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July 2012/Tammuz 5772
Yosef Mendelevich Returns 22, “leaped into the headlines, as he and a group of 15 Jews and two non-Jews, desperate to escape the USSR for Israel, were arrested at Leningrad’s Smolny Airport, as they were to board a 12-seat airplane which they had planned to hijack to fly under the Soviet radar to freedom.” Born in the Latvian capital Riga in 1947, Rabbi Mendelevich had grown up in the USSR in an atmosphere pervaded by antisemitism. His father was arrested in one of many waves of antisemitic persecutions. Bereft and alone, his mother died shortly afterwards. At 16, he worked days to support his father and three siblings and studied engineering at night. By the time he was 19, Rabbi Mendelevich had founded an underground organization that struggled for Jewish rights, including the right to study Torah.
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Show Trial Six months after the thwarted attempt to escape to the West, the KGB’s showtrial prompted international demonstrations, which led to high-level political pressure, for which the Soviet Union was unprepared. In response, the Kremlin commuted the death sentences of two of the defendants and lessened the sentences of several others. The trial sent Mr. Richter and “hundreds of us from the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry marching with a coffin carried on our shoulders at the Soviet UN Mission, the fires of our passion burning against the bitter winter cold.” Then came years of waiting, which the prisoners spent in the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s penal labor-camp system, and activists spent devising plans for rallies and demonstrations to raise support for them.
“While Yosef; Sylva Zalmanson; her husband, Edward Kuznetsov; her brothers, Wolf and Israel; Hillel Butman; Mark Dymshitz; and others endured the prisons and labor camps of the Gulag, trickles of information fueled our hopes. Season after season, we kept raising our protest banners with their names and photos, kept lobbying Congress, the White House, and State Department to maintain pressure on a succession of Kremlin leaders, and built an American and international network to broaden our cause. We learned of Sylva’s defiant words in the KGB’s kangaroo court. Of hunger strikes by Yosef and others for their elemental religious, medical, and human rights in the brutal Gulag. Of their awareness of our campaign on their behalf that transcended national borders,” said Mr. Richter. “A Grave” Rabbi Mendelevich, who today lives in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem where he teaches at the Machon Meir Yeshiva and identifies with the Religious Zionist movement, described prison as “a grave.” “There’s total silence. It’s supposed to make you feel as if you’re forgotten,” he said. One of the prison stories he tells concerns his efforts to observe Shabbat. When he started to clean his cell, his guards were astonished. During one of his cleaning sessions, he discovered a nail protruding from the wall. He used it to etch a depiction of candles into the wall and imagined lighting them. “When I ‘lit’ these candles and said the blessing, they were truly radiant,” he said, adding that he would manage to save some of the week’s meager ration of bread to use as “challah” and a piece of torn material as a challah cover.
“What a magnificent Shabbat I had. In this way, I felt myself completely free. I had my own private geula in prison,” he said. At one point, he and another Prisoner of Zion, Natan Sharansky, were thrown into the same notorious Vladimir Prison, where they had cells across from one another. Rabbi Mendelevich remembers teaching Mr. Sharansky some Hebrew and the bizarre ways they sometimes found to communicate with one another. On one occasion, they pumped the water out of the toilets in their cells and spoke through the toilet bowls. When news reached the prison that Mr. Sharansky’s father had died, Rabbi Mendelevich prepared the Kaddish prayer for him on a tiny piece of paper and threw it over the wall of their adjoining exercise yards. Jackson-Vanik While the prisoners of Zion suffered, activists such as Mr. Richter kept the rallies and protests on their behalf moving. A direct result of the activists’ efforts was the Congressional debate which resulted in the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment. Named for its sponsors, Sen Henry M “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Rep Charles Vanik of Ohio, the law, still on the books, denies “most favored nation” tax-credit status to countries that restrict emigration, which is considered a human right. The bill passed both houses of Congress unanimously and was signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975. In its wake, Ms. Zalmanson was granted an early release from the camps by the Soviets and allowed to emigrate to Israel. Solidarity Sunday Rally “Five years later, in 1979, with Senator Jackson leading the opposition to the SALT II US-
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