover, the number of people who would be permitted to emigrate would be significantly higher than the number who would be allowed to enter the U.S. Israel, therefore, ought to prepare housing and employment for a massive influx of new immigrants. Shamir then began to speak about other issues, and I decided to repeat what I had said initially. I remember that Eli Rubinstein, a former cabinet secretary, interrupted me and said, “Don’t forget that the name of our economics minister is Nisim (Hebrew for miracles).

Beginning in September, emigration figures again began to rise: in September 2373 received exit visas; in October─2587; November─2874; December─4874. The tendency was clear, but the dropout rate of those that didn’t go to Israel exceeded 85 percent. Starting in the summer of 1988, real measures were taken to reduce the dropout rate to a level that was acceptable to the Americans and Israelis. On June 19, 1988, the Israeli government introduced direct USSR-Israel flights via Bucharest.[11] The Romanian national airlines provided the flights from Moscow to Bucharest and there the immigrants transferred to either Israeli or local flights to Tel Aviv. Lishkat hakesher arranged the flights so that it was practically impossible to change one’s route in Bucharest. There were no missions there from HIAS or the JOINT, which had dealt with the immigrants in Ladispoli and Vienna; the Lishka handled the entire transit process. An agreement was reached with the Romanian government.

With a dropout rate of 85-90 percent, not only the American government but also many American Jewish organizations that had to share the burden of receiving the Soviet Jews were not prepared for such a large influx. The American government had long ago been willing to accede to the Israelis’ wishes but feared a stormy protest by the Jewish establishment in the U.S. The latter became more accommodating when they realized that massive Jewish immigration to America could entangle the government and Jewish establishment in complex financial and legislative problems.

Agreeing to accord refugee status to 120,000 people annually from the entire world, the U.S. government allocated the necessary amount in the budget. The figure was adjusted annually but the general structure remained unchanged. The immigration authority saw to it that the quotas for various countries were distributed fairly. As long as the total emigration from the USSR was insignificant, Soviet Jews were covered by the quota. The Americans were already somewhat uncomfortable, however with the fact that the Soviet Jews who had come to Ladispoli in Italy were no longer under threat and were able to go to Israel, but they were still regarded as refugees.

When the scale of Jewish immigration to America started to acquire enormous proportions, it became imperative to find a way out of the situation. Shoshana Cardin, who replaced Morris Abram as president of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), played an important role in the search for a solution.

When did you become president of the Conference? I asked her.

In 1988, but I had already been working together with Abram for a year and participated with him in meetings with Shultz and other members of the U.S. administration, in particular with Richard Schifter. We gave Schifter a list of people waiting for exit visas and saw to it that the Russian side received the request to grant them. I then continued to discuss with Schifter the topics that Morris Abram had broached such as giving separate visas to those who wanted to go to the U.S. I thought it was wrong to leave the USSR on an Israeli visa in order to land in the U.S.

Many of our activists, including myself, thought the same.

I have to tell you that at the time, that was not a popular point of view. I literally had to fight against organized resistance that maintained it was a matter of “freedom of choice,” which is a very important thing in the U.S. Abe Foxman, from the Anti-Defamation League, invited me to speak to the board of his organization because he shared my views. He himself lived for three years in a displaced persons camp after World War II, waiting to be admitted to the U.S. He thought that if you wanted to reach the U.S., you should submit documents to it. The problem was that the U.S. did not have the necessary diplomatic instruments in Moscow to issue entry visas in large amounts. It was also unclear how the Soviet leadership would react if the U.S. wanted to issue entry visas in Moscow. We thus first had to convince the U.S. administration and then together try to persuade the Soviet administration to agree to this. A very complicated task. I appeared before the board of the Anti-Defamation League and presented my point of view, which it supported. It was the first all-national organization that supported separate immigration paths─Israeli visas to Israel and American visas to the U.S. It was assumed that the USSR would permit American planes to land in Moscow or it would transport immigrants on its own planes to New York. We wanted direct Moscow─New York flights.

Wasn’t there already a direct connection?

There was, but not for refugees.

How did the process develop further?

At the time of the first signs of a possibly huge influx of Jewish immigrants to the U.S., it was not clear how they would be financed or supported during the period of integration. Earlier, the Jewish Federations dealt with that. Although the Jews used to arrive with the status of refugees, the Federations decided not to depend on government money for the absorption process. When we realized that the numbers could become enormous, an anonymous committee was formed at the initiative of Mark Talisman, a former congressional aide who had worked on formulating the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The committee included Talisman, Max Fisher, a prominent philanthropist and chairman of the Council of United Jewish Communities of America, myself, and Mandell Berman, former president of the Council of Jewish Federations. In addition to the four of us there was a representative of the State Department and Ivan Feller, head of the U.S. Immigration Service. One of Feller’s duties was to ascertain from what countries the refugees were arriving and to justly allocate quotas for various places. He proposed that Soviet Jews receive 25000 places out of a total number of 120,000 refugees from all over the world that the U.S. agreed to take in annually. This was even a little more than their fair share, but I said, “No, in view of the circumstances inside the USSR, 25000 is too little.” I proposed a figure of 40000, and after some discussion everyone agreed on that number. We were subsequently informed that it had been confirmed. For several years we did not say anything to anyone about our committee nor did we plan to disclose the information in the future; therefore, the committee remained without a name. Three years later, however, when we were all inspired by the successes of aliyah, Max Fisher told this story publicly.

Was the Liaison Bureau pleased?

They wanted all Jews to go to Israel. Some Jewish activists in the States declared that I was their flunky insofar as I agreed to such a procedure. Others, in Chicago, for example, said that it was dishonest to deprive immigrants of free entry into the U.S. After all, the immigration rules had also been changed. Now Soviet Jews were facing the same restrictions as others. A person had to have a first degree relative, not some uncle or aunt.

They still arrived as refugees?

Yes, but on the same basis as all other refugees.

Did the Lishkat hakesher try to lobby for a change in the rules before 1989?

Yes, but earlier I had no chance of convincing American Jewish organizations about this. In 1989 we decided that it needed to be done and we did it quietly, not telling anyone.

The laws concerning the entry of Soviet Jews into the U.S. were changed at the legislative level. On October 1, 1989, Congress adopted the Lautenberg-Spector Amendment. It defined the categories of Soviet citizens who had the right to immigrate to the U.S. with the status of a refugee (Jews, Evangelical Christians, and members of the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church) and determined the new emigration rules. For entry into the U.S. it was now necessary to complete a complicated process in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Only applications of those who had close relatives in the U.S were considered. Those who possessed entry visas to Israel issued after that date were no longer considered refugees. The U.S. Congress determined the entry quotas on an annual basis. In 1990 it was 50,000 people (40000 of them were for Jews).

After the entry rules into the U.S. were changed, Yakov Kedmi, head of the USSR division in Lishkat hakesher, decided to tighten the rules of entry to Israel as well in a way that would prevent the bubble of neshira from blowing up again. Those emigrants who intended to go to the U.S. now had their own direct track, and no one could accuse Israel of carrying out a selection of Jews, saving some and leaving others to the whim of fate. Kedmi remembered well how the innocent concessions to American millionaires in 1971-72─dispatching their relatives from Vienna directly to the U.S.─quickly burst open the dam and led to the constantly growing stream of noshrim (dropouts). In order to avert a recurrence─after all, in addition to the U.S., there were also Canada, Australia, and Germany─all possible loopholes for neshira had to be closed back in Moscow. This was the purpose of the changes that Kedmi introduced into the application procedure.

“At the basis of the new rules,” wrote Kedmi, “was an understanding of the habits and psychology of emigrants from the USSR. Those who received an exit visa [from the USSR] to go to Israel after the introduction of the new rules received an entry visa to Israel only after they had presented a ticket for a flight via Bucharest or Budapest, where it was practically impossible to change one’s route.” [12] Another element in this procedure was that entry visas were issued only after 5:00 p.m. of the evening for which the plane ticket had been purchased. At that hour the Austrian embassy was already closed and those who were trying to outsmart the system were unable to go there and request a transit visa to Israel via Vienna. Kedmi then took the following step:

 

I met with the Austrian consul in Moscow and I explained the Israeli consular delegation’s new procedure for issuing entry visas after a certain date. This was related to a change in our policy and to the new rules introduced by the Americans. Without going into the details, I requested that transit visas to Austria not be issued without the existence of an entry visa to Israel as is required by international law…. Those who had received visas before that date could continue to travel via Vienna because the Americans would still receive them there…. That was a dramatic turning point. We intended to dispatch to Israel all Jews who left with Israeli visas and to end the shameful neshira. I had the possibility of ending it once and for all. I knew that if I would be successful, that policy would change the aliyah to Israel and more than that─Israel and its future.”[13]

 

Kedmi and the staff of the Lishkat hakesher were successful. From the start, repatriates were given to understand that the issue was now closed and henceforth the rules would be that way. There were no disturbances, revolts, or appeals to public opinion. The procedure functioned like clockwork.

At the same time a decision was taken to establish alternate routes for bringing immigrants to Israel. Kedmi related:

 

In the summer of 1989, I began to think about arranging Moscow─Israel flights via a more convenient country for us─Hungary. I met with a representative of the airline Malev in Moscow and suggested the following: Malev would transport olim from Moscow to Israel via Budapest. The planes would fly from Moscow on special flights with immigrants on board, would land in Budapest and immediately fly to Israel. I told them that in the future they would not even need to land in Budapest; they would simply change the number of the flight while in the air and would continue the flight to Israel. We thus attained practically direct flights without formally declaring them as such. The Malev representative wanted to know why it was so important to us not to land in Budapest, and I explained to him that it was because of the difficulties in assuring the security of the passengers during disembarking and boarding. That was a real consideration, but the main one, of course, was to avert the development of a situation with neshira analogous to that at Ladispoli or Vienna. The company liked the proposal but needed the “go ahead” at the political level and the government was procrastinating. We decided to wait.[14]

 

Kedmi then decided to try to reach an agreement with the Soviet airline Aeroflot. At the end of 1989 that could have been possible, but at that point the Soviet Foreign Ministry official responsible for relations with Israel and Palestine, one Chistiakov, interfered and canceled the planned meeting with the Aeroflot representatives. He belonged to the old school of Soviet Orientalists, who were extremely hostile to Israel. Kedmi met with him and explained rather harshly that if the members of the Israeli consular delegation would be limited in their meetings, the exact same restrictions would be imposed on the work of the Soviet consular group.

Well aware that Aeroflot was unable to discuss international flights without the foreign ministry’s approval, Lishkat hakesher arranged it so that at a press conference in the U.S., Shevardnadze was asked about the possibility of direct flights between Moscow and Tel Aviv. “That is a commercial, not a political, issue, and the government of the USSR does not interfere in such matters,” replied Shevardnadze. His reply was printed in a Soviet newspaper, after which Kedmi phoned the director of Aeroflot, and talks began between Aeroflot and El Al. Although Aeroflot asked for an exorbitant price to transport the repatriates─$700 per person, Israel agreed to that. An agreement was quickly signed, and on January 1, 1990, an El Al plane landed in Moscow. It brought the Habimah theater troupe to Moscow and took olim on the return flight. Thus began true direct flights.

In connection with the first direct flight from Moscow, there was great excitement in Israel. David Bartov, the head of Lishkat hakesher, begged everyone to show restraint and refrain from any kind of public statements. Unfortunately, in one of his speeches, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declared that Israel was facing the start of a large aliyah, and a large aliyah needed a large country. His words provoked an angry reaction from the Arab world and cut the USSR to the quick. Shevardnadze ordered a halt to the direct flights. The agreement between Aeroflot and El Al was suspended. The flights were renewed over a year later under different circumstances and different conditions. By then it did not have the same significance as it did in 1990.[15]

The number of departures on Israeli visas continued to climb in 1989: in January─3308 people; in February─2947; March─4900; April─5507; May─4783; June─5593; July─5694; August─6776; September─10,243; October─11,558; November─2920; December─9330. A total of over 70,000 for the year.

The Shamir government listened benignly to Schifter and Kedmi’s warnings about an aliyah of over 100,000 for 1990 but they did not believe them. That year the budget allocated a sum for the absorption of 45,000 people.

At the end of 1989, emigration became practically free. Frightened by the rampage of blatant public antisemitism, the deteriorating living conditions, and the growth of social and inter-ethnic tension, Jews streamed to OVIR. The U.S. limited the number of potential immigrants by quotas and rules. The number leaving for Israel was limited only by the work capacity of the Moscow customs and OVIR. The majority of Soviet Jews at that time would have preferred to go to the U.S., but it was now necessary to have a first-degree relative there, and, even in that case, the waiting period could take years. Not willing to remain for that long a time in the chaotic USSR, where fear of pogroms was intensifying, people chose Israel as the most acceptable alternative. The collapse of the Soviet Union only reinforced this tendency.

The basic task of the Zionist movement inside and outside the USSR was thus accomplished. The remaining challenges were transferred to Israel in the sphere of absorbing the mass immigration.

The overwhelming majority of veterans of the Jewish national revival movement left the USSR in those years, but the movement did not die out. New activists appeared─perestroika Jews who believed in Mikhail Gorbachev and the possibility of reforming the USSR. A significant number of Jews remained, for various reasons unable or unwilling to leave, among them even some veterans of the movement, who assured the ideological continuity during the new stage. While continuing to deal with emigration, the movement began to exert greater effort to reinforce a Jewish national identity, revive national culture and Jewish communal life, and to fight antisemitism.