RUSSIA

RUSSIA, former empire in Eastern Europe; from 1918 the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.), from 1923 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.); from 1990 the Russian Federation. -Until 1772 ORIGINS The penetration of Jews into the territories now incorporated within the Union began in the border regions beyond the Caucasus Mountains and the shores of the Black Sea. Traditions and legends connect the arrival of the Jews in armenia and georgia with the ten lost tribes (c. 721 B.C.E.) or with the babylonian exile (586 B.C.E.). Clearer information on the settlement of the Jews in these regions has come down from the Hellenistic period. Ruins, recordings, and inscriptions on tombstones testify to the existence of important Jewish communities in the Greek colonies on the Black Sea shores, Chersonesus near sevastopol , kerch , and other places. Religious persecutions in the byzantine empire caused many Jews to emigrate to these communities. At the time of the wars between the Muslims and Persians during the seventh century many Jews emigrated to the Caucasus and beyond, where they established communities which during subsequent generations maintained relations with the centers of Jewish learning in Babylonia and Persia. From the early Middle Ages, Jewish merchants, referred to in Hebrew as holkhei Rusyah, regularly traveled through the Slavonic and Khazar lands on their way to India and China. They traded in slaves, textiles, hides, spices and arms. It was during this period that the accepted term in Hebrew literature for those lands – Ereẓ Kena'an ("Land of Canaan") – appeared (originating in the etymological interpretation of the name "Slavs"), and the merchants were said to be familiar with the "language of Canaan" (Slavonic). It is clear that the conversion to Judaism of the kingdom of the khazars during the first half of the eighth century was to a certain degree due to the existence of the many Jewish communities in this region. Jews from the Christian and Muslim countries which bordered upon the Khazar realm were later attracted to the Jewish kingdom. Possibly refugees who escaped from this kingdom formed one of the elements of Russian Jewry in later generations, though their proportion in the composition of this Jewry is still under discussion. The kingdom of the Jewish Khazars is referred to in ancient Russian literature as the "Land of the Jews," and warriors of the Russian epic poetry wage war against the Jewish warrior, the "zhidovin." According to one tradition, Prince Vladimir of Kiev conversed with Jews on religion before accepting Orthodox Christianity. At the same time, there were Jews living in Kiev. Ancient Russian sources mention the "Gate of the Jews" in Kiev. The Jews lived in the town under the protection of the prince, and when the inhabitants of the town rebelled against Prince Vladimir II Monomachus (1117) they also attacked the houses of the Jews. Extracts of religious disputations held in Kiev between monks and clergy and Jews have been preserved in the early Russian religious literature. There were also Jewish settlements in chernigov and Vladimir-Volynski. The Jews of Kiev also communicated with their coreligionists in Babylonia and Western Europe on religious questions. During the 12th century, there is mention of R. Moses of Kiev who corresponded with rabbenu jacob b. meir tam and with the gaon samuel b. ali of Baghdad. The invasion of the Mongols (1237) and their rule brought much suffering to the Jews of Russia. An important community – rabbanites as well as karaites – subsequently developed in Theodosia (feodosiya , Crimea) and its surroundings, first under Genoese rule (1260–1475) and later under the Tatar khans of Crimea. FROM THE 14TH CENTURY From the beginning of the 14th century, the Lithuanians gained control over western Russia. Under Lithuania the first extensive privileges were granted to Jewish communities in the region at the end of the 14th century. Under Poland-Lithuania the wave of Jewish emigration and large-scale settlement from Poland to the ukraine ,   volhynia , and podolia from the middle of the 16th century laid the foundations at the close of this century for most of the Jewish communities of the Ukraine and Belorussia, and their Polish-Jewish culture and autonomy (see great poland ; councils of the Lands). In 1648–49 the chmielnicki massacres devastated the Jews of the Ukraine, and some years later the Muscovite armies annihilated the Jews in the cities of Belorussia and Lithuania that they had captured. During the 18th century, the Jews suffered severely during the revolts of the haidamacks . With the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, most of the Jews of Lithuania and the Ukraine, and at the beginning of the 19th century also those of Poland, found themselves under Russian rule. During the 19th and 20th centuries Russian Jewry was, however, essentially an organic continuity of the Jewry of Poland and Lithuania in the ethnic as well as cultural respects. PRINCIPALITY OF MOSCOW In the principality of Moscow, the nucleus of the future Russian Empire, Jews were not tolerated. This negative attitude toward Jews was connected with the negative attitude to foreigners in general, who were considered heretics and agents of the enemies of the state. During the 15th century, Jews arrived within the borders of the principality of Moscow in the wake of their trade from both the Tatar kingdom of Crimea and Poland-Lithuania. During the 1470s, the religious sect known in Russian history as the "judaizers " (Zhidovstvuyushchiye) was discovered in the large commercial city of novgorod and at the court in Moscow. The Jews were accused of having influenced and initiated the establishment of the sect. When Czar Ivan IV Vasilievich ("the Terrible"; 1530–84) temporarily annexed the town of Pskov to his territory, he ordered that all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity should be drowned in the river. During the following two centuries, Jews entered Russia either illegally or with authorization from Poland and Lithuania on trade, and they occasionally settled in border towns. Repeated decrees issued by the Russian rulers prohibiting the entry of Jewish merchants within their territories, and explicit articles included in the treaties between Poland and Russia emphasizing these prohibitions, testify that this penetration was a regular occurrence. Small Jewish communities existed during the early 19th century in the region of smolensk . In 1738 the Jew, Baruch b. Leib, was arrested and accused of having converted the officer alexander voznitsyn to Judaism. Both were burned at the stake in St. Petersburg. In 1742 Czarina Elizabeth Petrovna ordered the expulsion of the few Jews living in her kingdom. When the senate attempted to obtain cancellation of the expulsion order by pointing out the economic loss which would be suffered by the Russian merchants and the state, the czarina retorted: "I do not want any benefit from the enemies of Christ." At the beginning of the reign of Catherine II, the question of authorizing the entry of Jews for trading purposes again arose. The czarina, who was inclined toward authorizing their admission, was compelled to reverse her decision in the face of hostile public opinion. Some Jews nevertheless penetrated into Russia during this period, while the authorities did not disturb those living in the territories conquered from Turkey in 1768 (Crimea and the Black Sea shore) and even unofficially encouraged the settlement of additional Jews in these territories. The question of the presence of Jews within the borders of the empire was however decided by historical circumstances, when at the close of the 18th century hundreds of thousands of Jews were placed under the dominion of the czars as a result of the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793 and 1795). -Within the Russian Empire: First Phase (1772–1881) The Jews who lived in the regions annexed by Russia (the "Western Region" and the "Vistula Region" in the terms of the Russian administration) formed a distinct social class. In continuation of their economic functions in Poland-Lithuania, they essentially formed the middle class between the aristocracy and the landowners on the one hand, and the masses of enslaved peasants on the other. Many of them earned their livelihood from the lease of villages, flour mills, forests, inns and taverns. Others were merchants, shopkeepers or hawkers. The remainder were craftsmen who worked for both landowner and peasant. Some of them lived in townlets which had mostly been founded on the initiative of the landowners and served as centers for the merchants and the craftsmen, while others lived in villages or at junctions of routes. It is estimated that the occupational structure of the Jews at the beginning of the 19th century was as shown in Table: 19th-Century Jewish Occupations, Russia. 19th-Century Jewish Occupations, Russia 19th-Century Jewish Occupations, Russia   Occupation % Innkeeping and leases 30 Trade and brokerage 30 Crafts 15 Agriculture 1 No fixed occupation 21 Religious officials 3 The economic position of the Jews steadily deteriorated with their confinement to the pale of Settlement (see below), their rapid growth in numbers, and consequent gradual proletarianization and increasing pauperization. The autonomy of the Jewish community was at first recognized. The Jews maintained their traditional educational network. When they came under Russian rule, many of the communities had become heavily indebted. Economic difficulties, the burden of taxes – in particular the meat tax (see korobka ) – and social tensions drove many Jews to abandon the townlets and settle in villages or on the estates of noblemen. During the period of their transfer to Russian domination, the Jews of the "Western Region" were involved in a grave conflict between the Ḥasidim and the mitnaggedim . Once the Russian government gained control of this region, it became   involved in this conflict. Complaints and slander even resulted in the arrest of shneur zalman of Lyady in 1798 and his transfer to St. Petersburg for interrogation. The various ḥasidic "courts" (the most important of which were those of lubavichi -Lyady, stolin , Talnoye, gora-kalwaria , aleksandrow ), as well as the yeshivot of the mitnaggedic type in Lithuania (the most important in the townlets of volozhin , founded in 1803, mir , telz (Telsiai), Eishishki (Eisiskes), and slobodka ; see also maggid ; musar movement ) combined to form a flourishing and variegated Jewish culture. CRYSTALLIZATION OF RUSSIAN POLICY TOWARD THE JEWS From the beginning of its annexation of the Polish territories, the Russian government adopted the attitude of viewing the Jews there as the "Jewish Problem," to be solved ultimately by their assimilation or expulsion. During the first 50 years after incorporation within the borders of the empire, the general tendency of the government was to maintain the status of the Jews as it had been under Polish rule, while adapting it to the Russian requirements. A decree of 1791 confirmed the right of residence of the Jews in the territories annexed from Poland and permitted their settlement in the uninhabited steppes of the Black Sea shore, conquered from Turkey at the close of the 18th century, and in the provinces to the east of the R. Dnieper (chernigov and poltava ) only. Thus crystallized the Pale of Settlement, which took its final form with the annexation of Bessarabia in 1812, and the "Kingdom of Poland" in 1815, extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and including 25 provinces with an area of nearly 1,000,000 sq. km. (286,000 sq. mi.). The Jews formed one ninth of the total population of the area. Jewish residence was also authorized in courland and, at a later date, in the Caucasus and Russian Central Asia to Jews who had lived in these regions before the Russian conquest. In the regions annexed from Poland, the Jews were caught up in the dilemma facing czarist rule there. The regime, whose power rested on the nobility, refrained from throwing the responsibility for the miserable plight of the mainly Orthodox peasants onto the Christian landowners, mainly of the Polish Catholic nobility, preferring to blame the Jews in the villages; it accepted the claim of the local nobility and officials allied to it that the Jews were causing the exploitation of the peasants (see G.R. Derzhavin ). The Jewish autonomy and independent culture added to this antagonism, as being alien to the Russian centralist regime and Christian-feudal culture. These concerns animated the first "Jewish Statute" promulgated in 1804. Its first article authorized the admission of the Jews to all the elementary, secondary and higher schools in Russia. Jews were also authorized to establish their own schools, provided that the language of instruction was Russian, Polish or German. The most important of the economic articles of the statute was the prohibition of the residence of Jews in the villages, of all leasing activity in the villages, and of the sale of alcoholic beverages (see wine and Liquor Trade) to the peasants. This struck at the source of livelihood of thousands of Jewish families. The legislation therefore declared that Jews would be allowed to settle as peasants on their lands or on the lands which would be allocated to them by the government. Government support was also promised to factories which would employ Jewish workers and to craftsmen. In 1817 Alexander I outlawed the blood libel which had caused terror and suffering to the Jewish communities in the 18th century. A short while after the publication of the "Jewish Statute," the expulsion of the Jews from the villages began, as did their settlement in southern Russia. It was, however, soon evident that agricultural settlement (see agriculture ) could not rapidly absorb the thousands of Jewish families who had been removed from their livelihoods. The expulsion order was therefore delayed, this being also due to the political and military situation in Russia during the war against Napoleon. Only in 1822 was the systematic expulsion of the Jews from the villages, especially in the provinces of Belorussia, resumed. An unsuccessful attempt was also made to induce the Jews to convert to Christianity by promises of emancipation and government support for their settlement on the land. UNDER NICHOLAS I The reign of nicholas i (1825–55) forms a somber chapter in the history of Russian Jewry. This czar, notorious in Russian history for his cruelty, sought to solve the "Jewish Problem" by suppression and coercion. In 1827 he ordered the conscription of Jewish youths into the army under the iniquitous cantonists system which conscripted youths aged from 12 to 25 years into military service; those aged under 18 were sent to special military schools also attended by the children of soldiers. This law caused profound demoralization within the communities of Lithuania and the Ukraine (it did not apply to the Jews of the "Polish" provinces). Nobody wished to serve in the army in the prevailing inhuman conditions and the "trustees" responsible on behalf of the communities for filling the quotas of conscripts were compelled to employ "snatchers" ("khapers") to seize the youngsters. The military obligations of the Jews in Russia brought no alleviation of their condition in other spheres, and the expulsions of Jews from the villages continued with regularity. The Jews were also expelled from Kiev, and any new settlement of Jews in the towns and townlets within a distance of 50 versts of the country's borders was prohibited in 1843. On the other hand, the government encouraged agricultural settlement among Jews. The settlers were exempted from military service. Many Jewish settlements were established on government and privately owned lands in southern Russia and other regions of the Pale of Settlement. During the 1840s, the government began to concern itself with the education of the Jews. Since the Jews had not made use of the opportunity which had been given to them in 1804 to study in the general schools, the government decided to establish a network of special schools for them. The maintenance of these schools would be provided for by a special   tax (the "candle tax ") which would be imposed on them. In order to pave the way for this activity, the government sent max lilienthal , a German Jew employed as teacher in the school established in Riga by the local maskilim, on a reconnaissance trip through the Pale of Settlement. During 1841–42 Lilienthal visited the large communities of the Pale of Settlement – Vilna, Minsk, Berdichev, Odessa, and Kiev. He was received with suspicion by the Jewish masses, who regarded the project to establish government schools for Jews as a medium for the estrangement of their children from their religion. In 1844 a decree was issued ordering the establishment of these schools, whose teachers would be both Christians and Jews. In secret instructions which accompanied the decree, it was declared that "the purpose of the education of the Jews is to bring them nearer to the Christians and to uproot their harmful beliefs which are influenced by the Talmud." Lilienthal became aware of the government's intentions and fled from Russia. The government established this network of schools which depended for instruction upon a handful of maskilim and at the head of which were the seminaries for rabbis and teachers of Vilna and zhitomir . These institutions, to which the Jewish masses shrank from sending their children, served as the cradle for a class of Russian-speaking maskilim which was to play an important role in the lives of the Jews during the following generations. In 1844 the government abolished the Polish-style communities but was nevertheless compelled to recognize a limited communal organization whose function it was to watch over the conscription into the army and the collection of the special taxes – the korobka and "candle tax." The community was also responsible for the election of the kazyonny ravvin ("government-appointed rabbi"), whose function it was to register births, marriages, and deaths and to deliver sermons on official holidays extolling the government. A law was also issued prohibiting Jews from growing pe'ot ("sidelocks") and wearing their traditional clothes. The next stage of the program of Nicholas I was the division of the Jews of his country into two groups: "useful" and "non-useful." Among the "useful" ranked the wealthy merchants, craftsmen, and agriculturalists. All the other Jews, the small tradesmen and the poorer classes, constituted the "non-useful" and were threatened with general conscription into the army, where they would be trained in crafts or agriculture. This project encountered the opposition of Russian statesmen and aroused the intervention of the Jews of Western Europe on behalf of their coreligionists. In 1846 sir moses montefiore traveled from England to Russia for this purpose. The order to classify the Jews according to these categories was nevertheless issued in 1851. The Crimean War delayed its application but amplified the tragedy of military conscription. The quota was increased threefold and the "snatchers" were given a free hand to seize children and travelers who did not possess documents, and hand them over to the army. The reign of Nicholas I came to an end with the memory of those days of intensified kidnapping. UNDER ALEXANDER II The reign of alexander ii (1855–81) is connected with great reforms in the Russian regime, the most important of which was the emancipation of the peasants in 1861 from their servitude to the landowners. Toward the Jews, Alexander II adopted a milder policy with the same objective as that of his predecessor of achieving the assimilation of the Jews to Russian society. He repealed the severest of his father's decrees (including the Cantonists system) and gave a different interpretation to the classification system by granting various rights – in the first place the right of residence throughout Russia – to selected groups of "useful" Jews, which included wealthy merchants (1859), university graduates (1861), certified craftsmen (1865), as well as medical staff of every category (medical orderlies and midwives). The Jewish communities outside the Pale of Settlement rapidly expanded, especially those of St. Petersburg and Moscow whose influence on the way of life of Russian Jewry became important. In 1874 a general draft into the army was introduced in Russia. Thousands of young Jews were now called upon to serve in the army of the czar for four years. Important alleviations were granted to those having a Russian secondary-school education. This encouraged the stream of Jews toward the Russian schools. At the same time, Jews were not admitted to officers' ranks. The general atmosphere the new laws engendered was of no less importance than the laws themselves. The administration relaxed its pressure on the Jews and there was a feeling among them that the government was slowly but surely proceeding toward the emancipation of the Jews. Jews began to take part in the intellectual and cultural life of Russia in journalism, literature, law, the theater and the arts; the number of professionals was then very small in Russia, and Jews soon became prominent among their ranks in quantity and quality. Some Jews distinguished themselves, such as the composer anton rubinstein (baptized in childhood), the sculptor mark antokolski and the painter isaac levitan . This appearance of Jews in economic, political and cultural life immediately aroused a sharp reaction in Russian society. The leading opponents of the Jews included several of the country's most prominent intellectuals, such as the authors Ivan Aksakov and Fyodor Dostoyevski. The attitude of the liberal and revolutionary elements in Russia toward the Jews was also lukewarm. The Jews were accused of maintaining "a state within a state" (the enemies of the Jews found support for this opinion in the work of the apostate J. Brafman , The Book of the Kahal, published in 1869), and of "exploiting" the Russian masses; even the blood libel was renewed by agitators (as that of Kutais in 1878). However, the principal argument of the hate-mongers was that the Jews were an alien element invading the areas of Russian life, gaining control of economic and cultural positions, and a most destructive influence. Many newspapers, led by the influential Novoye Vremya, engaged in anti-Jewish agitation. The anti-Jewish movement gained in strength especially after the Balkan War (1877–78), when a wave of Slavophile nationalism swept through Russian society.   POPULATION GROWTH One of the factors which influenced the position of the Jews was their high natural increase, due to the high birthrate and the relatively low mortality among children – the result of the devoted care of Jewish mothers as well as of medical progress. The number of Jews in Russia, which in 1850 had been estimated at 2,350,000, rose to over 5,000,000 at the close of the 19th century, notwithstanding a considerable emigration abroad. Governmental commissions appointed to deal with the "Jewish Problem" received instructions to seek methods for the reduction of the number of Jews in the country. ECONOMIC POSITION The natural growth resulted in increased competition in the traditionally Jewish occupations. The numbers of small shopkeepers, peddlers and brokers rose steadily. Many joined the craftsmen's class, a step which in those days was considered a fall in social status. A Jewish proletariat began to develop; it included workshop and factory workers, daily workers, male and female domestics, and porters. At the same time there also emerged a small but influential class of wealthy Jews who succeeded in adapting to the requirements of the Russian Empire and established contacts with government circles. The first members of this class were contractors engaged by the government in the building of roads and fortresses, or purveyors to army offices and units. During the reign of Nicholas I, many Jews engaged in leasing the sale of alcoholic beverages which had become a government monopoly. From the 1860s, Jews played an important role in the construction of railroads and the development of mines, industry (especially the foodstuff and textile industries), and export trade (timber; grain). They were among the leading founders of the banking network of Russia. This class of Jews was prominent in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and Warsaw. This upper bourgeoisie, headed by the guenzburg and polyakov families, considered themselves the leaders of Russian Jewry. They were closely connected with Jews who had acquired a higher education and had penetrated the Russian intelligentsia and the liberal professions (lawyers, physicians, architects, newspaper editors, scientists and writers). The wealth and the status of this small class was however unable to alleviate the suffering of the destitute masses. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the serious lack of land for the Russian peasants themselves became evident and the government ceased to encourage Jewish settlement on the land. Emigration became the only outlet. Until the 1870s, the migration was mainly an internal one, from Lithuania and Belorussia in the direction of southern Russia. While in 1847, only 2.5 percent of Russian Jews lived in the southern provinces, the proportion had increased to 13.8 percent in 1897. Important new communities appeared in this region: Odessa (about 140,000 Jews), Yekaterinoslav (dnepropetrovsk ), Yelizavetgrad (kirovograd ), kremenchug , etc. The famine in Lithuania at the end of the 1870s encouraged emigration toward Western Europe and the United States. HASKALAH IN RUSSIA From the middle of the 19th century, haskalah became influential among Russian Jewry. Its first manifestations, combined with signs of assimilation, appeared in the large commercial cities (Warsaw, Odessa, Riga). Among the Russian adherents of Haskalah, there was a trend to preserve Judaism and its values; hence they tended to seek changes based mainly on a thread of continuity. Although there were also circles which stood for complete assimilation and absorption in Eastern Europe (the "Poles of the Mosaic Faith" of Poland, nihilist and socialist circles in Russia), the majority of the maskilim sought a path which would preserve the national or national-religious identity of the Jews, while some of them even developed an indubitable nationalist ideology (Pereẓ smolenskin ). The herald of the Haskalah in Russia was the author Isaac Dov (Baer) levinsohn . In his Te'udah be-Yisrael (Vilna, 1828), he formulated an educational and productivization program. The most distinguished pioneers of Haskalah in Russia were the author abraham mapu , the father of the Hebrew novel, and the poet judah leib gordon . Even though the maskilim were at first opposed to Yiddish, which they sought to replace by the language of the country, some of them later created a secular Yiddish literature (I.M. Dick ; shalom yankev abramovitsh (Mendele Mokher Seforim); and others). At the initiative of the maskilim, there also emerged a Jewish press in Hebrew (Ha -Maggid , founded in 1856; Ha-Meliẓ ); in Yiddish (kol mevasser ); and in Russian (razsvet , founded in 1860; Den). The Ḥevrat Mefiẓei Haskalah ("society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia"), founded in 1863 by a group of wealthy Jews and intellectuals of St. Petersburg, was an important factor in spreading Haskalah and the Russian language among Jews. These books and newspapers infiltrated into the batteimidrash and the yeshivot, influencing students to leave them. Severe ideological disputes broke out in many communities, often between father and son, rabbi and disciples. The government assisted the spread of Haskalah as long as its adherents supported loyalty to the czarist regime (as expressed by J.L. Gordon – "to your king a serf") and cooperated in promoting educational and productivization programs, as well as in its opposition to the traditional leadership. By the 1870s, the activity of the maskilim began to bear fruit. The mass of Jewish youth streamed to the Russian-Jewish and general Russian schools. The general conscription law of 1874 encouraged this process, and thus began the estrangement of the intellectual youth from its people and Jewish affairs – to the despair of the nationalist wing of the Haskalah which resigned itself to this situation. However, the rise of the antisemitic movement within Russian society during the late 1870s (see above) resulted in a nationalist awakening among this youth. This was expressed in the development of a Jewish-Russian press and literature dealing with the problems of the Jews and Judaism (Razsvet; Russki Yevrey; voskhod ). -Within the Russian Empire: Second Phase (1881–1917) The year 1881 was a turning point in the history of the Jews of Russia. In March 1881 revolutionaries assassinated Alexander   II. Confusion reigned throughout the country. The revolutionaries called on the people to rebel. The regime was compelled to protect itself, and the Russian government found a scapegoat: the notion was encouraged that the Jews were responsible for the misfortunes of the nation. Anti-Jewish riots (pogroms ) broke out in a number of towns and townlets of southern Russia including Yelizavetgrad (Kirovograd) and Kiev. These disorders consisted of looting, while there were few acts of murder or rape. Similar pogroms were repeated in 1882 (balta , etc.); in 1883 (Yekaterinoslav, now Dnepropetrovsk, krivoi rog , Novo-Moskovsk, etc.); and in 1884 (Nizhni-Novgorod, now gorki ). The indifference to – and at times even sympathy for – the rioters on the part of the Russian intellectuals shocked many Jews, especially the maskilim among them. Revolutionary circles which hoped to transform these disorders into a revolt against the landowners and government also supported the rioters. The new czar, alexander iii (1881–94), and his cabinet underlined these trends in their policy toward the Jews. Provincial commissions were appointed in the wake of the pogroms to investigate their causes. In the main, these commissions stated that "Jewish exploitation" had caused the pogroms. Based on this finding, the "Temporary Laws" were published in May 1882 (see may laws ). These prohibited the Jews from living in villages and restricted the limits of their residence to the towns and townlets. In an attempt to halt the flood of Jews now seeking entry to secondary schools and universities, and their competition with the non-Jewish element, the number of Jewish students in the secondary and higher schools was limited by law in 1886 to 10 percent in the Pale of Settlement and to 3–5 percent outside it. This numerus clausus did much to accomplish the radicalization of Jewish youth in Russia. Many went to study abroad; others were able to enter Russian schools only if showing outstanding ability. All became embittered and disillusioned with the existing Russian society. In 1891 the systematic expulsion of most of the Jews from Moscow began. The pogroms were indeed halted in 1884 but instead administrative harassment of Jews became worse. The police strictly applied the discriminatory laws, and the expulsion of Jews from towns and villages where they had lived peacefully during the reign of Alexander II was effected, either under the law or with the help of bribery, to become a daily occurrence. The press (which was subjected to severe censorship) conducted a campaign of unbridled antisemitic propaganda. K. Pobedonostsev , the head of the "Holy Synod" (the governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church), formulated the objectives of the government when he expressed the hope that "one third of the Jews will convert, one third will die, and one third will flee the country." This policy was also continued under nicholas ii (1894–1918). In reaction to the growth of the revolutionary movement, in which the radicalized Jewish youth took an increasing part, the government gave free rein to the antisemitic press and agitation. During Passover in 1903, a pogrom broke out in kishinev in which many Jews lost their lives. From then on pogroms became a part of government policy. They gained in violence in 1904 (in Zhitomir) and reached their climax in October 1905, immediately after the czar had been compelled to proclaim the granting of a constitution to his people. In these pogroms, the police and the army openly supported the rioters and protected them against the Jewish self-defense organizations (see below). Pogroms accompanied by bloodshed in which the army actively participated occurred in bialystok (June 1906) and siedlce (September 1906). The establishment of the Imperial Duma brought no change to the situation of the Jews. There was indeed a limited Jewish representation in the Duma (12 delegates in the first Duma of 1906 and two to four delegates in the second, third and fourth Dumas), but this representation was faced by a powerful Rightist party – the union of the Russian People – and related parties, whose principal weapon in the political struggle against the liberal and radical elements was a savage antisemitism which overtly called for the elimination of the Jews from Russia. It was these circles which produced the "Protocols of the elders of Zion" which served, and still serve, as fuel for antisemitism throughout the world. In this atmosphere, a proposal for a debate in the Duma on the abolition of the Pale of Settlement was shelved, while a suggestion to exclude the Jews from military service was not accepted for the sole reason that the government could not dispense with the service of about 40,000 Jewish soldiers. Characteristic of this period was the law issued in 1912 which prohibited the appointment as officers not only of apostates from Judaism, but also of their children and grandchildren. In 1913 the government held a blood libel trial in Kiev involving mendel beilis : the antisemitic propaganda was intensified and the government mobilized its police and judicial cadres to obtain his conviction. A strong defense was mustered, including the jews o. grusenberg and Rabbi J. Mazeh , which succeeded in disproving the libel: the jury, consisting of 12 Russian peasants, acquitted the accused. The pogroms, restrictive decrees and administrative pressure caused a mass emigration of Jews from Russia, especially to the United States. During 1881 to 1914 about 2,000,000 Jews left Russia. This emigration did not result in a decrease in the Jewish population of the country as the high birthrate recompensed the losses through emigration. The economic situation improved, however, because the pressure on the sources of livelihood did not grow at its former pace and also because the emigrants rapidly began to send financial assistance to their relatives in Russia. Several attempts were made to organize and regulate this continual emigration, the most important by the Jewish philanthropist baron maurice de hirsch who reached an agreement in 1891 with the Russian government on the transfer of 3,000,000 Jews within 25 years to Argentina. For this purpose, the jewish colonization association (ICA) was established. Even though the project was not realized, ICA was very active in promoting Jewish agricultural settlement both in the lands of emigration and in Russia itself.   JEWISH POPULATION AT THE CLOSE OF THE 19TH CENTURY The comprehensive population census of 1897 provides a general picture of the demographic and economic condition of Russian Jewry at the close of the 19th century. In the census 5,189,400 Jews were counted; they constituted 4.13 percent of the total Russian population and about one-half of world Jewry. Their distribution over the Russian Empire appears in Table: Russian Jewish Population, 1897. Russian Jewish Population, 1897 Census Russian Jewish Population, 1897 Census   Region Number of Jews % of total population 3"> 1 93.9% of the Jews of Russia. 3"> 2 Excluding the Jews of Bukhara. Ukraine, Bessarabia 2,148,059 9.3 Lithuania, Belorussia 1,410,001 14.1 Russian Poland 1,316,576 14.1 Total in Pale of Settlement 4,874,636 11.51 Interior of Russia, Finland 208,353 0.34 Caucasus 58,471 0.63 Siberia, Russian Central Asia 47,941 0.352 Total Russian Jewish Population 5,189,401 4.13 In certain provinces of the Pale of Settlement, the percentage of Jews rose above their general proportion (18.12 percent in the province of Warsaw; 17.28 percent in the province of Grodno). The overwhelming majority of the Jews in the Pale lived in towns (48.84 percent) and townlets (33.05 percent). Only 18.11 percent lived in villages. The Jews of the villages nevertheless numbered about 890,000. A decisive factor in the social pattern of Russian Jewry was its concentration in the towns and townlets. The townlet (see shtetl ) – a legacy of the social structure of ancient Poland – was a center of commerce and crafts for the neighboring villagers and its population was mostly Jewish. There Jewish tradition, cohesion, and folkways were well preserved, serving as the basis and starting point for both the conservative and innovative forces in Jewish culture. In the larger cities, the majority of the Jews also resided in the same locality and led their own social life. The largest Jewish communities in Russia in 1897 appear in Table: Jewish Communities in Russia, 1897. Largest Jewish Communities in Russia, 1897 Largest Jewish Communities in Russia, 1897   City Number of Jews % of total population Warsaw 219,128 32.5 Odessa 138,935 34.4 Lodz 98,676 31.8 Vilna 63,831 41.5 Kishinev 50,237 46.5 Minsk 47,617 52.3 Bialystok 41,903 63.4 Berdichev 41,617 78.0 Yekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk) 40,937 36.3 Vitebsk 34,420 52.4 There were also many medium-sized towns in which the majority of the population was Jewish. ECONOMIC STRUCTURE This concentration of the Jews, and their intensive and variegated cultural life, made them a clearly distinct nation living in the Pale of Settlement. Their occupations and professional structure also gave a specific character to their society. In 1897 the Jews of Russia could be divided according to their sources of livelihood as shown in Table: Jews' Sources of Livelihood, Russia, 1897. Jews Sources of Livelihood, Russia, 1897 Jews' Sources of Livelihood, Russia, 1897   Occupation % Commerce 38.65 Crafts and industry 35.43 Domestics and daily workers 6.61 Liberal professions and administration 5.22 Transport 3.98 Agriculture 3.55 Army 1.07 Without regular source of livelihood 5.49 Total 100.00 In the Pale of Settlement Jews formed 72.8 percent of those engaged in commerce, 31.4 percent of those engaged in crafts and industry, and 20.9 percent of those engaged in transportation. At the close of the 19th century, the Jewish proletariat increased and numbered some 600,000. Approximately half of them were apprentices and workers employed by craftsmen, about 100,000 were salesmen, about 70,000 were factory workers, and the remainder daily workers, porters, and domestics. The desire of this proletariat to improve its material and social status, and its contacts with the revolutionary Jewish intelligentsia during the generation which preceded the 1917 Revolution, became an important factor in the lives of the Jews of Russia. IDEOLOGICAL TRENDS The last 20 years of the czarist regime were a time of tension and renaissance for the Jews, especially within the younger circles. This awakening essentially stemmed from conscious resistance to, and rejection of, the oppressive regime, the degraded status of the Jew in the country, and the search for methods for change. One response to the oppressive policy of the czarist government was to join one of the trends of the Russian revolutionary movement. The radical Jewish youth joined clandestine organizations in the towns of Russia and abroad. Many Jews ranked among the leaders of the revolutionaries. The leaders of the Social Democrats included J. Martov and L. Trotsky , while Ch. Zhitlowski and G.A. Gershuni figured among the founders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia. With the growth of national consciousness in revolutionary circles at the close of the 19th century, a Jewish workers' revolutionary movement was formed. Workers' unions which had been founded through the initiative of Jewish intellectuals united and established the bund in 1897. The Bund played an important role in the Russian   revolutionary movement in the Pale of Settlement. It regarded itself as part of the all-Russian Social Democratic Party but gradually came to insist upon certain national demands such as: the right to cultural autonomy for the Jewish masses, recognition of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews, the establishment of schools in this language, and the development of the press and literature. The Bund was particularly successful in Lithuania and Poland, where after a short time it raised the social status of the worker and the apprentice, and implanted in them the courage to stand up to their employers and the authorities. Another response of the Jews to their oppression in Russia found expression in the Zionist movement. Zionism originated in the Ḥibbat Zion movement which came into being after the pogroms of 1881–83 (see also leon pinsker ). A few of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who left for overseas turned toward Ereẓ Israel and established the first settlements there. Ḥovevei Zion societies in Russia propagated the idea of this settlement and raised funds for its maintenance. The movement gained great impetus with the appearance of theodor herzl , the convention of the First Zionist Congress in Basle, and the founding of the World Zionist Organization (1897). Because of the political regime of Russia, the central institutions of the Zionist Organization were established in Western Europe, even though the mass of its members and influence came from Russian Jewry. Zionism won adherence among all Jewish groups: the Orthodox and maskilim, the middle class and proletariat, the youth and intelligentsia. It encouraged national thought and culture among the masses. The Zionist press (haolam ; Razsvet, etc.) and Zionist literature in three languages – Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian – gained wide popularity. The movement was illegal and the attitude of the government ranged from one of reserve, seeing that the movement could divert the Jewish youth from active participation in the revolutionary movement, to one of hostility. Zionist congresses and meetings were held openly (Minsk, 1902) and clandestinely. The failure of Herzl to obtain a charter from the Turkish sultan and the debate over the uganda project resulted in a grave crisis within the Zionist movement in Russia. Herzl largely based his case for accepting the Uganda project on the urgent need for a "Nachtasyl" for the suffering Russian Jews, but it was the majority of the Russian Zionists, led by M. Ussishkin and J. Tschlenow , who on principle opposed the Uganda proposal. Some of the proposal's supporters later resigned from the Zionist movement and founded territorialist organizations (see territorialism ), the most important of which was the Zionist Socialist Workers' Party (SS). Immigrants and pioneers from Russia formed the greater part of the Second Aliyah and it was from their ranks that the founders of the labor movement in Ereẓ Israel emerged. Within a relatively short period, the revolutionary movement and the Zionist movement brought a tremendous change among Jewish youth. The battei-midrash and yeshivot were abandoned, and dynamism of Jewish society now became concentrated within the new political trends. When the new wave of pogroms broke out in Russia in 1903, Jewish youth reacted by a widespread organization of self-defense. Defense societies of the Bund, the Zionists, and the Zionist-Socialists were formed in every town and townlet. The attackers encountered armed resistance. The authorities, who secretly supported the pogroms, were compelled to appear openly as the protectors of the rioters. The principal motives for the self-defense movement were not only the will to protect life and property but also the desire to assert the honor of the Jewish nation. CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS The nationalist awakening was also expressed by an astonishing development of Jewish literature in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian. A continuation of the Haskalah literature, it reached its peak during the generation which preceded the 1917 Revolution. The most outstanding authors of that period were: Aḥad Ha-Am , M.J. Berdyczewski , M.Z. Feuerberg , the Hebrew poets Ḥ.N. Bialik , saul tchernichowsky , Z. Shneour , and others, as well as the Jewish Russian poet S.S. Frug , and the Yiddish writers shalom aleichem , I.L. Peretz , and sholem asch . There also arose a generation of researchers and historians, the most important of whom was S. Dubnow , who wrote his History of the Jews and based his historical and world view on autonomism . Systematic research into Jewish folklore was started upon (S. An-Ski ). A Jewish encyclopedia in Russian was published (Yevreyskaya Entsiklopediya; 1906–13). The existing and new societies – Ḥevrat Mefiẓei Haskalah, ort , oze , ICA – became frameworks for the activity of members of the Jewish intelligentsia who sought to extend the scope of these societies as far as possible. Jewish newspapers circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies. The mass of Jews read the daily press in Yiddish (Der Fraynd; haynt ; der moment ; etc.); Hebrew readers turned to the Hebrew press (Ha-Ẓefirah ; Ha-Ẓofeh ; Ha-Zeman); others read the Russian-Jewish press. In St. Petersburg the foundations were laid for a Higher School of Jewish Studies by Baron D. Guenzburg, and in Grodno a teachers' seminary, which trained teachers for the Jewish national schools, was opened under the patronage of the Ḥevrat Mefiẓei Haskalah. An important point at issue that developed between the Zionists and their opponents was the character of Jewish culture. The Bund and Autonomist circles considered that the future of the Jews lay as a nation among the other nations of Russia; they sought to liberate it from religious tradition and to develop a secular culture and national schools in the language of the masses – Yiddish. The Zionists and their supporters stressed the continuity and the unity of the Jewish nation throughout the world and regarded Hebrew as the national language of the Jewish people. They considered the deepening of Jewish national consciousness and attachment to the historical past and homeland – Ereẓ Israel – to be the primary aim and mainstay of Jewish culture. This controversy grew acute after the Yiddishists had proclaimed Yiddish to be a national language of the Jewish people at the czernowitz   Map 1. Main Jewish communities in Russia outside the Pale of Settlement. Population figures according to official census of 1897. Map 1. Main Jewish communities in Russia outside the Pale of Settlement. Population figures according to official census of 1897.     Yiddish Language Conference in 1908. The "language dispute" was fought with bitter animosity and caused a split within the Jewish intelligentsia of Eastern Europe. WORLD WAR I Russian Jewry, while regarding World War I with some fear, felt that their participation in the defense of Russia would bring about the abolition of their second-class status. The course of events did not, however, justify this anticipation. The mobilization affected about 400,000 Jews of whom approximately 80,000 served at the front. The battle lines passed through the Pale of Settlement in which millions of Russian Jews lived. In the region of the Russian front and its nearby hinterland, there was a military regime under the control of a group of antisemitic generals (Prince Nikolai Nikolayevich; Januszkiewicz). With the first defeats of the Russian army, the supreme command found it expedient to impute responsibility for their reversals to the Jews, who were accused of treason and spying for the Germans. Espionage trials were held and hostages were taken and sent to the interior of Russia. This was followed by mass expulsions of Jews from towns and townlets near the front line. These reached their height with the general expulsion of the Jews from northern Lithuania and Courland in June 1915. In July 1915 the use of Hebrew characters in printing and writing was prohibited. The Hebrew and Yiddish press and literature were thus silenced. The attacks on the Jews aroused public opinion in Europe and America against the Russian government whose serious military and financial situation compelled it to take Western opinion into account, as this was hindering Russia from obtaining loans in the Western countries. In the summer of 1915, most of the restrictions on Jewish residence were abolished de facto, though not de jure, and thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland and Lithuania streamed toward the interior of Russia. From the outset of the war, Jewish communal workers established a relief organization for Jewish war victims known as yekopo . In conjunction with the existing Jewish societies, it assisted the refugees by providing shelter, food, and employment for them and by the establishment of schools for their children. Communal workers of every class participated in this activity, which awakened the feeling of national unity within the masses. The suffering and persecutions led Jews to attempt to evade military service and desert from the hostile army, and in the difficult conditions caused by the mass of refugees and defeat, speculation in food and other commodities became rife among Jews. The non-Jewish population and the army reacted by intensified hatred toward them. The extensive conquests of Germany and Austria in 1915 brought approximately 2,260,000 Jews (40% of Russian Jewry) under the military rule of the advancing armies, thus freeing them from czarist oppression while separating them from the Jews who remained under the czar. In 1917 there were 3,440,000 Jews in the region which remained under Russian control; of these, about 700,000 lived outside the former Pale of Settlement. These upheavals brought about cultural and social changes. The conscription of great numbers of Jewish youths into the Russian army and the suppression of the Jewish press and the literature accelerated the process of Russification among the Jews there. In contrast, the Jewish masses of Poland, Lithuania, the eastern Ukraine, and Belorussia, which formed the most deep-rooted element, as well as the great Jewish cultural centers of Warsaw and Vilna, were torn from Russian Jewry. This also affected the greater part of the Ḥasidim. THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION (1917) The nine months following the February Revolution of 1917 constituted a brief springtime in the history of Russian Jewry. The Provisional Government abolished all the restrictions affecting the Jews on March 16, 1917, as one of its first measures. Jews were immediately given the chance to hold office in the government administration, to practice at the bar, and rise in the army ranks. All at once opportunity opened up to them for free development in every sphere of life, both as citizens of the state and as a national group. The hatred of the Jews, which had served as a political weapon in the hands of the ancient regime, became incompatible with the Revolution and was forced underground. Naturally the Jews supported the Revolution and participated in the active political life which began to flourish in the country. There were Jews in all the democratic and socialist parties at all levels, from the leadership to the rank and file. The leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) included the jurist M. Vinawer ; among the Socialist Revolutionaries there was O. Minor , who was elected mayor of Moscow, and I.N. Steinberg , who later became commissar for justice in the first Soviet government headed by lenin . Other leaders included, among the Mensheviks, J. Martov , and F.I. Dan ; and among the Bolsheviks, L. Trotsky, Y.M. Sverdlov, L.B. Kamenev , and G. Zinoviev . Many Jews led the revolutionaries in the provinces, which were poor in intellectual forces. Despite their numbers in the general revolutionary movement, these revolutionaries were only a minute section of the vast numbers of Russian Jews who remained attached to their national and religious culture and society. This adhesion was expressed by the tremendous progress made by the Zionist movement in 1917. In May 1917 the seventh conference of the Zionists of Russia, representing 140,000 members, was held in Petrograd. Youth groups under the name of He-Ḥalutz , who prepared themselves to settle in Ereẓ Israel, were formed in many towns and townlets. The Zionists also promoted an intensive cultural activity. The Ḥovevei Sefat Ever ("Lovers of the Hebrew Language") society founded under the czarist regime, became the tarbut society. In Moscow a Hebrew daily, Ha-Am, was published and Hebrew publishing houses financed by the wealthy arts patrons Stybel (Stybel Publishing) and Zlatopolsky-Persitz (Omanut Publishing) were established. Training colleges for teachers and kindergarten teachers were founded, as well as elementary and secondary schools. The first steps were taken for the establishment of   a Hebrew theater, habimah . In all the elections which were held during that year by the general and Jewish institutions, the Zionists and related groups headed the Jewish lists, leaving the Bund and other Jewish parties far behind. In November 1917 information on the balfour declaration reached Russia and it was acclaimed with immense enthusiasm by the Jews throughout the country. Large-scale Zionist demonstrations and meetings were held in Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and other communities. All the Jewish parties united in joint activity to prepare the All-Russian Jewish Convention, which was to establish a political-cultural autonomous organization and central representation of all the Jews in Russia. A powerful national awakening was manifested among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish soldiers who served in the Russian army. Thousands of them enrolled in the military colleges and obtained officers' rank. At meetings and conventions of soldiers, debates were held on the establishment of a Union of Jewish Soldiers, one of whose principal objectives would be the organization of self-defense on a military basis, to prevent and suppress pogroms. This union was headed by joseph trumpeldor . Indeed, as the Provisional Government weakened and anarchy became widespread, antisemitism lifted up its head, and here and there pogroms characterized by looting and assaults on Jews were perpetrated by undisciplined soldiers and mobs. The necessity for an organization which could stand in the breach was felt. The Jews of the Ukraine, where in 1917 about 60 percent of all the Jews living under Russian rule were to be found, faced in the summer of this year the tendency toward separatism that began to manifest itself there. A Central Ukrainian Council (Rada) was formed which at first demanded autonomy for the Ukraine and later (in January 1918) complete independence. The Jewish masses in the Ukraine did not regard Ukrainian separatism with favor. They felt no affinity with Ukrainian culture and retained in mind the tradition of hatred toward the Jews and the massacres of the 17th century (Chmielnicki) and the 18th (the Uman massacre) by Ukrainians. The Jews there regarded themselves as an integral part of Russian Jewry. The Jewish parties, Zionist and socialist, were, however, inclined to collaborate with the Ukrainians, both because of the doctrinal principle of supporting non-Russian nationalism and out of political considerations. The Ukrainians on their side were most anxious to acquire the support of the large Jewish minority which lived with them. Extensive internal national autonomy was promised to the Jews. A National Jewish Council was established, and at the end of 1917 an undersecretary for Jewish affairs (M. Silberfarb ) was appointed in the Provisional Government of the Ukraine. He became minister after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence. THE CIVIL WAR After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the whole of Russia was plunged into a civil war which lasted until the beginning of 1921. The Jews of the Ukraine were especially affected by this war. Various armies were clashing in the area: the Ukrainian army under the command of S. Petlyura and the bands of peasants connected with him; the Red Army, which came from the north but which organized and incorporated within its ranks many Ukrainian units; the counterrevolutionary "volunteers' army" (the "White Army") under the command of A. Denikin ; and independent units headed by local leaders (Grigoryev; Makhno; and others). These armies were composed mostly of soldiers who had fought on the battlefields of World War I and in general formed a wild mob mainly seeking after loot and bloodshed. As they passed through the towns and settlements, they abused and assaulted defenseless Jews. At times they contented themselves with the imposition of a "contribution" of money, clothes, and food, or with looting and murder on a limited scale. On other occasions, however, especially when in retreat, these armies and bands perpetrated general pillage and massacre among the Jews. The first acts of bloodshed against the Jews were carried out by units of the Red Army during their retreat before the Germans in the northern Ukraine during the spring of 1918. However, the Red Army command had already adopted a clear policy of suppression of antisemitism within the army ranks. Systematic propaganda against antisemitism was conducted and the rare army units or individual soldiers who attacked the Jews were severely punished. Even though units of the Soviet army also later erupted into violence against the Jews (especially at the time of the retreat of the Red Army before the Poles in 1920), the Jews nevertheless came to regard the Soviet regime and the Red Army as their protectors. On the other hand, manifest antisemitism reigned within the units of the Ukrainian army and the peasant bands affiliated to it. At the beginning of 1919, during the retreat of the Ukrainian army before the Red Army, the regular army units systematically massacred the Jews with bestial savagery in Berdichev, Zhitomir, Proskurov (leaving about 1,700 dead within a few hours), and other places. The Jewish autonomous organs in the Ukraine and the Jewish minister in the Ukrainian government could not obtain the punishment of the army commanders responsible for these pogroms. This convincingly proved to all the regular and irregular units of the Ukrainian army that lawlessness was licensed in regard to Jews. The policy of grain confiscation from the peasants adopted by the Soviets in those years encouraged anti-Soviet movements among the peasants. The Jews, inhabitants of the towns and townlets, were identified with Soviet rule, and the bands of peasants occasionally perpetrated systematic massacres of Jews when they gained control, often for a very short while, of the localities where Jews were living (Trostyanets, Tetiyev, etc.). During the summer of 1919, the White Army began to advance from the Don region toward Moscow. This army, which was composed of battalions of officers and Cossacks, was saturated with antisemitism and one of its slogans was the old slogan of czarist antisemites: "Strike at the Jews and save Russia\!" Its way northward became a succession of pillage, rape, brutality, and slaughter which reached its climax in the massacre of   the Jews at Fastov (with 1,500 dead). Their attacks on the Jews were even more severe at the time of their disorderly retreat southward at the end of 1919. It is difficult to assess the losses suffered by Ukrainian Jewry in these pogroms. S. Dubnow estimated that 530 communities had been attacked. More than 1,000 pogroms were perpetrated in these communities. There were more than 60,000 dead and several times this number of wounded. In the western Ukraine and Belorussia, the suffering of the Jews was caused mainly by the Polish army. Although pogroms did not take place, the Jews were terrorized and hundreds were executed without trial as "suspects" of Communist affiliation (Pinsk 1919, etc.). The Ukrainian and Russian "volunteer" units (under General Balachowicz-Bulak) which fought with the Poles also attacked the Jews. During those years, Jewish self-defense units were formed in many places in the Ukraine. These efforts were, however, local. They were successful in several large towns and in a few townlets only. At the beginning of the civil war, a "Jewish Fighting Battalion" led by a nucleus of demobilized soldiers and officers was formed in Odessa. This battalion obtained many arms and saved the Jews of Odessa from pogroms. The defense units of the small towns managed to protect the Jews from small local bands, but were powerless when confronted by army units or large bands of peasants. Occasionally the attackers took cruel vengeance against the inhabitants for the resistance offered by their youth when they entered the locality (the pogrebishche massacre). During the last two years of the civil war, as Soviet rule strengthened, these self-defense organizations at first received political and military support. However, since nationalist and Zionist elements prevailed in them, they were disbanded later during the suppression of non-Bolshevik elements in 1921–22. -Under the Soviet Regime By 1920 the borders of Soviet Russia took shape. A considerable number of Jews who had formerly been included within the borders of the Russian Empire remained in the states which had broken away from it (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia, incorporated into Romania). Only about 2,500,000 Jews remained within the limits of Soviet Russia. The fate of the Jews within the borders of Soviet Russia was to a large extent determined by the theory and practice of the Communist Party. Its outlook was defined and crystallized during the 20 years which preceded the Revolution. Like all the other socialist and liberal parties, the Bolshevik Party repudiated antisemitism, while the civic emancipation of the Jews, as that of the other Russian peoples, formed part of its program. It took some time until the party recognized Jews as a nationality. Under the influence of assimilated Jews, who carried weight in the circles of the socialist leadership of Europe and Russia, the Bolsheviks were inclined to regard integration and assimilation as the only "progressive" solution of the Jewish problem. This outlook was sharpened during the bitter discussion at the beginning of the century between the Bolsheviks and the Bund. Leaning upon Marx, K. Kautsky, and O. Bauer , Lenin declared that "there is no basis for a separate Jewish nation," and in regard to a "national Jewish culture – the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie – this is the slogan of our enemies." Stalin declared in his pamphlet, Marksizm i natsionalny vopros (Marxism and the National Question, 1913), that a nation is a "stable community of men, which came into being by historic process and has developed on a basis of common language, territory, and economic life"; since the Jews lack this common basis they are only a "nation on paper," and the evolution of human society must necessarily lead toward their assimilation within the surrounding nations. These theories of the fathers of Communism increasingly influenced Soviet policy toward the Jews, though in the beginning the Soviets were compelled by the actual conditions to deviate from their theories and to allow the existence of Jewish political and cultural institutions (the yevsektsiya (see below); Yiddish schools and publications, etc.). These deviations, however, proved in the long run to be of a temporary character, after which the line – of imposed assimilation of the Jews – was implemented with even more energy and firmness. By its war on antisemitism and pogroms, the new regime gained the sympathy of the Jewish masses whose lives depended on its victory. Jewish youth enthusiastically joined the Red Army and took part in its organization. Many Jews reached the higher military ranks and played an important role in the formation of the Red Army. Leon Trotsky, who organized the military coup of the October Revolution of 1917, was the creator of the Red Army, which included among its prominent commanders a number of Jews (of whom the most celebrated were General Jonah yakir and Jan Gamarnik). In the Soviet air force there was General Y. Shmushkevich . In 1926, 4.4 percent of the officers of the Red Army were Jews (two and a half times higher than their ratio to the general population). Jews took an important part in the restoration of the country's administration, which had collapsed after a large section of the Russian intelligentsia and former officialdom emigrated from Soviet Russia or refused to serve in it. However, the new regime brought complete economic ruin to the Jewish masses, most of whom belonged to the "petty bourgeoisie" of the towns and townlets. The abrogation of private commerce, confiscation of property and goods, and liquidation of the status of the townlet as the intermediary between the peasants and the large towns–all these deprived hundreds of thousands of Jewish families of their livelihoods. About 300,000 Jews succeeded in leaving the Soviet-controlled territories for Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Romania. The declaration of Lenin on the failure of the economic policy of the period of "war Communism," the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP), together with the conclusion of the civil war and the restoration of order in the country, brought some relief to the Jews, but their economic situation was broken and hopeless. With economic ruin, the new regime also brought spiritual ruin to the Jews. When the Bolsheviks seized power,   they were compelled to recognize the fact, even if as a temporary phenomenon, of the existence of millions of Jews who were attached to their language and their national tradition. A Jewish commissariat headed by the veteran Bolshevik S. Dimanstein was established between 1918 and 1923 to deal with Jewish affairs. "Jewish Sections" (Yevsektsiya) were also set up in the branches of the Communist Party. Jewish members of the party who were prepared to work among their fellow Jews were organized in these sections. The function of the Yevsektsiya was to "impose the proletarian dictatorship among the Jewish masses." The older Jewish members of the Communist Party were mostly assimilationists who did not want any contact with their people. However, as the success of the Bolsheviks and the efficiency of their terror measures became increasingly evident, they were joined by sections of Jewish socialist parties (the Bund, the United Jewish Socialist Workers' Party , the Po'alei Zion ) as well as by individual Jews. These brought with them ideas on the fostering of a secular Jewish culture in Yiddish and envenomed hatred toward the Jewish religion, the Hebrew language, the Bible, and the Zionist movement. The Communist Party put them in control of the Jewish population centers, at the same time stressing that their activity was only a temporary measure for as long as it would be required. The first activity of the Yevsektsiya was the liquidation of the religious and national organizations of the Jews of Russia. In August 1919 the Jewish communities were dissolved and their properties confiscated. The general antireligious policy took the form, in relation to the Jews, of persecution of traditional Jewish culture and education, of prohibiting the religious instruction of children, the closure of ḥadarim and yeshivot, and the seizure of synagogues which were converted into clubs, workshops, or warehouses. A violent campaign against the Jewish religion and its leaders was conducted and heavy taxes were imposed on the rabbis and other religious officials in order to compel them to resign from their positions. In these activities the Yevsektsiya encountered the opposition of the religious masses, who based themselves on the promise of freedom of religious worship, which was officially proclaimed and later included in the Soviet constitution, and struggled for their right to pursue their way of life by legal or illegal methods (through "underground" ḥadarim, yeshivot, etc.). The imprisonment and expulsion from the Soviet Union of Rabbi J. schneersohn , the leader of Chabad Ḥasidism, in 1927 marked one phase in the suppression of Jewish religion. Even after this, "underground" religious activity continued, and its influence was manifested when hundreds of ḥasidic families left the Soviet Union and went to Ereẓ Israel after World War II. War was also proclaimed against Hebrew; its study was prohibited, and the publication of books in Hebrew was suspended (though until 1928 it was still possible to print religious books and Jewish calendars). In June 1921 a group of Hebrew authors led by Ḥ.N. Bialik and S. Tchernichowsky left Russia. Several years later, the Hebrew theater Habimah left the Soviet Union. It had attained a high artistic standard and for several years had been protected from the Yevsektsiya by several of the greatest Russian cultural personalities, led by M. Gorki. The remaining Hebrew authors (Abraham Friman, Ḥayyim Lenski , elisha rodin , and others) were cruelly persecuted and many of them sent to forced labor camps. The Zionist movement revealed great vitality. The Soviets viewed Zionism as a threefold danger. It strengthened the vitality of Jewish nationalism. It diverted the Jewish intelligentsia, whose talents the regime required, toward activities beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. It maintained relations with the World Zionist Organization, then an ally of Britain, which ranked among the countries hostile to the Soviet Union. The Zionist movement went underground. Most of its members were youths and boys who were active in the Zionist parties (Ẓe'irei Zion; ZS), youth movements (Ha-Shomer ha-Ẓa'ir ; Kadimah; and others) and within the framework of He-Ḥalutz which trained its members for aliyah. Many Zionists were imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or exiled to outlying places in Soviet Asia. For several years, the Soviets authorized the existence of He-Ḥalutz in certain regions of the country, but this authorization was abrogated in 1928. Thus organized Zionism was silenced by the end of the 1920s. The independent societies and publishing houses (Ḥevrat Mefiẓei Haskalah, the Historical and Ethnographic Society, and others) continued to exist until the late 1920s. Some of their activists succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union (S. Dubnow ; S. Ginsburg ). Individuals remained in the Soviet Union (I. Zinberg ). In 1930 the Yevsektsiya was also disbanded. The first stage in the liquidation of the national life of the Jews in the Soviet Union had been completed. "JEWISH PROLETARIAN CULTURE." To replace the Jewish culture which had been destroyed, the Jewish Communists attempted to develop a "Jewish proletarian culture," which was to be, according to Stalin's slogan, "national in form and socialist in content." This culture was based on the promotion of the Yiddish language and its literature, while the writing of Hebrew words in Yiddish was changed to phonetic transcription, so as to cut the link with Hebrew (examples: כאוויירים instead of עמעס ;חברים instead of אמת). A Yiddish press was established, with three leading newspapers; Der Emes (1920–38) in Moscow, Shtern (1925–41) in the Ukraine, and Oktiabar (1925–41) in Belorussia. Numerous literary and philological periodicals, youth newspapers, and a trades unions press were published every year. A Yiddish theater network was established. It was headed by the Jewish State Theater under the direction of A. Granovski (until 1929) and afterward the actor S. Mikhoels . These presented adaptations of Jewish classics, by authors such as Mendele Mokher Seforim, Shalom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, as well as Yiddish translations of Soviet propaganda pieces and plays. In Minsk and Kiev, "Faculties of Jewish Culture" were established in the universities. They essentially promoted research into the Yiddish language and its literature, Jewish folklore, and Marxist historiography of the history   of the Jews in Russia and of the Jewish labor movements. The works of these institutes, as well as the whole of Jewish literature, were subject to the supervision of the Yevsektsiya, headed by M. Litvakov , who kept watch to prevent "nationalist and rightist deviations." During the short period from the middle 1920s to the middle 1930s when this Soviet Yiddish culture flourished, it appeared to many adherents of Yiddish in the world that with the assistance of a great power a new Yiddish literature would emerge in the Soviet Union. Jewish authors and scholars who had left the country during the first years after the Revolution, as well as Jews from other countries, began to arrive in Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk (among them the authors: D. Bergelson , P. Markish , M. Kulbak , and the scholars: N. Shtif , M. Erik , and meir wiener ). Yiddish was also given an official status by the establishment of governmental tribunals in which proceedings were held in Yiddish. The greatest efforts were, however, invested in the development of a network of Yiddish schools. Many such schools were opened in the towns and townlets of the Ukraine and Belorussia. During the first years, an attempt was even made to compel Jewish parents to send their children to these schools. Secondary schools and training colleges for teachers were also established. At the height of this period, in 1932, 160,000 Jewish children (over one third of the Jewish children of elementary school age) attended these institutions. From this year, however, a decline set in. Jewish parents refused to send their children to schools whose Jewish character, apart from the language of instruction (which was the de-Hebraized Soviet Yiddish), was limited to the study of a few chapters of Yiddish literature, with even these interpreted in a manner that offended the religious and national values of the Jewish people. A further cause for the decline of this network of schools was the small number of Yiddish secondary schools and the lack of Yiddish higher educational institutions. By the late 1930s, these schools began to disappear until they were liquidated, largely of their own accord, in almost every corner of the Soviet Union. Cultural assimilation gradually gained in momentum among the Jews as they became integrated within the life of the new Soviet society. The majority of the Jewish children attended Russian schools. Jewish youth was attracted to the larger cities where the Yiddish language was nonexistent. Even the Jewish-Russian press, which served as an obstacle to assimilation, and the Jewish societies and organizations were absent there. Mixed marriages became a frequent occurrence. In 1935 over 60,000 Jews studied at the higher schools (over 10 percent of the country's students). An expression of the assimilation of the Jews and their activity in Soviet literature could be seen from their large participation in the first conference of Soviet writers in 1934, at which there were 124 delegates of Jewish nationality (about 20 percent of the delegates). Only 24 of them wrote in Yiddish; the others mainly in Russian. These included some of the most prominent authors of Soviet Russian literature, such as: I. Ehrenburg , B.L. Pasternak , I. Babel , and S. Marshak . The Jews also played a central role in the development of other spheres of Soviet culture, especially the cinema (S. Eisenstein ; M. Romm). ECONOMIC RESHUFFLE The most decisive factor in the history of the Jews of the Soviet Union was the economic reshuffle which took place in their midst during the 1920s and 1930s. The brief NEP period (1921–27) aroused vain hopes among the Jews, who occupied a place of considerable importance in the urban economic class of shopkeepers and independent craftsmen ("nepmen"). However, when the success of the NEP period was at its height, severe supervision was imposed on this class, and the burden of taxation brought its impoverishment and destruction. The situation was especially difficult in Jewish townlets whose former economic basis had been destroyed. A widespread class of the destitute and unemployed was created; its members were also deprived of civic rights (lishentsy in Soviet terminology), such as the right to employment, public medical care, and the right of their children to study in secondary and higher schools. With the liquidation of the NEP and the introduction of the first Five-Year Plan (1927–32), the situation of these masses deteriorated even further. Thousands of families subsisted on the meager assistance which they received from Western Jewry, through public organizations (the american jewish joint distribution committee (JDC), ORT, ICA), through organizations of emigrants from towns or townlets (landsmannschaften ), or individual relatives. Notorious in this period was the "Extortion of Dollars" campaign of the Soviet secret police, with the use of coercion and torture against Jews suspected of "hoarding dollars." During the late 1920s, according to official statistics, about one third of the Jews belonged to the economic classes which were destined to disappear and were deprived of the above-mentioned rights. The authorities sought to solve this problem in three ways: by agricultural settlement; by migration to the interior regions of Russia, which had been closed to the Jews under the czarist regime; and by concentration in the large towns and industrial regions of the Ukraine and Belorussia, where new classes of government officialdom and industrial enterprises had developed. AGRICULTURAL PROJECTS During the 1920s, many of the leaders of the Soviet government came to regard agricultural settlement as the high road to the solution of the Jewish problem. A steady movement toward agricultural settlement of Jews had already started near the Jewish townlets during the period of war Communism in the years of the civil war, when occupation in agriculture at least promised a piece of dry bread. In 1924 the government created the Commission for Jewish Settlement (Komzet) and a year later a Society for the Promotion of Jewish Settlement (Ozet) was founded. Several Soviet leaders, led by M. Kalinin and Y. Larin , viewed this settlement not only as an economic solution for the Jews but also as a means of assuring their national existence. Some members of the Yevsektsiya accepted these projects with enthusiasm and devoted themselves to their realization. These circles aimed to establish Jewish settlement in successive blocs which would   form autonomous national areas and would eventually find their place among the national units of which the Soviet Union was composed. As a basis for such a concentration, the regions of prerevolutionary Jewish settlement in southern Russia were chosen, where 40,000 Jewish farmers already lived, as well as the Crimean peninsula, in the northern parts of which there were still areas available for settlement. Over a number of years five autonomous Jewish agricultural regions were established: kalinindorf (Kalininskoye) in 1927, Nay Zlatopol in 1929, Stalindorf (Stalinskoye) in 1930, in the Ukraine; Fraydorf in 1931, and Larindorf in 1935, in the Crimea. Jewish settlement organizations of the West, especially ICA and the JDC, were associated in these activities. Ozet became the legal focus for Jewish activities, and in its newspaper Tribuna (Russian, 1927–37) the problems of the "productivization" of the Jews and their agricultural settlement were discussed. Communists of Russia and abroad considered this activity to be, among others, the Soviet alternative to Zionism. It soon became evident that there was not sufficient space in the Ukraine and Crimea for Jewish settlement on a large scale. In 1928 the government decided to direct this settlement to a distant and sparsely populated region in the Far East–the region of birobidzhan , on the banks of the Amur River on the Chinese border. In order to encourage settlement in Birobidzhan, a political as well as an international Jewish character was given to this enterprise. Jews throughout the world were called upon to lend a hand in the establishment of a Jewish territorial unit within the framework of the Soviet Union. On May 7, 1934, the district of Birobidzhan was proclaimed a Jewish Autonomous Region which was to cover an area of 36,000 sq. km., whose official language would be Yiddish. Settlement in Birobidzhan took place in difficult pioneering conditions. In August 1936, the government announced that "the Jewish Autonomous Region was from now on to become the cultural center of Soviet Jewry for all the working Jewish population." This proclamation aroused opposition within the circles of Jewish activists in the European part of the Soviet Union. It appears that misgivings were also felt in government circles toward the outspoken national character which the settlement of Birobidzhan received. In August 1936, a drastic change occurred in the attitude of the government toward Birobidzhan. The leadership of the region, which was in the hands of former members of the Jewish socialist parties, was liquidated. From then, the Jewish aspect of the region began to wane. Officially Birobidzhan retained its name and status of a Jewish autonomous region, and the only newspaper still published in Yiddish in the Soviet Union is the Birobidzhaner Shtern. At present, however, Birobidzhan has only symbolic importance in the lives of the Jews of Russia. Its number of Jewish inhabitants, which in 1936 rose to 18,000 (about 24 percent of the total population of the region), declined to 14,169 in the census of 1959, forming 8.8 percent of the region's population and about 0.66 percent of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. Less than 40 percent of them declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue. By the late 1930s, the hopes which many Jews in Russia and abroad had pinned on agricultural settlement evaporated. The collectivization of farming during the early 1930s, which was frequently bound up with a policy of "internationalization" (i.e., the inclusion of non-Jewish peasants in Jewish kolkhozes), resulted in the departure of many Jewish settlers. The industrialization and development of the towns attracted many members of the settlements to the large towns. With the German invasion, all the Jewish settlements of the Ukraine and Crimea were destroyed and they did not recover after the war. The Jewish Population of Birobidzhan, 19281959 The Jewish Population of Birobidzhan, 1928–1959   Numbers Immigration into the region 1928 400 900 1929 1,200 1,000 1930 2,600 1,500 1931 3,500 3,250 1932 7,000 9,000 1933 6,000 3,000 1934 8,000 5,250 1935 14,000 8,350 1936 18,000 8,000 1937 19,000 3,000 1945 20,000 1,750 1948 30,000 10,000 1959 14,269 – ABSORPTION INTO THE SOVIET STRUCTURE In practice, the problem of Jewish integration within the economic structure of the Soviet Union was solved by many Jews moving to the interior of Russia and their absorption in Soviet officialdom and industry. Migration toward the interior of Russia, which had already begun as a result of the expulsions from the war zones in 1915 and with the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, continued uninterruptedly, as indicated by the general censuses which were held in the Soviet Union in 1926 and 1939 (see Table: Migration toward the Interior of Russia, 1926 and 1939). Migration toward the Interior of Russia, 1926 and 1939 Migration toward the Interior of Russia, 1926 and 1939   2"> 1926 2"> 1939 Region Number of Jews (thousands) % of total population Number of Jews (thousands) % of total population Russian S.F.S.R. 599.0 22.4 948 31.4 Ukraine 1,574.5 59.0 1,533 50.8 Belorussia 407.0 15.2 375 12.4 Caucasus 51.5 1.9 84 2.8 Soviet Central Asia 40.0 1.5 80 2.6 Total 2,672 100.0 3,020 100.0 The movement of Jews to Moscow and Leningrad was most evident (see Table: Movement of Jews to Moscow and Leningrad).   \<!   \> \!movement of jews to moscow and leningrad Movement of Jews to Moscow and Leningrad   4"> Number of Jews Town 1897 1926 1940 (approx.) Moscow 8,473 131,000 400,000 Leningrad 17,251 84,412 175,000 Hundreds of thousands of Jews took up employment as factory workers or were absorbed in administrative occupations (especially as clerks in consumers' cooperatives and in accountancy). The division of the Jews' social status in 1939, according to official sources, appears in Table: Jews According to Social Status, Russia, 1939. Jews According to Social Status, Russia, 1939 Jews According to Social Status, Russia, 1939   Occupation % Clerks 40.6 Workers 30.6 Cooperative craftsmen 16.1 Individual craftsmen 4.0 Peasants in kolkhozes 5.8 Others 2.9 Total 100.0 Jews were heavily represented in the Soviet intellectual class. At the close of the 1930s, 364,000 Jews (of whom 125,000 were accountants) belonged to this class. Thus, in Soviet society, the Jews also remained an exceptional element in their social composition. Commerce, which had held the central place in the lives of the Jews before the Revolution, was replaced by administrative occupations and professions in technology and sciences. In Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, which were directed against the members of the old Communist guard, many members of the Yevsektsiya were liquidated and the main Jewish newspaper and the Ozet society were closed down. Apart from this, however, these purges did not bear an anti-Jewish character and were a part of the general policy of the party. At the end of the 1930s, Jews still played an important role in administration, science, and Soviet art. However, no Jewish national or communal organization existed whatsoever. Assimilation took giant strides. Mixed marriages became commonplace. Yiddish-Communist culture was gradually disappearing, but there was still a class of Jewish activists, authors and teachers who held their ground in this atmosphere of extinction, and proclaimed, in accordance with the optimistic official line in the Soviet Union, the great "success" achieved by Marxist-Leninist policy in the solution of the Jewish problem and the "renovated Jewish people" (dos banayte folk) which had emerged in the Soviet Union. -During World War II (1939–1945) On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded Soviet territory. The 22 months preceding the invasion witnessed a steady decline of the remnants of national Jewish life: Jewish institutions and newspapers which had survived the purge of the late 1930s functioned in an atmosphere of fear and oppression, and Jewish educational institutions closed down, often at their own initiative. Among the younger generation the process of assimilation was accelerated. (In June 1942 the Jewish commander of the Soviet air force, Lieutenant General Yaacov Shmushkevich, twice a Hero of the Soviet Union, was arrested and eventually executed, but this must be regarded as part of Stalin's general purges rather than an attack upon the Jews.) SOVIET ANNEXATION OF TERRITORIES: 1939–40 The most significant event of this period, in Jewish terms, was the addition of over two million Jews, residents of the territories that had been annexed by or incorporated into the Soviet Union (see Table: Distribution of Jewish Population in the Soviet-Annexed Territories). \<!   \> \!distribution of jewish population in the soviet-annexed territories Distribution of Jewish Population in the Soviet-Annexed Territories   Area Date of Annexation Number of Jews Location of Large Communities Eastern Galicia and western Belorussia Sept. 1939 1,220,000 Bialystok, Pinsk, Grodno, Rovno, Lvov Refugees from western Poland Sept. 1939 300,000 Lithuania and the Vilna area June 1940 250,000 Vilna, Kovno Latvia and Estonia June 1940 100,000 Riga Bessarabia, northern July 1940 300,000 Kishinev, Chernovtsy Bukovina Total 2,170,000 As a result of the annexations, the Jewish population of the Soviet Union totaled approximately 5,250,000. There were areas in the new territories which had a dense Jewish population – especially the cities – and Jews accounted for 5–10 percent of the total population. Most of these Jews spoke Yiddish and they were imbued with a high degree of national Jewish consciousness. The Zionist movement was strong and well entrenched, and a large part of the youth actively prepared itself to settle in Palestine; the socialist Bund also wielded considerable influence. The Jews had their own educational systems – traditional and secular schools, and also the great yeshivot – which taught Hebrew and Yiddish to many thousands of students. A multilingual Jewish press and literature existed whose ranks of Jewish writers and men of letters were augmented by refugees from Warsaw and the towns in western Poland. Deeply shocked by the swift capitulation of Poland and the fall of its Jews into Nazi hands, most Jews of the newly-annexed territories welcomed the new Soviet regime, regarding it above all as providing assurance of their physical survival. They accepted the new economic and social order in spite of the great hardship that it caused them – confiscation of factories and businesses and the imposition of heavy taxes on shopkeepers and artisans. Jews were now able to enter government   service, and found it possible to function in the Soviet economic system in cooperative and state-run workshops and commercial enterprises. The Jewish communities themselves were disbanded and the status of religion and religious institutions – synagogues, yeshivot and religious schools – underwent a sharp decline. The Hebrew-language schools had to adopt Yiddish as the medium of instruction and introduce the Soviet curriculum, with teachers from the old part of the U.S.S.R. put on their staff. Jewish youth organizations were either disbanded or went underground and many of the young people joined the Communist youth movement (Komsomol). The young Zionists and yeshivah students, for the most part, moved to Vilna, which was a Polish city and then became the capital of Lithuania, but was not occupied by the Soviets until June 1940, and from there many succeeded in reaching either Palestine or the United States. There was also a minor revival of Yiddish cultural life. The old Soviet Yiddish writers, who had almost given up all hope of saving Yiddish culture from obliteration, now saw a new sphere of activities opening up. They established contact with writers in such Jewish centers as Vilna, Kaunas, Riga, Lvov, Bialystok, and Chernovtsy, founded newspapers and theaters, and began to publish their books. A chair for Yiddish language and literature, headed by noah prylucki , was created at Vilna University. This development soon met with the disapproval of the Soviet authorities, and by the end of 1940 there was no doubt that Jewish institutions in the new territories were also being systematically liquidated. This was especially true of Jewish schools, where teachers and parents were "persuaded" to replace Yiddish by Russian. A few attempts at protesting this policy were firmly suppressed, as, for example, the arrest and later execution of the Soviet Yiddish writer selik axelrod in Minsk. Many of the refugees from western Poland were arrested in the early months of the Soviet occupation and deported to camps in the Soviet interior. In the spring of 1941, mass arrests took place among Jews and non-Jews alike, primarily former businessmen, industrialists, and religious functionaries, as well as socialists, Zionists and Bundists. They were sent into exile or labor camps in northern Russia, where many of them died; for others, deportation turned out to be the means of survival, while the families they had left behind soon became the victims of the Nazi slaughter. It was clear that Soviet policy was designed to equate the social and cultural standard of the new areas, as quickly as possible, with that of the rest of the country. Any remaining contact between Soviet Jewry and the Jewish world beyond the borders was broken off. The Soviet press reported very little of the atrocities committed by its Nazi treaty partner, and made no mention at all of the persecution of the Jews. As a result, the Jews of the Soviet Union knew practically nothing of the fate of their brethren in the countries occupied by the Germans, and when the Soviet Union was invaded, they were mostly unprepared for what was to happen. GERMAN INVASION: 1941 In the first few weeks following June 22, 1941, the German invaders occupied most of the areas annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940, including all of Belorussia and the greater part of the western Ukraine (as eastern Galicia had become). Vilna was taken on June 25, Minsk on June 28, Riga on July 1, Vitebsk and Zhitomir on July 9, and Kishinev on July 16. From most of the towns, the Jews attempted to flee to the Soviet interior, but were prevented from doing so either by the advancing German troops or by Soviet security forces who did not permit the crossing of the pre-1939 borders of the U.S.S.R. The Jews in the areas that were occupied by the Germans at a later date, such as Kiev (September 19) and Odessa (October 16), did in large measure succeed in escaping in time, either individually or within the organized evacuation of government employees, of functionaries of institutions, and of workers in factories. In the more remote areas occupied by the Germans, the majority of the Jewish inhabitants also managed to get away in time. The total Jewish population in the areas occupied by the Germans had been four million (spring 1941). Of these, about three million were murdered. The rest were saved in a variety of ways including prior deportation and evacuation together with non-Jews; drafting into the Red Army; and flight to the forests and joining the partisan units. Almost none of the Jews who remained in the cities and towns of the German-occupied territory survived the war. By the time of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., the Nazi plan for the "final solution " had been worked out. Here the Nazis felt none of the restraint which they had imposed upon themselves in Western Europe, since they were unconcerned by local reaction. The annihilation of the Jews proceeded at a rapid pace. The ghettos that were established proved to be only temporary collection points for the utilization of Jewish labor prior to destruction. ANNIHILATION OF THE JEWS The task of the systematic murder of the Jews was put in the hands of four specially created units called Einsatzgruppen, made up of 3,000 killers recruited from the ss , the SD and the Gestapo. These units were assigned the job of following the German troops as they advanced into the Soviet Union, and ridding the occupied areas of all undesirable elements – political commissars, active Communists, and, above all, the Jews. Their task was explained to them in special training courses: to destroy the Ostjuden (Jews of Eastern Europe) who represented the "biological base" of the Jewish people all over the world and constituted the breeding ground of world Communism. Each unit was allotted a certain area of activity, and on completion of its task in one area, it was transferred to another. The units were commanded by high-ranking officers of the Gestapo, many of them well-educated men who had chosen the assignment because of its absence of personal danger and its high reward – a better salary, plus the valuables taken from the victims. Among these officers, there were some of the "finest" products of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, they could not have carried out their task without assistance from various sources, foremost among them the German army, which supplied the Einsatzgruppen with personnel, transport and weapons. An   order issued by Field Marshal Reichenau on Oct. 10, 1941, on the "Conduct of the Armed Forces in the Eastern Theater of Operations," explicitly called upon German troops to assist in the murder of Jews. Hitler described it as an "excellent" (ausgezeichnet) order and instructed all army commanders on the Soviet front to follow Reichenau's example. Local antisemitic elements, too, participated in the slaughter of Jews, first by means of pogroms initiated of their own accord, especially in the Baltic states and later as members of special police units made up of Ukrainians, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Tatars, who collaborated in the extermination campaign. The Germans had a special interest in gaining the cooperation of the local populations, so that they became accomplices in the crimes being committed. One means by which they achieved this end was the distribution of Jewish houses and portions of Jewish property among gentile neighbors. The attitude of the local population to the Jews differed from one place to another. In the Baltic states and the Crimea, home of the Tatars, there were local elements who participated in the annihilation of Jews as effectively as the Nazis. In the Ukraine the number of Nazi collaborators, led by Ukrainian nationalists, was particularly large. On the other hand, the Belorussian and Russian population in the Nazi-occupied areas hated the Germans and were on the whole opposed to the mass murder of Jews. In a very few instances attempts were made to save Jews. One such effort was the work of the Metropolitan Sheptitski, head of the Uniate Church in the western Ukraine, who, with the help of monks belonging to his church, organized a network for saving Jews by hiding them in monasteries. A similar network of Polish and Lithuanian intellectuals and clerics operated in Vilna. However, prevailing conditions severely limited the scope of these efforts. The method by which the annihilation of the Jews was carried out by the Nazis differed from one place to another. In many instances the murders took place in the very beginning of the occupation. This was true of many cities and towns in the Baltic states, where local nationalists accused the Jews of having welcomed and supported the Soviet annexation. Often the Nazis used the murder of Jews to set an example for the local population and to intimidate them, or in revenge for operations carried out by the partisans. In Kiev 33,779 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered within two days (Sept. 29–30, 1941) in the babi yar valley , near the local Jewish cemetery, in response to the blowing up of German headquarters in the city. In Odessa, German and Romanian forces reacted similarly to the destruction of Romanian headquarters in the city, and 26,000 Jews were put to death during Oct. 23–26, 1941, many by hanging or burning. The killing in Odessa continued until the middle of the winter. In the Ukraine and Belorussia, the Nazis celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution on Nov. 7, 1941, by mass killings of Jews. In the Soviet Union, the Nazis tried out new ways of murdering Jews. One such method was the use of closed vans, in which Jews were ostensibly being transported from one place to another, while in fact poison gas was forced into the vans, causing the immediate death of all the passengers. The most common method was to drive the Jews to the outskirts of the city and fire on them by rifles or machine guns in front of previously prepared ditches, pushing the victims into the ditches and covering the ditches with earth. Sometimes some of the victims were not dead, and were thus buried alive. In many instances, they had to remove their clothes before going to their deaths. Nazi leaders, among them A. Eichmann , were frequent witnesses of these spectacles. Where the slaughter was not completed in the early days of the occupation, the Nazis established ghettos for the survivors, situated, as a rule, in the slum quarters of the town, where the Jews were concentrated in the worst conditions possible. A judenrat and a ghetto police force were appointed by the Nazis to run the ghetto. Some of those appointed showed courage and fortitude in carrying out the task that a bitter fate had decreed for them. In the majority of cases, however, working under the Nazis resulted in moral degeneration. The Jews were forced to wear the yellow badge and were not permitted to leave the confines of the ghetto, unless they were working for the Nazis outside. From time to time, the Nazis staged Aktionen designed to weed out the "useless" elements – invalids, old people and children. Those whose turn for death had not yet come were forced to work in German army workshops, road building and fortifications. Surviving Jews in places that were declared judenrein were transferred to central ghettos, which also contained large numbers of Jews from Western Europe. The largest of these ghettos existed in Vilna, Bialystok, Kaunas, Riga, and Minsk (only the last belonging to the pre-1939 Soviet territory), and they remained in existence for almost the entire period of German occupation. Most of the Jews from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were deported to transnistria , the area beyond the Dniester that had been occupied by the Romanian army, where they suffered from starvation and disease and were put into forced labor. The enormity of the Nazi crimes was revealed while the war was still going on, as soon as the Soviet army began its westward advance, liberating occupied territories. Several of the Nazi murderers who fell into Soviet hands, and their collaborators among the local population, were put on trial. While at the start no attempt was made to conceal the Jewish identity of the victims, after a while the Soviet authorities and information media refrained from mentioning the anti-Jewish character of the crimes and described the victims as "Soviet citizens." JEWISH RESISTANCE Jewish resistance to the Nazi regime was manifested in two ways: the revolt in the ghettos, and participation in the partisan movement (see partisans ). There was a decided difference between the behavior of the Jews in the pre-1939 territory of the Soviet Union and the Jews in the recently incorporated areas. The former had been deprived by the Soviet regime of any form of Jewish organization and lacked any semblance of coherence as a national   group. In their case the process of annihilation was swift and thorough and, with few exceptions (Minsk, Kopyls), these ghettos existed only for a few months or even weeks. In the newly annexed areas, such as the Baltic states, former eastern Poland, northern Bukovina, etc., the tradition of Jewish organization and self-contained Jewish life was still strong, and it took the Nazis much longer to wipe out the ghettos. The Jews maintained clandestine institutions for mutual help, and rendered assistance not only to the local Jewish population but also to the deportees who had been brought in from other places. In these ghettos, there were underground libraries, choirs, orchestras, and theater companies, as well as schools and synagogues. An underground press informed the ghetto population of developments on the front and events concerning Jews, and served to keep up morale. These activities were organized largely by the youth and by the few surviving intellectuals. A leading role was played by Zionist youth groups, who hoped for a future life in Ereẓ Israel, and by the Communists, who hoped for the victory of the Soviet army. In many of the ghettos, fighting organizations were created which collected arms in preparation for a ghetto revolt or for escape to join the partisans. The underground fighting groups in the large ghettos managed to maintain communications with each other and send messengers to the ghetto resistance movement headquarters in Warsaw. A major dilemma confronting the fighting ghetto youth was the choice between remaining in the ghetto to carry on the hopeless struggle there, or escaping to the woods to join the partisans. Generally, the policy of the ghetto leadership was to stay in the ghetto and carry on their miserable existence there, in the hope of "surviving them" (iberlebn zay); an open revolt would lead to drastic punishment and the immediate murder of large numbers of ghetto inmates. However, the resistance movements arrived at the conclusion that the Nazis aimed at the total extermination of all Jews. In their leaflets (in Vilna, Bialystok, and elsewhere) the resistance called on the Jews not to go "like sheep to the slaughter" but to defend themselves and take up weapons. The only recourse for the underground resistance movement was to stage a revolt of the ghetto as a whole just as it was about to be liquidated. An earlier flight to the woods meant abandoning the ghetto, and the families of the escapees, to their bitter fate. Usually, however, the problem was resolved by the conditions created by the Nazis. In the summer of 1942, the Germans began the systematic liquidation of the ghettos in the provincial towns. In some of them revolts broke out, the ghetto inmates resisting their deportation, setting the ghetto houses on fire and making mass attempts to escape to the forests. nesvizh , mir , lachva , kletsk and kremenets were some of the places where ghetto revolts occurred. In August 1943, when the Nazis embarked upon the final liquidation of the bialystok ghetto, a revolt broke out there. There were no revolts in vilna and kaunas , but the Jewish underground encouraged the young people to flee to the forests and join the partisans. In Minsk the ghetto underground maintained close contact with the partisan units in the vicinity. PARTICIPATION IN THE PARTISAN MOVEMENT Jewish participation in the partisan movement, which encompassed large areas under German occupation, especially in Belorussia, Lithuania and Ukraine, was relatively small. The partisan movement was based in the forests and the villages in the forest area, consisting primarily of local people, such as peasants and shepherds. There was widespread antisemitism among the partisans, with many instances of partisans attacking Jews, robbing them of their goods, and even murdering them. The time factor was also against wide Jewish participation. The Soviet partisan movement gained its strength after June 1942 (date of the establishment of the central partisan headquarters), a period when most of Soviet Jews in the German-occupied territories had already been murdered. The non-Jewish partisan, as a rule, was an able-bodied person who had chosen to fight the Germans. Most of the Jews, however, who had fled to the forests, had no other choice, and brought with them a large number of old people, women, and children who were incapable of joining the fighting and whose security and sustenance were a heavy burden which the non-Jewish partisans were unwilling to bear. In general, Jews were received coolly by the partisans and frequently had to prove their ability and readiness to fight, as well as obtain their own weapons, before they were permitted to join the partisan ranks. Many Jews, especially in the Soviet interior, assumed non-Jewish names and posed as gentiles in order to join the partisans. The presence of antisemitic elements both in the partisan command and in the rank and file manifested itself in frequent executions of Jewish partisans for minor misdemeanors, for which their non-Jewish comrades were given a light punishment only. A change for the better occurred in the fall of 1942, when a partisan supreme headquarters was created in Moscow and political instructors sent to the partisan units to form them into a regular organized movement. Groups of Jews, members of resistance movements or others who fled to the woods, tried to establish Jewish partisan units. Often they did not find any other partisans in the area when they arrived. Some of them formed "family camps" which housed complete families, as well as fighting units whose task it was to defend the camps against both the Germans and the non-Jewish partisan units. Examples of such family camps were the one headed by Tuvyah Belski, in the vicinity of novogrudok , where over 1,000 persons found refuge, most of whom were able to survive the war; a camp in the forests near Minsk, created by Shimon Zorin, which sheltered families and also served as a base for several fighting units; and various camps in the forests of western Belorussia, Lithuania, and Volhynia, among them the fighting unit headed by jechezkiel atlas in the Slonim area, the "Jewish Unit" headed by M. Gildenman in the Volhynian forests, and the 51st Company of the Shchors Battalion in Polesie. When the Soviet command took over the partisan movement, it pressed for the disbandment of the Jewish units and the distribution of its members among the various other national partisan units. This policy was based on the territorial principle which called for the partisan   units to symbolize the organic connection between the population of the district in which the partisan units were active and the Soviet Union. Jewish commanders were replaced and non-Jewish partisans were incorporated into the Jewish units, so that the units soon lost their Jewish character. Thus, there were units termed Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Lithuanian, even in cases when a substantial part of the unit strength was made up of Russians or, sometimes, of Jews (e.g., in Lithuania). Estimates of the number of Jews who were active in the partisan movement range from 10,000 to 20,000. About one third fell in the fighting with the Germans. When the areas in which they were active were liberated by the Soviet army, most of the Jewish partisans were drafted and joined the Soviet forces in their drive to Berlin. A substantial number of these erstwhile partisans made their way to Palestine when the war was over. JEWS IN THE SOVIET ARMY Jewish soldiers played a leading role in the fighting units in those areas of the Soviet Union which were not occupied by the Germans. There was no question of where their loyalty lay: they were fighting for their lives, and for them, unlike Russians such as Vlasov and Ukrainians such as Bandera, treason was out of the question. It was known that Jewish soldiers in the Soviet army who were taken prisoner were executed at once by the Germans. About 500,000 Jews served in the Soviet army during the war, and approximately 200,000 fell in battle. In the Brest-Litovsk fortress, one of the organizers of the heroic resistance was a Jewish officer, Chaim Fomin. A similar role was played by another Jew, Arseni Arkin, who was the commissar of the Hango garrison, the advance position in the Gulf of Finland. The first Soviet squadron to bomb Berlin (August 1941. was commanded by Michael Plotkin, a Jew. In the battle for Moscow at the end of 1941, a Jewish brigadier (later general), jacob kreiser , took a leading role. Many Jews were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union during that battle. Many Jews took part in the battle for Stalingrad, among them Kreiser; Lieutenant General Israel Baskin, an artillery commander; and the commander of the 62nd Armored Corps, M. Weinrub. At the fall of Stalingrad, Field Marshal von Paulus surrendered his pistol to a Jewish brigadier, Leonid Vinokur. A large proportion of Jews were also among the troops that spearheaded the Soviet drive into Germany. Among the 900 soldiers who were decorated Heroes of the Soviet Union for their part in the crossing of the Dnieper, 27 were Jews. Similarly, in the battle for Berlin many Jews took part in the fighting, among them Major General Hirsh Plaskov, artillery commander, and Lieutenant General Shimon Krivoshein, commander of the armored corps. Jews were heavily represented in the artillery units, armored corps, army engineers, and the air force. Their numbers were also particularly great in the medical corps, among them the surgeon general of the Soviet army, Major General M. Vofsi, later to be among the accused in the antisemitic "doctor 's Plot" eight years after the war (see also below). Among many Jews serving in the navy were Rear Admiral Paul Trainin, who commanded the Kerch naval base, and submarine captains Israel Fisanovich and Shimon Bograd. A Jewish major general of the cavalry, Dovator, was among those who fell in the defense of Moscow. A total of 160,000 Jewish soldiers in the Soviet forces were decorated during the war, with the Jews thus taking fifth place among Soviet nationalities. The highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union, was granted to 145 Jews, among them David Dragunski, who was awarded it twice. Jewish women distinguished themselves as nurses, medical orderlies, radio operators, and even as snipers and pilots. Among the latter were Polina Gelman and Raisa Aronova, who became Heroes of the Soviet Union. A considerable number of Jewish writers took part in the fighting, and among those who fell in battle were S.N. Godiner , A. Gurshtein and Meir Wiener. Jews who were taken prisoner could save their lives only if they succeeded in hiding their Jewish identity. A Soviet prisoner-of-war underground movement in Germany, organized in 1943, was discovered by the Nazis and its members were executed. At the head of the movement was an officer named George Pasenko, whose real name, it later transpired, had been Joseph Feldman. The tendency among Jewish soldiers to hide their true identity also existed in the Soviet army itself, because of antisemitic elements. This situation facilitated the work of the antisemitic propagandists, especially in the rear, who argued that the Jews were not taking part in the war effort, and in the postwar years antisemitic groups continued to belittle the Jewish role in the defeat of Germany. In the story of Jewish participation in the Soviet war effort, the Lithuanian division and Latvian units represent a special chapter. The Soviet government had a special interest in creating national Lithuanian and Latvian units in order to demonstrate that these countries had become an integral part of the U.S.S.R. The Lithuanian division was created in the northern Volga region in December 1941, but because the number of Lithuanians available was too small to fill its ranks, Russian-born Lithuanians and Lithuanian-born Russians were also drafted into the unit. But in its initial stage Jews comprised a majority in the division. Jews also accounted for a large part of the Latvian national units. When the Lithuanian division finally reached Lithuanian soil, the proportion of Jews had been reduced to one fifth. Four of the Jewish soldiers serving in this division were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. After the war, a considerable number of former members of the Lithuanian division managed to reach Palestine. POSITION OF JEWS BEHIND THE FRONT Jews living behind the front underwent great suffering during the war. In addition to sharing the general fate of the population, many of them suffered special hardship, for the number of refugees among them was disproportionately large, and they lived under severe conditions in the towns and kolkhozes beyond the Volga and in Soviet Central Asia. A few refugees were allowed to join the Polish army under General Anders and were thus able to leave the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities were suspicious of the Jewish refugees, especially the former Polish citizens   among them. Even those who had formally become Soviet citizens, were, at the beginning, drafted into labor battalions only. A tragic example of this attitude was the execution by the Soviets of two former Polish Bund leaders, H. Erlich and V. Alter , in December 1941. Latent antisemitism among the Soviet masses manifested itself overtly throughout the war. Its principal victims were the Jewish refugees, whom the local population regarded as competitors for the scarce food and shelter available. When in 1943–44 the Soviet army liberated the occupied areas, not only was the Holocaust of the Jewish communities revealed, but also the hatred of the Jews that the Nazis had successfully aroused and encouraged among the local population. This hatred was further intensified by the attempts of the few returning Jews to regain their houses and positions. In numerous instances, Jews who had survived the war and tried to reestablish themselves in their old homes were murdered by their erstwhile neighbors. Liberated Kiev was the scene of a pogrom in which a number of Jews lost their lives. FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE HOLOCAUST IN RUSSIA New archival material from the zentralestelle der landesjustizverwaltungen at Ludwigsburg, which was previously not available, now makes it possible to give an account of the extermination of the Jews in the Nazi-occupied territory of the U.S.S.R. The Jewish population of the U.S.S.R., within the frontiers of Sept. 17, 1939, was, according to the census of January 1939, 3,028,358, with the following breakdown: Ukraine 1,532,776, Belorussia 375,092; Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic 956,599; all other territories 200,000. Eighty percent of these Jews lived in the large industrial cities or in small towns which served as industrial and commercial centers for the surrounding villages. The Nazi onslaught on June 22, 1941, and the rapid progress of the German army, took the Jews completely by surprise, as was the case with the Red Army command. As a result of the confusion and lost sense of direction, and because of transportation failures, heavy shelling, and the swift advance of German units (on June 26 they approached minsk and, by the middle of July, almost the whole of Belorussia and the greater part of the western Ukraine, with zhitomir , were occupied), it was practically impossible for Jews inhabiting Belorussia and the western Ukraine (on the right bank of the Dnieper) to escape. The number of Jews evacuated in an organized manner from the eastern Ukraine and the Russian Republic was, according to S. Schwartz, about 50 percent; according to reports by Einsatzgruppen, between 70 and 90 percent of the Jews escaped from some towns. They were evacuated with their plants and offices. There was practically no evacuation of Jews as such. Many of the Jews who had sought refuge in the crimea and the caucasus were subsequently murdered by the advancing Germans. Many Jewish families did not even attempt to leave, as no one anticipated the Jewish extermination policy of the Nazis, since the Soviet press had adopted a friendly policy toward Nazi Germany, especially after the signing of the nonaggression pact, and it refrained from mentioning the persecution of Jews in occupied Europe. At the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Nazi Government already had a carefully elaborated plan for the liquidation of Russian Jewry, and had prepared the material basis for implementing it. In March 1941, the organization of special units, the so-called Einsatzgruppen, began, with the aim of exterminating all Jews and Communists within the occupied territory of the U.S.S.R. Einsatzgruppen A, B, and C were directly subordinated to the rsha commander. Each of them operated in the territory of one of the three fronts (Heeresgruppe), while Einsatzgruppe D operated in the territory of Manstein's 11th Army to the south. The Einsatzgruppen immediately followed the front-line units, made inquiries, and, in cooperation with auxiliary police troops (mainly Lithuanian and Ukrainian), carried out the first mass slaughter of the Jews. To quote only one example, Einsatzgruppe C entered Zhitomir together with the first German tanks and, on September 19, 1941, the 4a Einsatzkommando of the same Einsatzgruppe C arrived in kiev ; here, ten days later, along with troops led by a senior SS officer and the Sued ("South") police units, it organized the massacre of more than 33,000 Jews at babi yar . The ss and senior police officers (Hoehere SS und Polizeifuehrer – HSSPF) with their subordinated units were another organized force who, almost from the first day of the occupation, engaged in the liquidation of Jews under the guise of fighting the partisans. There were three such officers in the U.S.S.R.: Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Pruetzmann and Obergruppenfuehrer Franz Jeckeln, who alternately supervised the territories of the Baltic states and the northern part of the Russian Republic as HSSPF-Nord and the Ukraine as HSSPF-Sued, and HSSPF-Mitte Obergruppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who operated mainly in Belorussia. The total number of Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen and the troops of the HSSPFs during the first period of the occupation (mainly in July and August 1941) is still unknown. Incomplete evidence shows that in August 1941 alone the HSSPF-Sued units executed 44,125 people, most of them Jews, while the SS Kavallerie-Regiment 2, subordinated to the HSSPF-Mitte, killed 6,526 Jews in the period between July 27 and August 11, 1941. A comment by the commander of the aforementioned unit, SS Sturmbannfuehrer Magill, bears witness to the German soldiers' bestiality. He reported that the operation had in general been carried out satisfactorily, despite the fact that the marshes were not deep enough to drown the women and children. There was close cooperation between the German army and those who organized the extermination of the Jews. The Einsatzgruppen received supplies from military sources and were assisted by regular army units in liquidating the Jews.   The army often asked the SD to exterminate Jewish communities in the territory within their control (Priluki, gadyach ), or took a direct part in such operations. In the report of Einsatzgruppe A for the period between Oct. 16, 1941 and Jan. 31, 1942, for example, it is stated that "up to January 1942, about 19,000 partisans and criminals, primarily Jews, were killed by the Wehrmacht." Following this first wave of massacres, which took place immediately after the entry of the German army, there was a period of organized liquidation. The preparatory stage was similar to that elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe and included legal discrimination, the tattooing of numbers, registration, humiliating forced labor, and concentration in camps and ghettos. One notable difference, however, was that in Russia this stage took only a short time – from a few weeks to a few months. Usually, the Jews were forbidden freedom of movement from the outset, or not allowed to associate with non-Jews or benefit from public services. The quantity and quality of goods sold to Jews were usually minimal, as were the hours of sale; in many cases, all shopping was made impossible for the Jews. They were ordered to wear distinguishing badges: in Belorussia it was usually a yellow circle or a yellow magen David ("shield of David") on the chest and back, and in the Ukraine, a yellow armband. The so-called "Jewish Committees" were established during that period, whose task it was to supply the Germans with manpower, collect contributions, and – mainly in the Ukraine – register the Jews as a first step toward their extermination. The next step was the systematic slaughter of most young men of Jewish origin. In the large cities, those capable of military service were interned during the first days of the occupation; Jews were usually separated from the rest, and, as a rule, executed soon afterward (Minsk, Kiev). In the smaller towns, Jewish men were rounded up – ostensibly for forced labor, but in reality to be put to death. Jewish prisoners of war were as a rule shot immediately. There is eyewitness evidence of the mass slaughter of Jewish intellectuals at that time (Minsk, vitebsk , Vinnitsa). In the majority of cases during the second month of the occupation closed ghettos were established in large Jewish communities and in district centers for the concentration of Jews in the whole area. It also happened that, where there were few Jews (as in Novo-Moskovsk or Baran), no ghettos were established, and the Jews were allowed to remain in their places of residence until they were exterminated. Ghettos were usually located in those suburbs which had been most badly damaged, and in buildings unfit for human habitation – factories, barracks or warehouses (kharkov , Vitebsk). Those deported to the ghetto were permitted to take only hand luggage. Since these ghettos were simply concentrations of Jews to be liquidated, they were often merely open areas surrounded by barbed wire (Smolevichi, gorodok , polotsk , Smolyany, Kletnya). Such ghetto-camps usually existed from several weeks to a few months. The Jews in the ghettos received no food as a rule, and the mortality rate there was very high, particularly during the severe winter of 1941. The liquidation of the newly-established ghettos began as early as the autumn of 1941. Of the 18 known ghettos in Belorussia, nine were liquidated by the end of 1941, six of them in October. In the Ukraine, too, most of the Jews had been put to death by the end of 1941. Out of the 70 known Jewish communities in the Ukraine (including the Crimea), 43 were liquidated by the end of 1941, and the remainder were also rendered judenrein by mid-1942. For the Germans themselves, the "Jewish question" in the Ostland (including the Baltic states and Belorussia) had virtually found a solution. In the Ukraine, the "Jewish question" ceased to exist by August 1942. In 1943, Jews were still to be found only in a few ghettos (those of Minsk, slutsk , and khmelnik ) and a very few labor camps, but they were liquidated by the end of the year. In the Crimea and the Caucasus, and probably also in the southeastern Ukraine, practically no ghettos were set up. Jews were liquidated there almost immediately after the occupation of the region, and the German orders followed one after another; first, the establishment of the Jewish Committee, then registration, badges, and finally "evacuation," which meant death. Such was the fate of the Jews of simferopol , yevpatoriya , feodosiya , kerch , rostov , krasnodar , Kislovodsk, and other towns. As a rule, the Ashkenazi Jews were liquidated first, and then the Crimean Jews (Krimchaks). The executions were usually organized by the Einsatzgruppen. The ghetto was surrounded by the German police, assisted by auxiliary forces of the local police and frequently by the Wehrmacht. The Jews, who believed they were being evacuated, were rounded up in public squares and taken in trucks or driven on foot to the place of execution. In front of the graves, prepared beforehand, by the local population or, more often, by Soviet prisoners of war, the victims were ordered to strip naked or remain in their underwear, stood in groups at the edge of the graves, or pushed inside them and told to lie down, after which they were machine-gunned. The executions were carried out by both Germans and their local assistants. Fresh victims were laid on the corpses and the process continued until the grave was full. To make their work easier, the executioners sometimes rendered their victims unconscious by hitting them on the head. During an operation in Vitebsk in October 1941, Jews were reportedly shot on the bridge over the Dvina, and their bodies thrown into the river. At artemovsk , some of the Jews were shot dead, and others immured alive in the marbleworks. In some cases, Jews were made to run over a minefield or killed with grenades (Kharkov, mogilev ). In the Crimea, the method most widely adopted was to shoot Jews over wells into which their bodies were subsequently thrown. In certain communities (Minsk, Kharkov, Krasnodar), Jews were killed in special gas trucks. The Germans and their associates treated children with particular barbarity: their backs were broken, or they were poisoned or stabbed to death, or their heads were smashed against stones. Many children were thrown into graves or wells while still alive.   Executions of Jews usually took place in forests, ravines or isolated places near their places of residence. It can be said that almost every town in the territory in question had its own "Babi Yar." To mention but a few, at Mogilev it was Polikovichi; at Vitebsk, Ilovskiy Yar; at Pskov, Solotopki; at smolensk , Mogalenshchina. In June 1942, himmler had already given orders that all traces of the activity of Einsatzgruppen in the East be removed. Paul Blobel, head of the Sonderkommando 4a, was charged with the task, He organized Kommando 1005 to unearth the corpses from the mass graves and burn them. It seems, however, that this obliteration of the traces did not become a mass operation before the autumn of 1942. It is difficult to estimate how many Jews were massacred by the Nazis in the U.S.S.R. Only fragmentary data are extant, mostly according to the documentation of the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen at Ludwigsburg, which give the number of Jews killed as 573,000, This figure, however, applies only to those put to death in the later period of German occupation (approximately after September 1941), and does not take account of the very large number of massacres in July and August of that year. Moreover, that figure applies only to a small number of townships and settlements, of which there were about 130 in occupied Soviet territory within Russia's 1939 frontiers. Nothing is known of the fate of Jews inhabiting the provinces as a whole; some data are available concerning individual communities, such as the districts of cherkassy , Sumy and Voroshilovgrad. There is also information to the effect that 6,150 Jews were killed in the nikolayev and kherson regions. Even where the number of victims from certain communities is known, the evidence tends to be incomplete or inaccurate, since it is either confined to limited periods or else gives the total number of Jewish and non-Jewish victims together. It can be assumed, however, that the actual number of Jewish victims in the occupied territory of the U.S.S.R. was at least twice the figure cited above, i.e., more than 1,000,000. (Vila Orbach) DESTRUCTION OF YIDDISH CULTURE Soviet Yiddish culture, itself a pale reflection of genuine Jewish culture which had suffered serious setbacks in the prewar purges, was totally jeopardized when the war broke out. The Yiddish press and Yiddish literature, based primarily in the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania, ceased to exist. The annihilation of the Jewish population was accompanied by the destruction of the remaining Jewish schools, libraries, and other cultural institutions. While in 1940 some 360 Yiddish books were published in the Soviet Union, by 1942 the number had dwindled to one. There was some improvement in 1943, after the Emes publishing house had moved to Kuibyshev, issuing 43 Yiddish books that year. The creation of the jewish anti-fascist committee also had a favorable effect upon the modest revival of Yiddish publications. In June 1942 the committee embarked upon the publication of its own organ, eynikayt , which attracted a group of Soviet Yiddish writers, led by david bergelson and itzik fefer . Although the main purpose of the committee was to solicit political and financial support among world Jewry for the Soviet war against the Germans, it also became, unofficially, a representative body of Soviet Jewry until its dissolution in 1948. It soon became clear, however, that the Soviet Union had no intention of permitting a postwar revival of Yiddish schools and the Yiddish press. The millions of Jews for whom Yiddish had been their mother tongue – in the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia – were no longer alive. The majority of the surviving Jews spoke Russian. There were over two million of them, and the Soviet authorities sought to bring about their complete assimilation. -Contemporary Period With the close of the war, Jews of Polish citizenship, including many previous inhabitants of territories annexed by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1940, began to leave the Soviet Union. Groups of Soviet Jews, including Chabad Ḥasidim, who had preserved their religious distinctiveness throughout the years of the Soviet regime, succeeded in leaving and large numbers of these emigrants found their way to Palestine. During the early postwar period, those active in Soviet-Jewish culture attempted to effect a revival. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (see above) continued to serve as a center for Soviet Jewry and as a liaison with Jews in other countries. Large-scale publication of Yiddish books was initiated, the Jewish State Theater expanded its activity, and three other theaters functioned in Minsk, Odessa, and Chernovtsy. Rumors of the impending settlement of survivors of the Holocaust in the Crimea, and the conversion of the peninsula into a "Jewish Republic," spread among the Jews. The Jewish endeavor in Birobidzhan was also renewed, and many Jews tried to settle there. News of the establishment of the state of Israel, with Soviet endorsement and support, infused new life into wide sectors of Soviet Jewry. Eynikayt referred to a world Jewish conference in which Soviet Jews would also be represented. STALIN'S PERSECUTIONS Suddenly, however, the climate reversed completely and nightmarish days filled with fear overtook Soviet Jewry. In January 1948 S. Mikhoels was reported killed in an "accident" in Minsk, but was actually assassinated by the secret police; in November 1948 the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and those associated with it were arrested; Soviet newspapers conducted a vicious campaign against "cosmopolitans" that was directed primarily at the Jewish intelligentsia. Twenty-five leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including some of the outstanding Jewish writers, were accused of maintaining ties with Zionism and with American "imperialism." The "Crimea project" was leveled against them as an "imperialist plot" to detach the Crimea from the U.S.S.R. and they were executed secretly on Aug. 12, 1952. On Jan. 13, 1953, the government announced the arrest of a group of prominent doctors, the majority of them Jews, who were accused of, and who purportedly admitted to, having deliberately killed government leaders and conspired   to kill still others by incorrect medical treatment. A wave of antisemitism spread through the country. Jews were ousted from their positions, and rumors of an impending mass deportation of Jews to distant regions in the eastern Soviet Union began to circulate. This nightmare persisted for about five years until March 1953, when Stalin's death brought some relief. AFTER STALIN'S DEATH The "thaw" that followed Stalin's death, however, did not noticeably affect the fundamental conditions of Soviet Jewish life. Although the Jewish doctors were released from prison and the campaign against "cosmopolitans" ceased, Jewish institutional life, destroyed between 1948 and 1953, was not restored. Two new factors now began to affect the fate of Soviet Jews. First, in the wake of the post-Stalin thaw, postal communication with relatives in the West and in Israel was revived, and there was a stream of Jewish visitors from abroad to the Soviet Union. Direct contact with world Jewry was renewed to a degree, and Jewish public opinion in the West began to demand the restoration of rights to the Jews as a national and religious minority. Even Jewish Communists in Western Europe and the United States protested the obliteration of Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R., and the Soviet government was compelled to make several concessions to this public pressure. The second factor was the establishment of the State of Israel, which reawakened Jewish national sentiment that found expression in spontaneous mass demonstrations on occasions such as the arrival of golda meir , Israel's first diplomatic representative to the Soviet Union, in Moscow, and the visit of an Israeli youth delegation to the Democratic Youth Festival in Moscow in the summer of 1957. National sentiment was also manifested by increasing mass gatherings of young, mostly nonreligious, Jews in and around the synagogues in Moscow and other large cities on Simḥat Torah and on the High Holidays. In 1970 Soviet Jews were still denied the right to organize in any way or to express freely their thoughts and feelings as Jews. For many years, sources attesting the situation of Soviet Jewry consisted of incidental items of information interspersed in the Soviet press and world news agencies and of stories brought back by diplomats, visitors and tourists. More information became available in the mid-1960s and the years 1968–71, when a number of Soviet Jews arrived in Israel in the framework of the reunification of families. THE CENSUSES OF 1959 AND 1970 In the Soviet population census of 1959, 2,267,814 persons were registered as of "Jewish nationality" (the census takers did not demand to see any personal document and were instructed to register the oral declarations given by citizens). According to the census, the Jewish population constituted 1.09 percent of the total population of the country and was eleventh among over 100 Soviet nationalities. The 5,727 Karaites in the Soviet Union were counted separately. (See Table: Jewish Population of the Soviet Union by Republics, 1959.) Soviet Jewry was revealed as distinctly urban: in 1959, 2,159,702 Jews registered in cities and constituted 2.16 percent Jewish Population of the Soviet Union by Republics, 1959 Jewish Population of the Soviet Union by Republics, 1959   Republic Jews Percent distribution of Jews Percent of Jews among general population Total 2,267,800 100.0 1.09 Russia 875,300 38.7 0.74 Ukraine 840,300 37.0 2.01 Belorussia 150,100 6.6 1.86 Lithuania 24,700 1.1 0.91 Latvia 36,600 1.6 1.75 Estonia 5,400 0.2 0.46 Moldavia 95,100 4.2 3.30 Georgia 51,600 2.3 1.28 Armenia 1,000 0.0 0.06 Azerbaijan 40,200 1.8 1.09 Kazakhstan 28,000 1.2 0.30 Turkmenia 4,100 0.2 0.27 Uzbekistan 94,300 4.2 1.16 Tadzhikistan 12,400 0.5 0.63 Kirghizia 8,600 0.4 0.42 of the total population. Only 108,112 Jews (4.7 percent of the total Jewish population) lived in villages. Detailed Jewish population figures were published only in respect to the capitals of the republics (for more correct estimates, see articles on individual cities). Large Jewish communities of 10,000 persons and over existed in such cities as Odessa (well over 100,000), Kharkov (about 80,000), Dnepropetrovsk (about 35,000), Lvov, Chernovtsy, Zhitomir, Gomel, Vinnitsa, Rostov, Gorki, Kuibyshev, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Mogilev. According to other estimates, approximately 60 cities in the Soviet Union had a Jewish population exceeding 10,000. (See Table: Jewish Population in Capitals of the Republics in 1959.) Like the general demographic situation in the Soviet Union, as a result of the high proportion of wartime male fatalities, Jewish women outnumbered men with about 120 women per 100 men (a total of 206,556 more women than men). Jewish Population in Capitals of the Republics in 19591 Jewish Population in Capitals of the Republics in 19591   Number of Jews % of total population 3"> 1 In all other republics, the number of Jews was included under "other nationalities" in the census figures published in April 1971. Moscow 239,246 4.7 Leningrad 162,344 5.6 Kiev 153,466 13.9 Tashkent 50,455 5.5 Kishinev 42,934 20.0 Minsk 38,842 7.6 Riga 30,263 5.0 Baku 26,263 4.1 Tbilisi (Tiflis) 17,311 2.5 Vilna 16,354 6.9   According to the 1959 census, a total of 1,733,183 Jews (76.4 percent) declared Russian as their mother tongue; 46,845 declared other foreign languages (half of this number declared Ukrainian); 403,900 (about 18 percent) declared Yiddish; 35,673 Georgian (Georgian Jews); 25,225 Jewish Tat (mountain jews ); and 20,763 Tajiki (Bukharan Jews). It may well be assumed that a considerable number of Jews whose real mother tongue was Yiddish declared Russian as their national language; at the same time there were Jews who declared Yiddish as their mother tongue without really knowing it, in order to demonstrate their identification with the Jewish people. The highest percentage of Yiddish-speaking Jews was found in Lithuania (69 percent), Moldavia (50.3 percent), and Latvia (48 percent). The census data indicate several facts: hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews declared themselves to be of non-Jewish nationalities; the majority of Russian-speaking Jews declared their attachment to the Jewish people ("nationality"), among them certainly the vast majority of its younger generation; Yiddish-speaking Jews, of whom there were approximately 500,000, were mostly members of the older generation and inhabitants of the western regions of the Soviet Union (Lithuania, Latvia, Moldavia, the districts of Chernovtsy, Lvov, Volhynia, western Belorussia); there were Oriental (i.e., non-Ashkenazi) Jews, who, according to the census, numbered about 100,000, belonging to the Georgian, Tat, and Bukharan communities. The latter preserved their Jewish way of life, maintained traditional family life and ties with the Jewish community and synagogues, and observed the dietary laws and the Sabbath to a far greater extent than did Ashkenazi Jews. On April 17, 1971, the Soviet press published the first summaries of the population census taken on Jan. 15, 1970. According to the figures quoted, the Jewish population had fallen from eleventh (1959) to twelfth in size and the overall number of Jews had declined from about 2,268,000 (January 1959) to 2,151,000. Whereas in the previous census, 21.5 percent of the Jews declared a Jewish language (almost exclusively Yiddish) to be their native tongue, in 1970 only 17.7 percent declared this to be so, and in respect to declaring their national language as their native tongue, the Jews were last in the rank of nationalities. In this census, for the first time, the subjects were asked whether they were fluent in another one of the languages spoken in the Soviet Union; 16.3 percent of the Jews indicated Russian as their second fluent language, and 28.8 percent indicated another Soviet language as their second fluent language. (According to the summary of the census, about 13,000,000 non-Russians declared Russian as their native tongue and 41,900,000 as the second language in which they were fluent.) The Jews were the only major nationality in the U.S.S.R. whose overall size had diminished since 1959. In the U.S.S.R. the status of the Jew as such (as of each member of any nationality group) is indicated on his identity card (referred to in Russian as a "passport"). However, since the census figures were gathered through the subject's personal declaration, without checking of official documents, a differentiation is made by experts between "passport Jews" and "census Jews," whereby it is generally assumed that the number of passport Jews is much greater than the number of Jews reflected in the census because many Jews may have declared themselves to be members of another nationality to the census taker. Whether the decline in the number of census Jews in 1970 also indicates an equal or concomitant number of passport Jews in the U.S.S.R. was unknown. Jewish Population Changes in the U.S.S.R., by Republic, 19591991 Jewish Population Changes in the U.S.S.R., by Republic, 1959–1991   2"> 1959 2"> 1970 1979 19911 Jewish Population % of general Population Jewish Population % of general Population Jewish Population Jewish Population 7"> 1 Estimate for year end 7"> 2 Includes Armenian Republic Russian Republic (RSFSR) 875,300 0.7 808,000 0.6 700,700 430,000 Ukrainian Republic 840,300 2.0 777,000 1.6 634,200 325,000 Belorussian Republic 150,100 1.9 148,000 1.6 135,400 58,000 Uzbek Republic 94,300 1.2 103,000 0.9 99,900 55,500 Georgian Republic 51,600 1.3 55,000 1.2 28,300 20,700 Lithuanian Republic 24,700 0.9 24,000 0.8 14,700 7,300 Moldavian Republic 95,100 3.3 98,000 2.7 80,100 28,500 Latvian Republic 36,600 1.7 37,000 1.6 28,300 15,800 Estonian Republic 5,400 0.5 5,300 0.4 5,000 3,500 Armenian Republic 1,000 0.06 – – 1,000 300 Azerbaijan Republic 40,200 1.1 41,300 0.8 35,500 16,000 Turkmenian Republic 4,100 0.2 5,4002 0.12 2,800 2,000 Kazakhstan Republic 28,000 0.3 27,600 0.2 23,500 15,300 Kirghizian Republic 8,600 0.4 7,700 0.3 6,900 3,900 Tadzhikistan Republic 12,400 0.6 14,600 0.5 14,700 8,200   The 1959 census showed that Jews played a negligible role in Soviet agriculture. Most of the 100,000 Jews living in rural areas were officials or experts and belonged to the officialdom of the sovkhozes and the kolkhozes. Few Jews were counted in the villages of the areas previously settled by Jewish farmers: 2,765 in the Crimean district; 881 in Kherson; and 2,292 in Birobidzhan. On the other hand, Jews occupied prominent positions among the Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1960–61 academic year, 77,177 Jewish high school students were accounted for (3.22 percent of the general student body and three times their proportion to the general population, although not exceeding their proportion to the urban population). Among "those with a secondary and higher education" (a term which encompasses doctors, officials, bookkeepers, engineers, and so on), there were 427,000 Jews at the end of 1960, i.e., 4.9 percent of this entire class. This was the predominant class among Soviet Jews. They held a notable place also among "scientific workers" (36,173 in 1961, 9 percent of the total number). This group enjoys numerous privileges and shares in the awards and marks of distinction customarily granted to such categories under Soviet rule. In 1962 the Jewish physicist lev landau was awarded the Nobel Prize. Similarly, Jews constitute about 10 percent of Soviet writers and represent a higher proportion in the other arts. The Jewish role in the state commercial establishment was considerable. In the early 1960s, during the regime of Nikita Khrushchev, when the government initiated a fierce campaign against widespread illegal economic practices, including illegal production and marketing of scarce consumer goods as well as bribery and embezzlement, Jews were deliberately singled out for punishment. The campaign was entrusted to the secret police according to new, very harsh decrees, including the death penalty. Jews constituted such a high proportion of those sentenced to death or long periods of imprisonment that disinterested investigations (such as that of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva) affirmed that Jews served as scapegoats to deter the rest of the population, probably because the latter might have rebelled and reacted strongly to direct attack by the authorities. It is safe to assume that many Jews were engaged in work in cooperatives and government projects. Similarly, a limited class of Jewish industrial workers existed. On the whole, however, Jewish youth turned to the ranks of the intelligentsia and the educated officialdom, a phenomenon serving to intensify antisemitic tendencies among the masses and in sectors of the intelligentsia as well. Increasingly prevalent complaints about Jewish "evasion of manual labor," or their obligation to make room for members of other national groups in the professions, were being heard every so often even from members of the government. REPRESSION OF JEWISH CULTURE Soviet policy was intent on accelerating the process of Jewish assimilation, and manifestations of religious culture on the part of Jews were suppressed or, under optimum conditions, barely tolerated. The pressure exerted upon other religions was in no way comparable to the persecution directed against Judaism. Synagogues were increasingly shut down (according to Soviet sources, between 1956 and 1963 the number of synagogues decreased from 450 to 96). There was no countrywide Jewish religious organization parallel to those of other religions. Jewish religious books were not printed (the 3,000-copy photostat edition of a prayer book, Siddur ha-Shalom, in 1957, was a much-publicized exception; although a new edition of it was published at the end of the 1960s, there were no indications that it was circulated). The baking of matzah was gradually proscribed in the 1960s, but was later permitted on a limited scale through the synagogues; attempts by Jews outside the U.S.S.R. to send matzah to their coreligionists were for the most part thwarted by the authorities. A crude campaign of slander was waged in books, pamphlets, and periodicals against the Jewish religion, and its adherents were not permitted to answer those who abused it. Ostensibly, the distinctive suppression of the Jewish religion was due to its unique national character and its ties with Israel. The effect of the establishment of the State of Israel and its progress and achievements, together with Jewish national awakening, disturbed the Soviet government. Official propaganda frequently presented horrifying descriptions of conditions in Israel. A delegation of Jewish propaganda agents posing as Jewish "tourists" was sent to Israel in 1959; upon its return to the U.S.S.R. it maligned Israel before the Soviet public and the Jewish community. Propaganda of this type, however, did not attain its objectives. News of Israel and Jewish life abroad steadily reached Soviet Jewry in various ways, including broadcasts from Israel and other countries, and the antisemitism which infiltrated many parts of Soviet society awakened in the younger Jewish generation an increased Jewish national consciousness and a strong desire to settle in Israel and to strengthen their ties with the Jewish people and the Jewish state. During the period of "thaw" and destalinization, Soviet Jewish culture was not allowed to revive. Yiddish schools did not exist. In the wake of public pressure outside the U.S.S.R., a token gesture was made by publishing some works in Yiddish, mostly by classical Yiddish writers. In the summer of 1961, a literary bimonthly (later a monthly), sovetish heymland , began to appear; it became a sort of "official address" of Soviet Jewry. In addition, works by Jewish writers were published in Russian and other translations and a commemorative stamp was issued on the centennial of Shalom Aleichem's birth. Concerts of Yiddish folklore, music, and song, and even theater performances by amateur groups, attracted masses of Jews and kindled enthusiasm within the culture-thirsty Jewish community. MANIFESTATIONS OF ANTISEMITISM Antisemitism remained officially proscribed in the Soviet Union, but hatred of Jews existed and expressed itself de facto in most levels of society and administration. From time to time, it found expression   Map 2. Jewish population of U.S.S.R. in 1959, showing major centers of settlement and distribution among Republics. Map 2. Jewish population of U.S.S.R. in 1959, showing major centers of settlement and distribution among Republics.     in violent outbursts (such as the riots in Malakhovka in October 1959 and the blood libels in Tashkent, Vilna, etc.), literary controversies (such as the reaction to yevgeni yevtushenko 's poem "Babi Yar"), antisemitic articles in the press (the pinnacle was reached with a blood libel article in August 1960 in the newspaper Kommunist of the city of Buinaksk in Dagestan), and journals and books (such as Judaism without Embellishment by T.K. Kichko, published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 1963). A deep distrust of the Jews pervaded the atmosphere in the Soviet Union. Jews were considered an alien element bound by family, historical, and spiritual bonds to the state of Israel and to Jews in the United States and other countries. They were strictly barred from the higher echelons of the ruling Communist Party, from the foreign service and senior military command; similarly, their proportion among elected representatives to the central and local Soviets has diminished, and clandestine police supervision has been imposed on the synagogues and on individuals meeting with visiting Jews from abroad. In 1965 a slight shift was noted in Soviet policy on Jewish emigration within the framework of "reunification of families" and several hundred Jewish families were allowed to emigrate to Israel. The six-day war (June 1967), however, and the subsequent severing of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel, brought this emigration to a standstill, though it was to a certain extent renewed at the end of 1968. After that, a frenzied wave of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist incitement, unparalleled in the depth and extent of its hatred, was unleashed in the press, in other mass media, and in all diplomatic and propaganda channels, evolving almost into a blatant campaign of hatred against the Jewish people and the State of Israel. It found expression in the publication of thousands of articles and scores of books. Israel was labeled a "Nazi" state and Zionism defined as the "worst enemy of mankind," a kind of powerful, secret international Mafia which had unlimited funds at its disposal and carried on subversive activities throughout the world, primarily in Communist-bloc countries. This unbridled incitement served to intensify, both directly and indirectly, the anti-Jewish sentiments of the masses. On the other hand, it greatly stimulated and strengthened national Jewish consciousness among many Soviet Jewish youth, as well as whole communities. Jews of Georgia, for example, felt the need to give practical expression to their national feelings by waging an active struggle to emigrate to Israel. PRESSURE FOR IMMIGRATION TO ISRAEL Tens of thousands of Jews applied for exit permits to go to Israel, but only a few of them achieved their aim. In consequence, hundreds of Jews, many of them of the younger generation and in the large cities, began to voice their protests against being denied the right to emigrate to Israel by sending letters and petitions addressed to the Soviet leaders, the UN secretary-general and its Human Rights Commission, the government of Israel, and even to the Communist parties in the West. Young Jews organized themselves to study Hebrew, calling these courses ulpanim, and many of them openly celebrated Israel's Day of Independence. There were some reports that young Jews were increasingly refraining from marrying gentiles, because "mixed marriages" were often an obstacle to leaving the U.S.S.R. for Israel. Various measures of the Soviet authorities to curb the mass revival of these "neo-Zionist" feelings, as, for example, imposing exorbitant fees on exit permits, depriving those leaving for Israel of Soviet citizenship, and even arresting groups of so-called "Zionist activists" (1970), did not deter the mounting Israel-oriented movement among Soviet Jews. A particularly dramatic episode was the December 1970 trial of a group of Jews (mostly from Riga) in a Leningrad court, accused of having plotted to hijack a Soviet airplane in order to leave the U.S.S.R. and reach Israel. The very harsh sentences imposed on them, including two death sentences, aroused a worldwide outcry of protest in most non-Communist countries, from Jews and non-Jews alike, including heads of state, governments, members of parliament, men of letters, scientists, and left-wing intellectuals. The death sentences were quickly commuted and the other sentences reduced. Shortly thereafter groups of Soviet Jews staged protest demonstrations, demanding permission to go to Israel, in the offices of the Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party headquarters, and the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow. Also worthy of mention was the prominent role played by members of the Jewish intelligentsia in the struggle of the so-called "democratic movement," headed by a small number of Soviet scientists and writers, to preserve adherence to the letter and spirit of the law and the safeguarding of human rights. See also "The Struggle for Soviet Jewry," below; antisemitism : In the Soviet Bloc; assimilation : In the Soviet Union. (Yehuda Slutsky) -Relations with Israel SOVIET SUPPORT (1947) The first public announcement of Soviet support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was made by Andrei Gromyko, deputy foreign minister and head of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations, on May 14, 1947, at the First Special Session of the General Assembly. He dwelt on the urgency of the Palestine problem, on the sufferings of the Jewish people during the war, and the hundreds of thousands of survivors who were wandering about in various countries of Europe. Dismissing any unilateral solution as unjust, Gromyko expressed his government's preference for the establishment of "an independent, dual, democratic, Arab-Jewish State." If this plan proved impracticable, because of the deterioration in relations between the Jews and the Arabs, it would be necessary to consider "the partition of Palestine into two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab." There was an earlier intimation of a possible change in the traditional negative Soviet attitude toward Zionism, when, on May 3, 1947, the Soviet delegation supported the Jewish Agency's demand to be heard at the Assembly as the representative   of the Jewish population of Palestine. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned speech came as a complete surprise, and was regarded as a decisive turning point in Soviet policy. This had been preceded by contacts established between Zionist leaders and Soviet representatives in various capitals after the U.S.S.R.'s entry into the war against Germany in 1941. During the war there were also visits of Soviet diplomats to Palestine, during which they expressed appreciation for the achievements of the yishuv. In March 1945, Zionist leaders were informed by the White House that Stalin, roosevelt , and churchill had agreed to hand over Palestine to the Jews. These developments, however, had not been widely known, and were followed, and seemingly contradicted, by over two years of evasiveness on the Palestine issue accompanied by a number of pronouncements opposing the Zionist position on Palestine's political future. The U.S.S.R. was vitally interested in the British withdrawal from Palestine and, indeed, the entire Middle East, and apparently believed this could be achieved by the establishment of a Jewish state. It was therefore in the Soviet interest to support the idea of partitioning the country. At the regular session of the General Assembly in the fall of 1947, the Soviet Union joined forces with the United States, and the two great powers voted for partition on Nov. 29, 1947. (Yaacov Ro'i) SOVIET POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST However, apart from the favorable attitude displayed by the U.S.S.R. at the 1947–48 debates and votes at the UN, and its initial friendliness to the emerging state, relations between the two countries steadily deteriorated. Support for the Jewish state, as expressed by Gromyko in 1947, underwent a gradual, yet drastic, transformation which in June 1967 (at the end of the Six-Day War) resulted in the complete rupture of diplomatic ties and an all-out Soviet diplomatic and propaganda campaign against Israel. The reasons for this deterioration are to be found in Soviet foreign and domestic aims and the tactics employed to achieve them. Soviet policy in the Middle East was based on a combination of three factors. The first was the traditional Russian objective (initiated by the czars) of achieving a position of power in the Middle East by gaining a foothold in the area, dislodging its great-power adversaries and then establishing broad, if not exclusive, influence there. The second, an "ideological" factor, was the role played by the U.S.S.R. as the leader of the Communist world and as protagonist in the "anti-imperialist," anti-Western, struggle. Finally, there was the "Jewish problem" within the U.S.S.R. and Soviet opposition to the idea that Israel might provide a possible solution. In spite of the glaring contradiction between the Soviet attitude in 1947 and the policy pursued in 1967, the basic aims did not alter. In 1947 the Soviet Union sought to further its ends by support of Israel; in 1967 it resorted to outright hostility toward Israel in order to achieve its purpose. The development of Soviet-Israel relations falls into six distinct periods. 1947–BEGINNING OF 1949 In the "honeymoon" period of Soviet-Israel relations between 1947 and the beginning of 1949, the U.S.S.R. campaigned at the UN for the establishment of a Jewish state in a part of Palestine and cooperated with the Jewish Agency and the yishuv in order to achieve this goal. Official Soviet spokesmen and the Soviet press supported the armed struggle of the yishuv and branded Arab armed resistance to the establishment of the state as a function of British imperialism. When the establishment of the state was declared, the Soviet Union was the first to accord it de jure recognition and to appoint a minister to Israel. It provided Israel with arms (by way of Czechoslovakia) and economic assistance (by way of Poland), and permitted large-scale emigration of Jews to Israel from all countries of Eastern Europe, except from the Soviet Union itself. The fact that the military and economic assistance was supplied indirectly, rather than directly from the Soviet Union, was not, at the time, regarded as having any negative connotation. It should be borne in mind that even at this stage when Arab nationalism derived its main support from Britain, the Soviet Union's principal adversary in the area, the U.S.S.R. emphasized its intention to become a source of support and protection to the Arabs. Thus, in a speech made on Nov. 26, 1947 – only three days before the partition resolution was to be passed – Gromyko assured the Arabs that the Soviet Union would continue to support their efforts "to rid themselves of the last fetters of colonial dependence," and expressed his conviction that in spite of their momentary misgivings, the Arabs and the Arab states "will still, on more than one occasion, be looking toward Moscow." The purpose of Soviet pro-Israel policy at this time was clearly outlined in The Palestine Problem, a booklet by J.A. Genin, published in Moscow in October 1948. Stressing the importance of Palestine for British economic interests, the author states that "the loss of Palestine will be a terrible blow to the British oil magnates. British departure from Palestine will be a severe defeat for British colonial interests, and its effects will not be confined to the Middle East. Britain will lose an important link in the chain of Middle Eastern countries dependent upon her, and her route from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf will be cut off." The Soviet Union also found it necessary to dispel at once any illusion that many Soviet Jews may have had about their future relations with Israel. Some Jews had asked for permission to go to Israel and join the ranks of the Israeli army, and a mass demonstration outside the Great Synagogue in Moscow had welcomed Golda Meir, the first Israeli minister to the Soviet Union. This was not to be tolerated. An article by ilya ehrenburg , published in Pravda on Sept. 21, 1948, made it clear that Soviet Jews should have nothing to do with Israel, a foreign and remote capitalist state: "Soviet Jews do not look to the Near East; they look to the future." 1949–1953 Between 1949 and 1953, when the Cold War was at its height and Stalin sought to make the Soviet Union impregnable to any influence from without, relations with Israel   took a turn for the worse. There was open antisemitism in the Soviet bloc culminating, in the last days of Stalin, in the "Doctors' Plot," and the slansky trial in Prague, where the Israel minister was declared persona non grata. At the UN, the Soviet Union no longer gave Israel its support. When Israel complained to the Security Council about the Egyptian blockade of the Suez Canal, the Soviet Union abstained on the resolution put before the council. The Soviet Union refused an Israeli request for technical aid, and emigration to Israel from all countries of Eastern Europe came to an end. Only economic ties were not seriously affected. Finally, in February 1953, about a month before Stalin's death, a bomb that exploded in the courtyard of the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv served the U.S.S.R. as a pretext for breaking off diplomatic relations with Israel. 1953–1956 In July 1953 diplomatic ties between the two countries were resumed and there was a slight improvement in the tone of diplomatic exchanges and of Soviet press commentary on Israel. In essence, however, there was no real halt to the deterioration of the Soviet attitude on Israel. On Jan. 22, 1954, the U.S.S.R. cast its first anti-Israel veto at the UN Security Council. On Jan. 9, 1956, the Soviet delegation even took the initiative of proposing an anti-Israel resolution at the Security Council. 1956–1963 Subsequently the U.S.S.R. adopted a policy of open and one-sided support of Arab bellicosity against Israel. In the fall of 1955 the Soviet Union concluded an arms agreement with Egypt (officially it was Czechoslovakia that supplied the arms). Relations with Israel reached a new low in 1956 when, in the wake of the sinai Campaign, the Soviet Union unilaterally abrogated the commercial agreement between the two countries. Until 1955 there had been a promising development in the exchange of goods. In 1954 the trade amounted to over $3,000,000; but in the following year it was little over half that sum, and a further reduction took place in 1956. During the Sinai Campaign (1956), Soviet policy was decidedly pro-Egyptian and anti-Israel. Threatening notes were sent from Moscow to the Israeli government demanding unconditional withdrawal from the occupied Sinai Peninsula. In the United Nations, the Soviet and U.S. governments exerted concerted pressure on Israel. 1963–1967 From 1963 to 1967, there was a slight improvement in Israel's relations with some of the Eastern bloc countries, and for a while there was some indication that relations with the Soviet Union would also improve. Some informal cultural exchange took place. In addition, an agreement was reached in 1964 on the purchase, by the government of Israel, of real property in Israel owned by the Russian Orthodox Church. But hopes that this agreement would result in the resumption of bilateral trade were not realized. A further deterioration took place in the spring of 1966, after a group of officers belonging to the left wing of the Baath Party seized power in Syria and stepped up aggression against Israel (including terror acts by the newly created Al-Fatḥ). Israel, on its part, made continuous efforts to arrive at a fruitful dialogue with the Soviet Union, persisting in these efforts up to the eve of the Six-Day War. AFTER 1967 On the last day of the Six-Day War, June 10, 1967, the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with Israel, and the rest of the East European countries, with the exception of Romania, followed its lead. In the period of tension that preceded the war, the Soviet Union displayed an extreme anti-Israel attitude, which, in fact, played a decisive role in fomenting the crisis and precipitating the war. It was the Soviet Union which spread the canard that Israel had concentrated troops on its northern border for an imminent attack on Syria; and it was the Soviet Union that urged Egypt to take countermeasures against this alleged threat to Syria. The U.S.S.R. encouraged Egypt in its aggressive steps, i.e., the demand for the removal of UNEF, the concentration of huge forces in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Tiran Straits, and the military pact with Jordan. Perhaps the Soviet Union had not wanted Egypt to engage in actual war and had hoped that the Arabs and the U.S.S.R. would achieve an easy prestige victory. At any rate, Israel's lightning victory over the Arabs frustrated such expectations. To make up for this tremendous setback, the Soviet Union speedily rearmed and rehabilitated the Egyptian and Syrian forces, and gave unrestrained support, by diplomacy and propaganda, to Arab pressure for Israel's withdrawal from the occupied areas without peace negotiations. The U.S.S.R. utilized Arab hostility toward Israel to strengthen Arab anti-American and anti-Western attitudes and to increase Arab dependence on the Soviet Union. The slogans "Soviet-Arab alliance" and "Israel, the present-day Nazis," as well as the anti-Israel campaign in the Soviet press with its antisemitic overtones, characterized Soviet propaganda and policy on the Middle East after 1967. (Eliezer Palmor) -The Struggle for Soviet Jewry The problems of Russian Jewry had exercised Jewish and world opinion for many years before the overthrow of czarism and were the subject of relief and resettlement projects, international protests, and interventions. In the first years after the October Revolution of 1917, when Zionist delegations from Russia were still able to attend world Zionist conferences and congresses (as in 1920 in London and 1921 in Carlsbad), attention was given to the turmoil that the civil war and revolutionary changes were causing to the large and vital Jewish community in Soviet Russia, and Zionist congresses adopted resolutions against the suppression of Zionism and Hebrew by the Soviet regime. The problem of Soviet Jewry found a place on the agenda of the founding assembly of the world jewish Congress (WJC) in 1936, but the contemporary widespread sympathy for the anti-Nazi stance of the Soviet Union and the belief that the U.S.S.R. had tried to eradicate antisemitism and accord national minority rights to its Jewish population muted   discussion of the question. It was only in 1948, with the first indications of official antisemitism in the U.S.S.R. (see antisemitism : In the Soviet Bloc), that interest in the problem began to revive. In spite of Soviet support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the gloom of impending developments in the situation of Soviet Jews could already be felt; and although East European delegations attended the WJC assembly in 1948, misgivings about Soviet Jews were tactfully mentioned in the assembly's report. In general, however, until the events of the "Black Years" (1948–53), little news of which reached the outside world, it was assumed that no acute Soviet Jewish problem existed and that the difficulties confronting Jews in the U.S.S.R. were intrinsically the same as those afflicting the general Soviet population. When the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" began to sweep the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, however, culminating in the "Doctors' Plot," a special world Jewish conference on the situation of Soviet Jews was contemplated. The WJC assembly meeting in Montreux early in 1953 prepared a document on the developments; the Zionist movement held discussions; and other Jewish organizations anxiously considered what steps might be taken if, as was feared, the Doctors' Plot trial was used as an instrument for wholesale repression of Soviet Jews. The death of Stalin in March 1953 and the revocation of the charges against the doctors ended this tense phase. 1956–1969 In 1956, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, international opinion again began to stir on behalf of Soviet Jews. Protests in the Warsaw Yiddish Communist newspaper Folkshtime in April 1956 that the persecution of Soviet Jews had been passed over in silence in Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress, and the details Folkshtime released about the extent and virulence of Stalin's anti-Jewish terror campaign, made the world realize that the Jewish problem was still acute after almost 40 years of Soviet rule. This came as a shock particularly to Jewish and also non-Jewish Communists. Delegations from Western Communist parties went to the U.S.S.R. to investigate the truth. J.B. Salsberg, a leading Canadian Communist, returned from such a visit appalled; he published a series of articles on the subject in the American and Canadian Communist press, including details of a meeting with the Soviet leadership in which Khrushchev's antisemitic bias was revealed, and left the party with a group of old-time Communists. hyman levy , a founder of the British Communist Party, prepared a confidential report about his visit in Moscow; the party executive regarded it as so shocking that only a strictly censored version was released for publication. Levy then published a pamphlet in 1958, Jews and the National Question, criticizing Soviet policy toward Jews in careful terms, and he was expelled from the party. In New York the Communist Daily Worker was closed down by the party and was transformed into a weekly called the Worker, because its editors continued to criticize the U.S.S.R.'s treatment of Jews. Two pamphlets published in Yiddish in Tel Aviv in 1958 reproduced articles and statements of Jewish Communists in the West and in Poland. Individual Jews and organizations in Western countries began to pay more serious attention to Soviet Jews. A principal problem was the paucity of reliable information. To meet this need the newsletter Jews in Eastern Europe was founded in 1958 in London, edited by E. Litvinoff ; it subsequently appeared three or four times a year and became a major source of factual information about Soviet Jews. At about the same time, the Contemporary Jewish Library was founded in London to collect and disseminate in photostats source materials in Russian and other Soviet languages relating to Jews in the U.S.S.R. under the title Yevrei i Yevreyskiy Narod ("Jews and the Jewish People"). A branch of the Contemporary Jewish Library opened in Paris published Les Juifs en Europe de l'Est and a monthly bulletin, Les Juifs en Union Soviétique. The Biblioteca Judía Contemporanea in Buenos Aires published Allà en la U.R.S.R., and similar pamphlets were published in Italy. In New York, Jewish Minorities Research, directed by Moshe Decter, published monographs, pamphlets, reprints, and other relevant materials on Soviet Jews, including Decter's Status of the Jews in the Soviet Union, originally published as an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1963. Over the years, many scholarly studies of the situation of Soviet Jews have appeared in various countries, including: The Jews in the Soviet Union by Solomon M. Schwarz (1951); The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union by B.Z. Goldberg (1961); Jews in the Soviet Union Census, 1959, edited by Mordecai Altshuler (Jerusalem, 1963); a study by the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva (see below); "Soixante ans du problème juif dans la théorie et la pratique du bolchevisme," by Marc Jarblum with a preface by daniel mayer (in Revue Socialiste, October 1964); Soviet Jewry and Human Rights by Isi Leibler (Human Rights Research Publication, Victoria, Australia, March 1965); two reports of the Socialist International (see below). Particular popularity was achieved by the two eyewitness accounts, Ben-Ami's (Arieh L. Eliav) Between Hammer and Sickle (Heb. 1965; Eng. 1967. and Elie Wiesel's The Jews of Silence (1966), which appeared in several languages and editions. Interesting light was shed on Communist attitudes to the Jewish problem in the U.S.S.R. by a series of polemical exchanges in Political Affairs, the ideological organ of the U.S. Communist Party, in January 1965, October 1966, and December 1966. During the 1960s the problem of Soviet Jewry – the discrimination against Jews in matters of language, education, and religion; the dissemination of anti-Jewish literature; the persecution of individual Jews, e.g., for "economic crimes" or for Jewish communal activity; and the denial to Jews of the right of emigration, particularly to Israel, and the reunification of shattered families – became a major issue in world Jewish and international discussion. Almost every Jewish organization, Zionist and non-Zionist alike, raised the problem as one of utmost importance to the Jewish people, "second only to the existence and security of Israel." Intellectuals on the left,   Jews and non-Jews, held special conferences to investigate the facts and issue appeals to the Soviet government. The first such conference took place in Paris in 1960 and was attended by about 50 scholars, writers, academicians, and parliamentarians from 16 Western and African countries. Its opening session was addressed by nahum goldmann and martin buber , and it received messages of support from Albert Schweitzer, François Mauriac, Bertrand Russell, former French president Vincent Auriol, Richard Crossman, former Dutch premier Drees, Reinhold Niebuhr, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, Daniel Mayer, and many others. Subsequent conferences of this kind were held over the years in Latin American countries, France, Scandinavia, Britain, and Italy. They were attended and supported by intellectual and moral authorities, including leading writers, poets, and prominent fighters for human rights. Of particular significance was the Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews in 1963, founded in New York by a meeting of leading liberals, under the sponsorship of Justice Douglas, Martin Luther King, former senator herbert h. lehman , Bishop James Pike, Walter Reuther, Norman Thomas, and Robert Penn Warren, which issued an "appeal to conscience" and published many documents containing factual material. At the same time the Jewish community in the United States established the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, which encompassed all the major Jewish organizations in the country (including the american jewish committee , which generally did not participate in comprehensive Jewish frameworks). This body sponsored mass rallies, press conferences, and meetings with the White House and State Department and also published factual information on the current situation of the Jews in the U.S.S.R. Similar activities were undertaken by central Jewish bodies in their respective countries, such as the Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France, the Executive Committee of Australian Jewry, etc. In 1967 an Academic Committee on Soviet Jewry was formed in the United States; its sponsors included: hans morgenthau , daniel bell , saul bellow , lewis s. feuer , nathan glazer , irving howe , alfred kazin , max lerner , and lionel trilling . The committee became an important source of information and has issued, among other publications, a booklet entitled Soviet Jewry: 1969, consisting of papers read at a symposium by leading Soviet experts. The moral struggle on behalf of Soviet Jews was given considerable impetus by the interest shown in the problem by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His involvement began early in 1962, when he sent a cable to Khrushchev, signed jointly with François Mauriac and martin buber , appealing for the full restitution of equal rights to Soviet Jews. He also sponsored the publication of a statement on Soviet Jewry signed by leading Nobel Prize laureates from different countries. A private exchange of letters between Russell and Khrushchev on this question followed until, to general surprise, the Soviet authorities sought Russell's permission to release part of the correspondence to the Soviet press and agreed to his condition that he should similarly release it to the Western press. It was published in Britain on Feb. 25, 1963, and in the U.S.S.R. on February 28, when it appeared simultaneously in Pravda and Izvestiya and was broadcast by Radio Moscow. Khrushchev had defined Russell's appeals as part of a campaign of "vicious slander" against the Soviet Union. On April 6, 1963, Russell replied at length repudiating this insinuation and describing as "gravely disturbing" the fact that some 60 percent of those executed for "economic offenses" in the U.S.S.R. were Jews. Although the Soviet premier did not reply to this letter, Russell continued his interventions on behalf of individual Soviet Jews and the community as a whole until age caused him to discontinue his public activities in 1968. The problem began to be reflected at the United Nations, in parliaments, and in international bodies throughout the world. The first discussion at the UN took place in 1961 at the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, and continued to be a feature of UN debates. The matter was raised in 1962 at the General Assembly's Social Committee by the Australian delegate, the first time it was directly taken up by a member government other than Israel. This development followed a report by a delegation to the U.S.S.R. of the World Council of Churches, which testified that Judaism experienced severe persecution in that country. In 1964, before a visit by Khrushchev to Sweden, Denmark, and Norway was due to take place, the problem of Soviet Jews was featured by the leading newspapers in all three countries, and the Soviet premier's visit was "postponed." The Council of Europe at Strasbourg, consisting of parliamentary representatives from all democratic countries in Europe and of official observers from Israel's Knesset, several times debated the issue and established an investigating committee to report on it. Its report served as the basis for the council's appeal to all European parliaments to raise their voice on behalf of Soviet Jewry. In the parliaments of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and many other countries, motions were signed by many members (in Britain over 400 out of 630), and governments were urged to appeal to the Soviet Union on this matter. Both houses of the U.S. Congress also debated the issue and several times adopted almost unanimous resolutions on it. Leading statesmen, such as President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and the British and Belgian premiers, as well as leaders of socialist and other opposition parties in the West, took up the issue in their encounters with Soviet statesmen and public figures. In 1964 the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva published a special study entitled Economic Crimes in the Soviet Union, which proved the anti-Jewish character of Soviet policy in this matter. Gradually the current situation of the Jews in the Soviet Union began to be prominently featured in the world press. Such topics as the anti-Jewish riot at Malakhovka, near Moscow, the mass gatherings of Jewish youth on Simḥat Torah at the synagogues of Moscow and Leningrad, the ban on matzah in the U.S.S.R., the virtual dissolution of the Moscow yeshivah, the blood libel in the newspaper Kommunist at Buinaksk,   Dagestan, Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar," and antisemitic publications such as Kichko's Judaism Without Embellishment were extensively reported and commented upon in the principal newspapers the world over and were the subject of sharp debates with Soviet representatives in various bodies of the UN and other international forums. National and international writers' congresses, as well as PEN Club meetings, adopted resolutions against the suppression of Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R. Some Communist and pro-Soviet circles and press organs, particularly in Italy, Canada, Britain, the United States, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, and Australia, openly criticized Soviet discrimination against Jews. In the late 1960s Jewish student groups for the struggle for Soviet Jewry sprang up in the United States, mainly on the east and west coasts, and in Great Britain, where demonstrations were staged, particularly at Soviet diplomatic missions. The World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) organized a mobile exhibition illustrating the plight of Soviet Jewry, and mass petitions were signed by many thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish students. PARTICIPATION OF ISRAEL Israel representatives were in the forefront of initiating discussions on the problem in various UN bodies, the Socialist International (which published two reports, in 1964 and in 1969, called The Situation of Jews in the U.S.S.R. and Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe), the Council of Europe, etc. In 1965 the first motion on Soviet Jewry was discussed in the Knesset. Later the Knesset devoted several special sessions to the situation of Soviet Jewry and made an appeal to other parliaments to take up the issue. The problem was repeatedly dealt with by the Israeli press and broadcasting service and in official and unofficial encounters by Israel's leaders and diplomatic representatives with Soviet diplomats and other personalities. In Israel the Hebrew writings of Soviet Jews, most of them brought out clandestinely from the U.S.S.R., were published as early as the 1950s and served as a powerful means of reviving feelings of solidarity with Soviet Jewry. A collection of the Hebrew poetry of Ḥayyim Lenski and elisha rodin appeared in 1954 under the title He-Anaf ha-Gaddu'a ("The Cut-off Branch"). In 1957 the first anonymous Hebrew manuscript from the Soviet Union, called El Aḥi bi-Medinat Yisrael ("To My Brother in the State of Israel"), which was written in an old-fashioned maskil style, and contained a diary on the "Black Years," was published, first in the newspaper Davar and then in book form. (Only after the author's death in Kiev in 1968, was his name, Barukh Mordekhai Weissman, revealed.) Under the pen name Sh. Sh. Ron, a Soviet Hebrew writer described his own and his fellow Jews' experience in a concentration camp in a smuggled-out booklet, Me-Ever mi-Sham ("From Over There," 1959). Unknown and unpublished poems by Ḥ. Lenski, some of which were written in a concentration camp in Siberia, somehow reached Israel and were published posthumously in 1960 under the title Me-Ever li-Nehar ha-Lethe ("From the Other Shore of the Lethe River"), together with an introduction and postscripts by the poet's friends in Israel. A collection of Zionist poetry in its Russian original with Hebrew translations, Ha-Lo Tishali (its Russian title "My Spring Will Come") by an anonymous Soviet Jew, with an introduction by Y. Nadav (describing how the poems were written by a member of a clandestine Zionist group in a labor camp), appeared in 1962. A strong impact was made by Esther Feldman's autobiographical Kele Beli Sugar ("Prison Without Bars," 1964), the story of a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union whose husband (Joseph Berger-Barzilai) was imprisoned for over 20 years as an "enemy of the people" and then "rehabilitated." Soviet Hebrew fiction published in Israel included a novel about World War II, Esh ha-Tamid ("The Eternal Fire," 1966), written by a writer who hid his identity under the pen name A. Tsefoni, smuggled out of the U.S.S.R., and Abraham Friman's monumental novel, 1919, about the revolutionary years (1968); its first two parts had been published in the 1930s and received the Bialik prize. Educational work to convey deeper knowledge of the history and the current situation of Soviet Jewry was conducted over the years in Israel's schools and army units in various forms, including lectures, classes, a mobile exhibition, etc. The Hebrew magazine He-Avar and various publications of the Israel section of the World Jewish Congress have devoted themselves to research on Soviet Jewish affairs. 1969–1971 A turning point in the struggle for Soviet Jewry was Prime Minister Golda Meir's dramatic broadcast in Israel (in November 1969) of a letter sent to her by 18 Jewish families in the Soviet Georgian Republic who asked the Israeli government to convey to the UN their protest against the Soviet authorities for denying them the right to settle in their historic homeland, Israel. This letter inaugurated a new phase in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. For the first time Soviet Jews themselves, in growing numbers and from all parts of the Soviet Union, began to voice their demands, centered almost exclusively on their ardent desire to settle in Israel. They appealed openly to the highest Soviet authorities, as well as to the UN, the Israeli government, and international public opinion. These appeals, which were widely publicized in the world press, finally disproved the monotonously repeated contention of Soviet spokesmen that Soviet Jews were completely and finally integrated and no longer identified themselves with the Jewish people abroad and Israel. When the Soviet authorities staged a press conference of prominent Soviet Jews in Moscow in 1970, and also initiated a spate of letters from Jews to the Soviet newspapers accusing Israel of aggression and repudiating the demand for exit permits to Israel, many scores of Jews in various Soviet cities signed collective statements that sharply denounced this anti-Israel drive as unrepresentative of Soviet Jewish opinion and the result of police pressure. Hundreds of signatures of Soviet Jews, on pro-Israel statements, complete with personal data and addresses, were published in the West. Their number was proportionately much higher than the number of names signed in the U.S.S.R. on general liberal   and democratic protests, which became a feature of Soviet life in the late 1960s. This courageously open Israel-oriented movement of Soviet Jews, mainly of the younger generation, became increasingly the focus of the struggle of world Jewry, the Israeli government, and international public opinion for Jewish survival in the U.S.S.R. At the end of 1970, with the Leningrad trial and its worldwide repercussions (see above), a favorable atmosphere was created for an impressive Jewish world conference devoted exclusively to the problem of Soviet Jewry. It took place in Brussels in February 1971 with about 750 delegates from 36 countries. The conference, convened by a coordinating committee of the principal Jewish bodies in the Diaspora and in Israel, became, even before it assembled, the subject of feverish Soviet diplomatic and propaganda moves directed at preventing the conference from taking place, or at least undermining its moral authority in advance. A delegation of several Soviet Jews who arrived in Brussels on the eve of the conference held a press conference, in which they denied all charges about discrimination against Jews in the U.S.S.R. and the urge of the Jewish masses to leave the Soviet Union and settle in Israel. The conference itself adopted a "Brussels Program" for Soviet Jewry, pledging the Jewish people to an unremitting struggle for the right of Soviet Jews to go to Israel and transmit the Jewish cultural and religious heritage to their children, and against the antisemitic campaign of the U.S.S.R., disguised as "anti-Israel" or as an "unmasking" of "international Zionism." Among the participants at the conference were: david ben-gurion , menahem begin , Arieh Eliav, herschel schachter , William Wechsler, Chief Rabbi jacob kaplan , lord janner , and other Jewish parliamentarians, intellectuals, and men of letters (including: gershom scholem , abraham shlonsky , A. Kovner , S. Yizhar , hans joachim morgenthau , paddy chayefsky , and otto preminger ). (Emanuel Litvinoff / Binyamin Eliav) -Developments in the 1970s JEWISH CULTURE In the Soviet Union there were two clearly distinguishable realms of Jewish culture. One was Jewish cultural activity, usually conducted in Yiddish, promoted by the Soviet government; the other was outside the framework of official institutions, whose principal proponents are the "refuseniks." Contact between these two realms was, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. The attitude of "aliyah activists," especially "refuseniks," toward the issue of the development of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union underwent a change over the 1970s. Until the end of 1973 most Jewish activists in the Soviet Union argued that all efforts must be directed toward the immediate emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union, and that any cultural activity with long-term goals would inevitably deleteriously affect the struggle for emigration. The year 1974, however, marked the beginning of a decline in Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. The number of "dropouts" was growing steadily (see later) and some "refuseniks" became increasingly aware of the rapid pace of assimilation within the Jewish community. In view of these developments many of the activists realized that in addition to the campaign for emigration, there was a need to expand Jewish cultural activity outside the boundaries of the official Soviet framework. This cultural activity took on several forms: (A) ulpanim for the study of Hebrew; seminars on Jewish themes; (C) publications; (D) Jewish art and folklore; and (E) commemoration of events related to Jewish history and tradition. (A) Ulpanim for the Study of Hebrew. According to Soviet law, private instruction of a language recognized by the Soviet Union was permitted. On the basis of this law four individuals (V. Prestin, S. Gurvitz, V. Polski, and P. Abramovich) obtained permission to teach Hebrew. In 1972, however, pressure to cease the instruction of Hebrew grew. The cases of Pavel Abramovich of Moscow and Lev Furman of Leningrad serve as examples. Abramovich had been teaching Hebrew since May 1971 on a legal basis and accordingly paid income tax. However in February 1972, he received a notice from Moscow's Pervomaysky Region Finance Department instructing him to stop teaching Hebrew since this language was not recognized by the Soviet Union, nor was it taught in any of its institutions. Abramovich thereupon applied to the Ministry of Higher Education and asked whether Hebrew was taught anywhere in the Soviet Union. The ministry replied that Hebrew was taught at the Institute of Asian and African Peoples within the University of Moscow, at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, at the University of Leningrad, as well as at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. Though the Hebrew classes were attended by a minimal number of students at all these institutions, and Jews were not permitted to register, the very fact of their existence served as a pretext for the ulpan organizers to renew their request for the recognition of the private instruction of Hebrew. The authorities insisted that Abramovich lacked the necessary certificate qualifying him as a Hebrew instructor, and although he presented a teacher's certificate issued by the World Association for Hebrew, the tax authorities adamantly refused to register him as a private instructor of Hebrew. In 1976 an attempt was made to publicize the existence of Hebrew classes and a notice to this effect was presented to the Moscow Bureau of Advertising for publication. When the bureau refused to advertise the notice, Pavel Abramovich brought charges against them in court, as a result of which the bureau was compelled to publish a notice announcing Abramovich's Hebrew lessons. This incident clearly demonstrated that Hebrew instruction in Russia is legal and the authorities had therefore resorted to harassing the teachers in their attempt to prevent Hebrew classes from taking place. In keeping with this line of approach, Abramovich's apartment was searched and all Hebrew material confiscated. Moreover he was threatened by the KGB and told in no uncertain terms that he was to desist from holding Hebrew classes. A similar case was that of Lev Furman. In September 1976 the Finance Department in Leningrad granted Furman a license to teach Hebrew privately. On the basis of this license, Furman   organized a Hebrew teacher-training seminar in April 1977 in which five students registered. In July of that year, KGB agents burst into his apartment during a session, arrested Furman and held him for five days on the charge of "disobedience." In October 1977, the Soviet authorities ordered Furman to cease giving Hebrew lessons immediately, on grounds that he lacked the necessary certificate qualifying him to teach Hebrew. The authorities were trying prima facie to respect the existing laws of the state to some degree, and were therefore compelled to turn a blind eye to the Hebrew classes, while at the same time they threatened and harassed Hebrew teachers, accusing them of "parasitism" and "anti-Soviet propaganda" and the like. This contradiction in Soviet policy made possible the existence of a number of Hebrew ulpanim in several cities in the Soviet Union. The number of students who participated in those ulpanim at the end of the 1970s was estimated to be about 2,000, including those who did not plan to emigrate in the near future. Both the teachers and most of the students wished to leave the Soviet Union and therefore these groups were by nature fluid, with participants leaving and new ones joining all the time. The program of studies and the intensity in which the language was studied were not constant in all ulpanim, rather they were dependent on the ability of the teachers as well as the frequency of the sessions. Thus the language competency of those who "graduated" from the ulpanim ranged from basic knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet to acquisition of a limited vocabulary and perhaps even proficiency in simple conversational Hebrew. The value and significance, however, of these ulpanim extended well beyond the realm of acquisition of language skills; they constituted a focal point for Jewish cultural activity. Seminars on Jewish Themes. The raison d'être of the scientific seminar organized in Moscow in April 1972 was, in its early stages, to provide "refusenik scientists" who had been dismissed from their places of employment with an opportunity to meet and discuss matters pertaining to their scientific pursuits. However the seminar participants were not content to deal with professional matters only and after a while began to include in their discussions themes related to Jewish culture, history, and problems of Jewish existence in the Soviet Union. During the years of the existence of the seminar many of the original participants left the Soviet Union and were replaced by others. Following a short recess during the summer of 1977, the seminar reconvened with Victor Brailovsky as chairman, and some 20 individuals participating on a more or less regular basis. Seminars of this nature, where discussions covered both scientific and cultural themes, were organized in several other cities. In September 1977, a similar seminar organized in Riga opened its first session with a lecture on Rosh Ha-Shanah and the teachings of the Hebrew prophets. Between 20 and 40 people participated in this seminar and even individuals connected to the Soviet establishment were invited. Most of the discussions in a seminar organized in Kishinev at the end of 1976 were devoted to such cultural themes as Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, the period of the Judges and its place in Jewish history, and related themes. A group which began meeting in the home of Naum Salansky in Vilna at the beginning of 1977 devoted all its sessions to the study of Jewish history. In Leningrad 15 Jews participated on a more or less regular basis in a seminar which dealt with topics related to Jewish culture. In September 1977 a special seminar was organized for young Jews in Riga, in which between 30 and 60 Jews participated, some of whom had not yet decided to emigrate. The seminar included lectures dealing with selected chapters of Jewish history, the history of Hebrew poetry, and themes related to Jewish holidays. Some of the young people began to meet for special "Erev Shabbat" evenings where they sang Hebrew songs and read Hebrew poetry in translation. In the second half of the 1970s, a second seminar was organized in Moscow whose declared aim was the dissemination of Jewish culture and history. The leader of this seminar was Arkadii May and about 80–100 people participated in it. At the same time, a similar seminar was organized in Minsk; most of the participants did not intend to emigrate from the Soviet Union. An attempt was made in Kiev to organize a seminar concerning Jewish culture, but in this instance the KGB acted with particular viciousness and the attempt failed. The seminar groups in the various cities maintained contact with each other and lecturers of one seminar often appeared as guest lecturers in others. Their existence was most certainly known to the authorities, who attempted relentlessly to disturb the meetings by arresting the organizers, carrying out searches at meeting places, and confiscating material. Despite these harassments, the seminars continued to constitute a center of Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet Union. (C) Publications. "Jewish samizdat," as publications not under Soviet censorship were generally called, consisted basically of two kinds: publications of material written and edited by Soviet Jews, and translations and distribution of material either written before the revolution or originally published outside the Soviet Union. A literary publicistic journal called Jews in the U.S.S.R. was founded in Moscow in October 1974, and continued to appear for several years. According to its editors, the motive for its publication was the search for identity, for an answer to the question "Who am I?" and any material included in this journal had to conform to the following criteria: "The writer of any article must be sufficiently knowledgeable with respect to his theme, the material should not be of a political nature, nor should it contain any untruths or personal slander whatsoever." And indeed, the journal contained the writings of Jews and non-Jews on a variety of themes including emigration, assimilation, Jewish culture and history, as well as essays on philosophy and religion, and short stories and poetry. A journal in the Russian language, Tarbut, appeared in 1975. Seven issues of Tarbut appeared in 1976, the size of each an average of 60 typewritten pages. The purpose of the journal was to impart knowledge of the Jewish cultural heritage. Tarbut contained material depicting the role of the Jews in the war against the Nazis, as well as selections of the writings of Frug,   Bialik, judah halevi , Aḥad Ha'am, jabotinsky , scholem , and others, translations of which in some instances were in existence before the revolution, while others were prepared especially for publication in the journal. Tarbut was issued in tens and sometimes hundreds of copies and there is reason to believe that it passed through the hands of thousands of readers, not all of whom were involved in the Jewish national movement but nevertheless sought to expand their knowledge of Jewish cultural and historical heritage. In Riga in 1979, a few issues of a journal called Jewish Thought were published; they dealt with the development of Jewish thought from the days of the Bible to present times. The same year a journal called Law and Reality began to be published in Moscow. It published Soviet laws and orders concerning emigration, the teaching of languages, cultural activities, and documented examples of the authorities avoiding compliance with these laws. The main purpose of this journal was to draw the attention of world opinion to breaching of Russian laws by state authorities and to make Russian Jews aware of the fact that their activities are legal in accordance with the laws of the state. In addition to these journals, "Jewish samizdat" included the publication and distribution of entire books, or excerpts thereof, as well as newspaper articles originating in the West. These publications appeared in the form of photocopied, stenciled, and typewritten copies, and were widely distributed among young Jews who sought to become acquainted with their people. The circulation of these books in Russia continued, though on an irregular basis and in the face of many obstacles. A Russian translation of Cecil roth 's Short History of the Jewish People, after circulating in stenciled form, was printed, probably outside the U.S.S.R., and achieved wide circulation. Thus the interest in Jewish culture among Soviet Jews grew more widespread and even found expression in the great interest shown by Soviet Jews at the Israeli book stall at the International Book Fair held in Moscow. JEWISH ART AND FOLKLORE Through the 1970s, there was a marked tendency among some Jewish artists in the Soviet Union to have recourse to Jewish themes in their avant garde style in painting and sculpture. While private exhibitions of nonconformist art became a rather widespread phenomenon, the group of Jewish artists which organized them in 1975 expressly stated that in its desire to develop a modernist style, it sought to cultivate Jewish themes in art. This group, with a membership of 12 artists, and calling itself "Aleph," organized two exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad. The Moscow exhibition, housed in a private apartment, was visited by some 4,000 people. The more interesting Leningrad exhibition was dominated by the works of A. Abezgauz whose paintings depict the life of the Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement and the life of the refuseniks. Among the works exhibited by S. Ostrowsky was a painting entitled The Patriarchs of Israel. Paintings by 26-year-old T. Kornfeld, the youngest participant, carried titles such as The Lover and The Jew. Plastic arts were represented by Iu. Kalendarev whose wood sculptures entitled Hanukkah Lamp and Mezuzah attracted many spectators. The artists who participated in both these exhibitions each had his own particular artistic style, while that which set them apart as a group was their Jewishness, which found expression in their preoccupation with Jewish themes or in their particular world view. Jewish folklore was likewise increasingly incorporated into Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet Union. Jewish songs, ḥasidic as well as Israeli, were often sung at meetings of Jewish activists. A. Vinkovetski even edited an anthology of Jewish folklore which he was unable to publish due to the refusal of Soviet publishers to print the book. COMMEMORATION OF EVENTS RELATED TO JEWISH HISTORY AND TRADITION Among the concrete expressions of Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet Union were the celebration of Jewish holidays and festivals and commemoration of Jewish historical events. Two landmarks in contemporary Jewish history – the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel – served for many Soviet Jews as the focal points in their public manifestation of Jewish national identity. Immortalization of the memory of the victims of World War II was a common feature in Soviet society. Statues and monuments were erected in thousands of settlements in the memory of the victims of the Nazi occupation, and were frequented by Soviet schoolchildren and members of the Communist youth movement. Yet in all these places, the methodical and clearly intentional disregard of the Jewish victims is conspicuous. Jewish activists, therefore, saw it as their duty to dwell on the Holocaust and its uniqueness. As a result, in 1976 and 1977, as in previous years, a group of 50 Jewish activists decided to hold a memorial service in the Moscow synagogue on Remembrance Day of the Holocaust. However, the gabbai of the synagogue, apparently on the instructions from the authorities, prevented them from holding the service as planned, and they consequently adjourned to a private home. In the 1970s, Jews of several cities tried to hold a memorial service at Babi Yar, in Kiev. The organizers sought to lay a wreath at the foot of the monument in memory of those Jews who were the principal victims at Babi Yar and about whose fate the inscription on the monument is silent, as well as to hold a religious service. The Soviet security forces prevented them from carrying out their plan, and even arrested some activists who tried to make their way from Moscow to Kiev to participate in the service. On Israel Independence Day, hundreds of activists held parties in their homes, while some chose to celebrate the event in parks on the outskirts of the city. At these gatherings, Hebrew songs were sung and at some speeches were delivered about the State of Israel. The annual gatherings outside synagogues on Simḥat Torah became a well-entrenched tradition among Soviet Jews, with some 5,000–8,000 Jews assembling each Simḥat Torah outside the Moscow synagogue.   SYMPOSIUM ON JEWISH CULTURE The goal of the symposium on the subject "Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union – Present and Future" was threefold: an assessment of what existed and what was lacking in Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, the establishment of guidelines for future development, and drawing the attention of world public opinion to the restrictions on Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet Union. In March 1976 an organizing committee of 13 individuals, with Professor B. Fain as chairman, was set up in Moscow, for the purpose of convening an international symposium to discuss Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. The organizing committee prepared a memorandum defining these goals. The memorandum, which in effect served as an invitation, was sent to hundreds of Jewish scholars and intellectuals throughout the world as well as to a number of Soviet institutions. The organizing committee eventually grew to include 30 persons (13 from Moscow, 4 from Riga, 2 from Vilna, 2 from Kiev, 2 from Vinnitsa, 2 from Leningrad, 2 from Tiflis, and 1 each from Tallinn, Minsk and Kishinev). On Oct. 23, 1976, the organizing committee convened and approved 27 papers to be presented at the symposium, half of which were contributed by foreign lecturers. On Nov. 17, 1976, the organizers called a press conference inviting foreign as well as Soviet correspondents. In the context of preparations for the symposium, the organizers met with official and semiofficial Soviet representatives. On Sept. 27, 1976 E. Liberman, one of the organizers, met with General Shekhovtsev, director of the Institute of Military History. When Liberman pointed out to the general that most of Soviet society is led to believe that the Jews did not take an active part in the war against Hitler, Shekhovtsev admitted the truth of the allegation, but was quick to argue that the history of World War II was not studied in its national ramifications but from a more encompassing point of view as the war of the Soviet people as a whole. This argument was clearly unfounded in view of the hundreds of books in the form of memoirs, historical studies, and literature published in the Soviet Union which depicted the contributions of various nationalities to the war effort against Nazi Germany. On Dec. 8, five members of the organizing committee met with the Soviet Deputy Minister of Culture, V. Popov. He admitted having received an invitation, though he argued that since their perception of Jewish culture was contrary to the Soviet perception, their very activity constituted provocation. On Dec. 14, the organizers of the symposium met with the members of the editorial board of the Yiddish journal Sovetish Heymland. A. Vergelis, the editor, rejected the possibility of the existence of Jewish culture in any language other than Yiddish and argued that any literary creation in the Russian language ipso facto belonged to Russian culture, regardless of whether its theme or author were Jewish. He did, however, admit that there was no institution in existence in the Soviet Union where Yiddish might be studied, and noted that it would be commendable to do something about the dissemination of a knowledge of Jewish history according to a Marxist approach. Nonetheless Vergelis unequivocally opposed the symposium which, in his view, sought to halt the process of assimilation which, according to him, was a positive phenomenon. Furthermore, he stressed that the very organization of a symposium would endanger Soviet cultural activity in Yiddish. An article which appeared in Izvestia on Nov. 22, under the evocative heading "The Formula for Treason," implicitly affirmed the KGB's decision to prevent the symposium from taking place. And so, between Nov. 23 and 25, searches were carried out in the apartments of many of the organizers and much of the material prepared for the symposium was confiscated. On Nov. 24 the news agency TASS "revealed" that thematerial confiscated proved that contact had been established with Zionist organizations and that their activity was aimed at stirring hatred among the peoples of the Soviet Union. On Nov. 29, the organizers made a fervent appeal to public figures and heads of state in the West, calling on them to demonstrate their support for this Jewish cultural undertaking. The Soviet press at the same time launched an extensive and widespread campaign against the organizers which continued into December. On the one hand, the campaign was aimed at branding the organizers of the symposium as agents of anti-Soviet political forces, and on the other, at proving that Jewish culture on a wide scale in fact exists in the Soviet Union. Concomitantly, the KGB systematically called in the organizers of the symposium for questioning on charges of "dissemination of lies with the intent to harm the government and Soviet society." Initially these investigations were limited to symposium organizers in Moscow, but it was not long before they spread into other cities where most of the members of the organizing committee, lecturers, and indeed any person who appeared to the authorities as having a hand in the convening of the symposium were arrested and taken in for questioning. As the opening date of the symposium drew near (Dec. 21), arrests and harassment of the organizers and participants accelerated. By Dec. 21, not one of the participants had succeeded in reaching Moscow. According to plan, the participants in the symposium were to assemble outside the Moscow synagogue at 10 A.M. and were to proceed to a private apartment for the opening session. However, on the way to the designated meeting place, the majority of the organizers, lecturers, and participants were arrested. Nonetheless, nearly 100 people, among them Western correspondents as well as the renowned freedom-fighter Andrei Sakharov, assembled at the synagogue at the designated hour. They adjourned to a private apartment where a symbolic opening of the symposium was held, all under the careful scrutiny of KGB agents. The participants, who heard a number of papers which the KGB had not succeeded in confiscating, sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party protesting the arrest of their colleagues. These events marked the end of another stage in the struggle for Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet Union. Although the symposium did not take place as intended, its very organization and the events surrounding it drew the attention of world public opinion to the plight of Soviet Jewry and its desire to maintain its particular cultural life. Moreover, there is reason   to believe that the incident roused many Jews into Jewish cultural activity, among these many who did not intend emigrating from the Soviet Union. JEWISH CULTURAL ACTIVITY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT Institutionalized and legitimate Jewish cultural activity whose main vehicle was Yiddish found expression in publications and in the area of the performing arts. In 1977 four books were published in Yiddish while several were translated from Yiddish. Most of the Yiddish writers living in the Soviet Union published their work in the monthly literary-social journal Sovetish Heymland. This journal was largely designed for foreign consumption and was forever in difficulties for lack of contributors as well as readers. Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union had not been able to recover from the severe blow it suffered during the last years of Stalinist rule, when its foremost writers were removed. Many of the writers who managed to return from the detention camps and prisons remained emotionally and spiritually broken, many passed away over the previous 20 years, and some Yiddish writers left the Soviet Union during the 1970s for Israel. As a result, the number of writers who participated in Sovetish Heymland grew increasingly and effectively smaller. In 1977, 40 writers and literary critics published their work in the journal. Most of the contributors were well advanced in age, only five being between the ages of 51 and 60, 21 between 61 and 70, 11 between 71 and 80, and three writers from 81 to 90. No Yiddish schools had existed in the Soviet Union since the end of World War II, and there was thus no possibility of replenishing the cadres of Yiddish writers. To overcome the lack of material, contributions were accepted in the section of the journal containing reportage and stories by amateurs, so that most of the literary creations which appeared in Sovetish Heymland were of poor literary quality and of shallow Jewish content. Even more distressing than the difficulty of procuring material was the lack of readers, and to deal with it the journal included from 1969 a section on individual study of Yiddish. At a special meeting of the editorial board in June 1977, called to discuss the publication of a textbook for the study of Yiddish, Hirsh Remenik stressed that since there were no Yiddish schools or qualified teachers, the textbook would have to be designed for individual study. It was decided to proceed with the preparation of a text for the study of Yiddish geared towards Russian speakers. In order to draw the interest of readers both in the Soviet Union and abroad who knew no Yiddish, the journal began to include, as of September 1977, abstracts in Russian and English. In 1979 Yiddish was introduced as an optional subject in several Birobidzhan schools, but only some 10,000 Jews lived in this region. In 1977 there were two Yiddish "folk theaters" in the Soviet Union – one in Birobidzhan and the other in Vilna. The "folk theater" was comprised of a group of amateurs who received financial government support. Both groups presented skits as well as evenings of songs and folklore. As a result of the aforementioned symposium on Jewish culture the government announced, at the end of 1977, the establishment of a professional Yiddish theater in Moscow. In Dec. 1978 the Jewish musical chamber theater began its activities by showing "Black Bridle for a White Horse" by Yu. Sherling, and in 1979 it performed a musical review, "Let's All Do It Together." In the same year, Georgian television produced a program of medieval Jewish poetry recited by local actors. RELIGION Religious activity in Russia centered on the synagogue. In mid-1977, as far as could be ascertained, there were 69 synagogues in the Soviet Union; 17 in R.S.F.S.R., 14 in Georgia, 12 in the Ukraine, nine in Uzbekistan, three each in Azerbaijan and Belorussia, two each in Moldavia, Lithuania, Estonia and Kazakhstan, and one each in the republics of Latvia, Tadzhikistan, and Kirghizia. In addition special minyanim were organized for prayer on the High Holidays in many centers. The synagogues had no countrywide organization, though Rabbi Y.L. Fishman of the Great Synagogue in Moscow was given prominence over others. There was an acute shortage of rabbis. The Moscow yeshivah, which trained religious functionaries, had only ten students, three of whom were sent to Hungary to complete their studies. The synagogues also suffered from an acute shortage of prayer books and other religious articles. Many of the synagogues had facilities for kosher slaughtering, and several are equipped with facilities for baking matzah for Passover. The Department of Religion and the security forces maintained stringent supervision over the synagogues, and religious functionaries were often exploited for propaganda purposes in the attacks by the authorities against Zionism and its proponents in the Soviet Union. As a natural result aliyah activists avoided the synagogues, which were mainly frequented by elderly people. EDUCATION, EMPLOYMENT AND DEMOGRAPHY During the academic year 1976–77, 66, 900 Jews, comprising 1.4 percent of the total registration, were enrolled in institutions of higher learning. Of these, 2,850 were studying for a candidate degree. (The title of candidate is comparable to the Ph.D. degree in the West.) The 33,300 Jewish students enrolled in post-high-school vocational institutions comprised 0.7 percent of the student body. Since the 1974–75 academic year, the number of Jewish students in institutions of higher learning had dropped by 12 percent and in the vocational schools by 6 percent. In November 1975, 181,000 Jews who had completed vocational training were employed in the Soviet economy, comprising 1.4 percent of the total, while 385,000 Jews who had graduated from institutions of higher learning were employed in the Soviet economy, constituting 4.1 percent of the total. The number of graduates of institutions of higher learning who were integrated into the Soviet work force grew by 8 percent during the years 1970 to 1975, while the number of Jews in the same category continued to drop steadily. At the end of 1975, there were 69,000 Jews working in scientific fields (5.7 percent of the total), 8 percent more than in 1970. At the   end of 1973 there were 28,000 employed Jewish scientists bearing the titles of candidate or higher, comprising 8.8 percent of the total. Thus the percentage of Jews grew as the educational level of the category rose, though in view of the shrinking numbers of Jewish enrollment, it was doubtful if they could maintain such a level. However, despite the restrictions and difficulties, the Jewish community as a whole turned towards academic pursuits and most young Jews in 1977 were enrolled in institutions of higher learning, though perhaps not always in the institutions or fields of their choice. In January 1979 a population census, the third since World War II, was conducted in the U.S.S.R. The final tabulation listed 1,810,876 people as Jews distributed among the republics, as seen in the Table: Jewish Population, U.S.S.R. In the nine years from the census of January 1970 and the one in 1979, the Jewish population decreased by about 340,000 (in 1970 there were 2,151,000 Jews), of whom 177,000 emigrated from the Soviet Union during that interval. This means that in the period under discussion the Jewish population decreased as a result of demographic factors and assimilation by about 163,000. The average yearly decrease in the Jewish population, for reasons other than emigration, was during the 1970s 0.87 percent. Of those declaring themselves as Jews in the latest census, 19.6 percent stated that the Yiddish language is their mother tongue or their second language, as compared to 25.5 percent in the 1970 census. SOVIET POLICY Soviet policy toward the Jews and Judaism found expression in propaganda and suppression of aliyah activists and proponents of nonestablishment Jewish culture, the two methods being closely interrelated. On Jan. 22, 1977, a film shown on several television stations in the Soviet Union portrayed aliyah activists as a group of corrupt individuals who received funds from Zionist sources abroad, and who directed its actions against the state. The local and national Soviet press published hundreds of articles depicting Judaism as cultivating hatred among peoples, and Zionism and the state of Israel as being in the forefront of imperialism and following in the footsteps of the Nazis. In reportage and stories, the Jew was portrayed as an individual bearing negative qualities and untrustworthy. The campaign against Judaism, Zionism, and aliyah activities gained momentum during the second quarter of 1977. On Feb. 5, 1977, the president of the United States wrote a letter to the renowned advocate of human rights in the Soviet Union, Andrei Sakharov. As an indirect response to the letter, the official Soviet government newspaper Izvestia printed an unsigned article in which nine Jewish activists (two of whom had already left the Soviet Union) were accused of having supplied information to the American intelligence service. The seven who were still living in the Soviet Union were Valdimir Slepak, a radio engineer, age 51, who had applied for an exit permit to Israel in 1974; ida nudel , an economist, age 46, who had first applied for an exit permit in 1971; Dina Beilin, engineer, age 38, who had first applied for an exit permit in 1971; Mikhail Kremen, radio engineer, age 40; Boris Tchernobilsky, radio engineer, age 31; Professor Alexander Lerner; and Anatoly shcharansky . They considered filing suit against Izvestia but abandoned their plan when Anatoly Shcharansky was arrested on Mar. 15. Shcharansky had applied for an exit permit to Israel in 1975 and when it was refused, he became one of the chief spokesmen of the aliyah activists, meeting with U.S. senators, Western correspondents, and tourists. Following his arrest, the Soviet authorities announced that Shcharansky would be charged with treason, espionage on behalf of the United States, and anti-Soviet propaganda. On June 30, the president of the United States made an exceptional gesture and announced at a press conference that Anatoly Shcharansky had never had any contact with American intelligence agencies and consequently never passed on any information. The Soviet security forces nonetheless proceeded with their task. In various cities of the Soviet Union, dozens of aliyah activists who had at some time met with Shcharansky were called in for questioning. It soon became apparent to the aliyah activists that the Soviet authorities were in the process of preparing a show trial which was aimed not only at harming Shcharansky, but ultimately at branding activists involved in the struggle for emigration and Jewish culture in the Soviet Union as enemies of the state and agents of foreign intelligence services. On July 14, 1978 Anatoly Shcharansky was sentenced to 13 years hard labor. The campaign for the release of Anatoly Shcharansky thus became the focal point of activity in the free world on behalf of Jews in the Soviet Union. In June 1978 ida nudel was sentenced to four years in exile and recently one of the editors of the journal Jews in the Soviet Union, Viktor Brailovski, was arrested. -The Struggle Continues The struggle on behalf of Soviet Jewry was adopted by most Jewish communities all over the world. In most countries, the campaign was coordinated by a central body such as the National Conference of Soviet Jewry in the United States, the Canadian Committee for Soviet Jewry in Canada, the International Coordination Office for Regional Organizations in Defense of Soviet Jewry in Europe, and in Israel, the Israel Public Council for Soviet Jewry. These organizations and others all had representatives on the executive committee of the Brussels Conference on Behalf of Soviet Jewry. The activities of these groups were aimed at bringing the persecution of Soviet Jewry to the attention of the wide public via the mass media on national and international levels. Local committees on behalf of Soviet Jews, as well as professional and ideological groups, existed in almost every country, such as groups of students, professors, clergymen, and the like. They also appealed to their respective governments and members of parliament. The activities in which Jews and non-Jews alike participated were focused on three main issues: (1) the release of prisoners of Zion; (2) a campaign against antisemitism; and (3) protest against the sabotage of the Symposium on Jewish Culture. (1) The Release of Prisoners of Zion. Hundreds of demonstrations of organizations and individuals took place all over   the world demanding the release of prisoners of Zion and in defense of Anatoly Shcharansky and Ida Nudel. Many prominent figures appealed to the Soviet authorities, calling for the release of prisoners of Zion on humanitarian grounds, as well as the release of Shcharansky. The demonstrations were generally held outside Soviet institutions in the West and wherever Soviet diplomats and artists appeared. (2) Campaign against Antisemitism. The main efforts were directed towards drawing the attention of world public opinion to the antisemitic literature recently published in the Soviet Union. It was stressed that this contradicted the international commitments of the Soviet Union. (3) Protest against the Sabotage of the Symposium on Jewish Culture. The attention of world public opinion was drawn to the plight of Jewish culture and religion in the Soviet Union. In many countries conferences were organized to demonstrate solidarity with the Symposium. During the days that the Symposium was to have been held in Moscow, symposia of scholars and scientists were organized in many cities in Europe, the United States and Israel in which the state of Jewish culture and religion in the Soviet Union was discussed. The Soviet Union was warned that it could not expect Western cooperation as long as it ignored its commitments according to Basket III of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Agreement. In the wake of this agreement, private bodies and parliamentary groups were set up to monitor the fulfillment of Soviet obligations in the protection of human rights. Similarly, the executive committee of the Brussels Conference on Behalf of Soviet Jewry set up a group to monitor the fulfillment of Soviet obligations according to the Helsinki Agreement with respect to its treatment of Soviet Jews. This group prepared a document to be presented at the Belgrade Conference of representatives of countries that signed the Final Act. This document, known as the "Blue Book," described in detail thousands of instances where the Soviet government violated the agreement. This extensive material was presented to delegations of 30 countries participating in the Belgrade Conference so that they might raise the issue before the Soviet delegation. The problem of Soviet Jewry thus became a matter of public and political concern in countries of the free world, thereby compelling the Soviet Union to take heed, to some extent, of world public opinion in every measure it took against Soviet Jewry. EMIGRATION Emigration was one of the most important events of Jewish life in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Of the 246,000 Jews who left the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1981, some 19,000 left during the years 1977–78. The ethnic composition of those Jews who emigrated in the years 1977–83, according to Soviet republics, is shown in Table: Soviet Jews who Emigrated to Israel (Olim) According to Ethnic Composition, 1970–1979. Soviet emigration procedures were complicated and often rather lengthy. The first step involved obtaining an affidavit from Israel. At times such affidavits did not reach their Soviet Jews Who Emigrated to Israel (Olim) according to Ethnic Composition, 19701979 according to Ethnic Composition, 19701979") Soviet Jews Who Emigrated to Israel (Olim) according to Ethnic Composition, 1970–1979   Ethnic group Number Percentage Relative percentage within Sov. Jewish pop. Ashkenazi Jews 98,500 64.3 93.5 Georgian Jews 29,600 19.4 2.3 Mountain Jews 9,800 6.4 2.3 Bukharan Jews 15,100 9.9 1.9 Total 153,000 100.0 100.0 destination, while in some cases the applicants themselves, due to personal and other considerations, decided not to approach the Soviet authorities with requests for exit permits even after receiving their affidavits. Consequently, the number of affidavits sent from Israel did not reflect the exact number of requests for exit permits processed by Soviet authorities. Nonetheless, the request for an affidavit from Israel did indicate that the applicant at some stage considered leaving the Soviet Union. Thus, although as stated 246,000 Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union between 1968 and Jan. 1, 1981, 350,000 new affidavits were sent to Jews in Soviet Union, meaning that 16 percent of Soviet Jews had at least considered emigration. There was generally a correlation between the number of emigrants and the number of new affidavits sent from Israel, the number of new affidavits sent from Israel being between 1.7 and 3.5 times the average rate of emigration for any one year between 1972 and 1981, as shown in Table: Monthly Rate of Emigration from the Former Soviet Union; New Affidavits from Israel, 1968–1980. Monthly Rate of Emigration from the Former Soviet Union; New Affidavits from Israel, 19681980 Monthly Rate of Emigration from the Former Soviet Union; New Affidavits from Israel, 1968–1980   Years Average monthly rate of emigration Monthly average of new affidavits 1968–71 466 1,992 1972 2,623 5,658 1973 2,910 4,851 1974 1,682 3,570 1975 1,095 2,845 1976 1,178 3,008 1977 1,430 3,589 1978 2,550 8,934 1979 4,278 10,616 1980 (Jan–June) 2,515 3,765 It may therefore be said that every Jewish family emigrating from the Soviet Union acted as a catalyst urging one or two other families to consider the possibility of emigration. Consequently the increase in Jewish emigration in 1979 as compared to 1978 brought in its wake an increase of approximately 19 percent in the number of new affidavits sent from Israel as compared to the previous year. It was therefore not surprising to find the greatest number of applicants for affidavits in those Soviet republics where emigration figures are highest.   Whereas of the 246,000 Jews who left the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1980, 157,000 emigrated to Israel while the remaining 89,000 (36 percent) proceeded to other countries, especially the United States, the figures for 1979–80 show that out of 73,000 emigrants only 24,700 or 34 percent settled in Israel. Furthermore, there existed a disproportion between the ethnic composition of those emigrating to Israel and the corresponding ethnic composition within Soviet Jewish society as a whole, as demonstrated in the Table: Emigration: Olim and "Dropouts" from Russia, 1980–1986. Emigration: Olim and Dropouts from Russia, 19801986 Emigration: Olim and "Dropouts" from Russia, 1980–1986   Year Exited Russia Immigrated to Israel "Dropped Out"1 in Vienna Percentage "Drop-outs" 5"> 1 Chose another country instead of Israel. 1981 9,481 1,806 7,675 81.2 1982 2,708 756 1,952 72.8 1983 1,320 390 930 70.5 1984 896 350 546 60.9 1985 1,137 344 793 69.7 1986 (1–7) 381 92 289 75.8 Total 15,923 3,738 12,185 76.5 These figures therefore indicate that the percentage of non-Ashkenazi Jews among those who proceeded on to Israel was greater than the percentage they comprise within Soviet Jewish society as a whole. This disparity may be attributed to two factors: (a) the percentage of non-Ashkenazi Jews who left the Soviet Union in this period was greater than the percentage of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated; and the percentage of "dropouts" among non-Ashkenazi Jews was significantly smaller than the percentage of dropouts among Ashkenazi Jews. As in previous years, in 1977–78 the dropout phenomenon was predominant among Jews originating from certain cities. The rate of dropouts is thus seen to be linked to the geographic origin of the emigrants: Jews of the first six cities being of Ashkenazi origin, those from Tashkent and Tiflis being Ashkenazi, Georgian, and Bukharan Jews, while Mukachevo, Kishinev, and Chernovtsy were annexed to the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II. The average level of education among dropouts was higher than that of those who emigrated to Israel. The number of members of the family of working age is likewise higher among dropouts. Furthermore, the frequency of mixed marriages is higher among dropouts. Approximately 46 percent of the work force among Soviet Jewish emigrants comprised skilled workers and/or those who had attained a high level of education. THE REFUSENIKS The leading protagonists in the struggle for the right to emigrate from the Soviet Union were those known as "refuseniks," individuals who applied for exit permits but whose applications were turned down. Refuseniks were alienated from the surrounding society and constituted a separate social group "stronger than a community" according to Vladimir Lazaris. "Their bodies are still fettered, but their souls are free." Many refuseniks were dismissed from their places of work as soon as they applied for exit permits, and for some the sole source of income was small monetary contributions they received from abroad. They lived under the constant threat of being charged with "parasitism." One such instance is that of Josif Begun who was employed as an economist in a Soviet research institute. In 1972, he applied for an exit permit and was subsequently dismissed. His attempt to persuade the Soviet authorities to recognize his work as a Hebrew instructor as a legitimate source of income failed in May 1977, and he was tried under the charge of parasitism and sentenced to two years of exile. Though his sentence, based on the charge of parasitism, was exceptionally severe in 1977, it served as a warning to other refuseniks, and the harsh attitude of the Soviet regime toward them rendered them the most active element within Soviet Jewry, and their voices were often heard abroad. In January 1977 there were 2,001 refuseniks in the Soviet Union, some of whom had been waiting for exit permits for three or more years. Between January and September 430 refuseniks received exit permits and subsequently left the Soviet Union. However, during that same period the Soviet authorities turned down an additional 694 requests. Consequently in October 1977, there were 2,265 refuseniks, an increase of 13 percent as compared to the beginning of that year. The activities of the refuseniks centered on (a) the struggle for the right to emigrate and cultural activity outside the framework of Soviet institutions (see above). As part of the struggle for the right to emigrate, some 30 Jews demonstrated in October 1976 in front of the offices of the Supreme Soviet, and a delegation of the demonstrators was received by the minister of internal affairs who promised to reexamine their cases. On Feb. 21, 1977, 62 refuseniks staged a sit-in at the Supreme Soviet and in June six young Jews declared a hunger strike. During that period, seven Jews of Kiev publicly renounced their Soviet citizenship as a sign of protest against the emigration policy of the Soviet Union. In 1977, as in previous years, refuseniks appealed to countless international conferences, foreign governments, and world public opinion, calling for unremitting action for the cause of the right of Jews to leave the Soviet Union. (Mordechai Altschuler) -The 1980s DEMOGRAPHY In the 1980s the annual decrease in the population among Soviet Jewry reached 2.2 percent. The Soviet census of January 1989 recorded 1,450,511 people who identified themselves as Jews; this was a decline of 19.9 percent from the figure of 1,810,876 in 1979. The Jewish population declined sharply in all of the union republics (see Table: Jewish Population Changes in the U.S.S.R., by Republic, 1959–1991, above, p. 555); in Moscow from 223,100 to 175,700. Overall, the percentage of Jews in the Soviet population declined from 0.69 percent in 1979 to 0.5 percent in 1989, when 41.5 percent of Soviet Jewry were residents of Moscow, Leningrad, or the capitals of the union republics. Soviet Jewry represents an extreme example of an aging, demographically dying, assimilating community. In 1988–89 the birthrate of Jewish mothers was 7.3 per 1,000 Jews (6.3 in the R.S.F.S.R.). The birthrate in homogenous Jewish families (i.e., where both parents were Jewish) was 4.3 per 1,000 Jews (2.6 in the R.S.F.S.R.). Fertility of Jewish women in the U.S.S.R. did not exceed 1.6 children per woman. At the same time mortality was high, with 21.3 deaths per 1,000 Jews (the corresponding figure for the R.S.F.S.R. was 24.4). The median age of Jews in the U.S.S.R. in 1989 was 49.7 and in Russia it was 52.3. (For comparison, in 1990 the median age of Jews in Israel was 28.4, of Jews in the United States 37.3, and of the total Soviet population in 1989 30.7.) The percentage of aged people (60+) among the Jews of Moscow in 1989 was 39.6 percent, while that of aged people among the general population in the city was 18.2 percent. Children up to age 5 made up only 3 percent of the Jewish population of Moscow while the same age group made up 8 percent of the general population. The percentage of mixed marriages among all marriages involving Soviet Jews in 1988 was 58.3 percent for Jewish men and 47.6 percent for Jewish women. The same indicators for the RSFSR were 73.2 and 62.8 percent, respectively. The vast majority of children of mixed marriage who were under 18 were not registered as Jews in the 1979 census. In the U.S.S.R. this involved 90.9 percent of those children with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother; 95.3 percent of the children with a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father (for Russia the percentages were 93.9 and 95.5, respectively). The mass emigration of the 1970s (see "Emigration and Aliyah") only accelerated the already advanced process of the erosion of Soviet Jewry. (See Tables above.) The smaller subethnic Jewish groups largely maintained their knowledge of their native languages. The percentage of Ashkenazi Jews with a knowledge of Yiddish may well be even lower than the official 11.1 percent since the declaration by a Soviet Jew of a Jewish language as his native tongue is often a demonstration of national feelings rather than an indication of a real command of the language. With the breakup of the U.S.S.R. toward the end of 1991, Soviet Jewry as such disappeared. At the end of that year the number of Jews living in territory of the former Soviet Union was estimated as 990,000, of whom the majority (430,000) lived in Russia. Russian Jewry now no longer constitutes the third largest Jewish community in the world. As of 1992 over half a million Russian-speaking Jews lived in Israel. THE LAST YEARS OF STAGNATION 1983–1986 Official Policy. A sharp change in Soviet emigration policy in the period 1979–1981 led to the formation of a large group of refuseniks (see above), i.e., people who were refused permission to emigrate. Reasons given for refusal were often far-fetched pretexts of local OVIR (visa) offices caught between a flood of requests for exit visas and a sharply reduced quota of permits allowed by Moscow. No judicial procedure existed for appealing OVIR decisions. In the early 1980s, the number of refuseniks in the whole country numbered tens of thousands. Besides many had their emigration documents rejected even for consideration by OVIR while others who had an invitation from Israel did not submit their applications due to their conviction that such an attempt would be useless. A whole generation of Soviet Jews grew up "in refusal," including thousands of highly qualified professionals whose careers were irretrievably harmed when they were banned from working in their fields after applying to emigrate. By 1987 refuseniks had become a dominant factor in Soviet Jewish life, a major force for unity among international Jewish organizations, and an important element in Soviet-Western relations. The Soviet authorities proclaimed that "neither antisemitism nor Zionism" would be allowed, suggesting that Soviet Jews forget about emigration and return to "normal" Soviet life. Sometimes refuseniks were even promised that they would be given back their former posts in return for a written statement that they would abandon any idea of emigrating. In fact, antisemitism did not decrease; discrimination was manifested against the Jews, as a potentially disloyal part of the population, in regard to acceptance into institutions of higher education, job promotion, and the awarding of prestigious positions, in awarding scientific degrees, etc. In 1980–1981, 3 percent of Soviet Jews had been studying in institutions of higher education; in 1984–1985 the percentage dropped to 2.6. Between 1982 and 1987, the number of Jews among scientific workers declined from 63,000 to 58,600 and among those with Candidate of Science degrees from 25,800 to 25,200. In the 1980s, in general, there was a relative decline of the status of Jews in Soviet society. At the same time, a campaign gathered momentum against everything connected with Israel, Zionism, Jewish history, Judaism, and Jewish culture. On April 21, 1983, the Soviet Public Anti-Zionist Committee, an ostensibly voluntary organization headed by General David Dragunskii, was established. A group of privileged writers who made a specialty of "anti-Zionism" emerged at this time; they included: Iurii Ivanov, Lev Korneev, Caesar Solodar, Lionel Dadiani, Evgenii Evseev, and Vladimir Begun. Their works were circulated throughout the country in hundred of thousands of copies. An overtly racist approach characterized the "anti-Zionist" ideology. Soon there was a revival of the notorious myths and libels propagated in the past against the Jews by the Czarist Black Hundreds and by Nazi propaganda: the myth of the "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy," The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and even the blood libel. Public criticism of this "anti-Zionism" was not permitted. Thus, the attempt of the Leningrad philologist Ivan Martynov to sue Korneev for libel was turned into judicial persecution of Martynov himself. In the summer of 1986 the book On the Class Essence of Zionism, which purported to be a historiographic   survey of "anti-Zionist" literature in the previous two decades, was published. Its author, Alexander Romanenko, denied the very existence of the Jewish nation, of any Jewish language (either Hebrew or Yiddish), and of Jewish culture. He justified the prerevolutionary pogroms as a manifestation of the class struggle against the Jewish bourgeoisie. The Zionists were also blamed for the Holocaust\! According to Romanenko, the Zionists were more dangerous than the Nazis since they had succeeded in defeating the latter and then proceeded, by blackmail and threats, in totally bankrupting the Federal Republic of Germany by forcing it to pay reparations to Israel. This fantastic ideology was regularly foisted off on the Soviet population at Party and trade union meetings, on television, and in the press. The Jews were also being assigned a demonic role in Russian history, for example, in the vulgar historical novels of Valentin Pikul. A special place in this demonology was reserved for Leon Trotsky, who was depicted (for example, in the novel Petrograd-Brest (-Litovsk) by I. Shamiakin) as a symbol of Russia's enemies and described in terms of an anti-Jewish caricature. One of the aims of the anti-Zionist campaign was to discredit the idea of emigration and to intimidate activists in the growing Jewish national movement in the country. However, despite the jamming of foreign radio stations, a relatively realistic picture of life beyond the "iron curtain" reached Soviet Jews via letters from the thousands of relatives and friends who had already emigrated. This encouraged them to continue the struggle to emigrate. In an effort to put an end to the refusenik phenomenon, the authorities initially allowed some of the leaders to emigrate. This tactic backfired by increasing the number of activists. Then repression became the order of the day. Special KGB groups were assigned to monitor Jewish activity. They bugged telephone conversations, opened letters, infiltrated informers among the refuseniks, intimidated activists and their families, arranged for some people to be fired from their jobs and for others to be beaten up, and so on. All forms of independent Jewish cultural and public activity were persecuted, including the teaching of Hebrew, the publishing of samizdat journals, the organization of kindergartens, the performance of purimshpils (often satirical Purim plays) in private apartments, or public meetings to commemorate the Holocaust. There were frequent searches of apartments and jailings of activists on fabricated charges of anti-Soviet activity and propaganda, slander of the Soviet state, and on trumped-up criminal charges, such as possession of narcotics. Sometimes the people arrested were beaten. Occasionally, activists were placed in special psychiatric hospitals. Yet there was a limit to the persecution: mass arrests were not resorted to. The number of Jewish activists imprisoned at any one time between 1983 and 1986 amounted to about 15, probably representing the quota decided upon by the central authorities. It appeared that the government wanted to maintain a certain low level of Jewish activity with an eye toward negotiations with the West while the KGB was interested in the continuity of such activity in order to justify the existence of their "anti-Zionist" cadres. In response to the continued accusations from abroad that they were persecuting Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R., the Soviet authorities did sponsor some Jewish cultural enterprises of their choice. A number of these took place far from the large Jewish population centers, in the so-called Jewish autonomous Oblast (province) of Birobidzhan, the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated in 1984. In 1982 a Yiddish textbook was published there in a minuscule print run and permission was granted for an optional course in Yiddish at one of the schools in the province. At the same time, several propaganda booklets were published describing the alleged flourishing of Jewish culture in Birobidzhan. In Lithuania several prose works of Grigorii Kanovich were published on Jewish themes. In 1984 a Russian-Jewish (Yiddish) dictionary was published in Moscow and an evening celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of Shalom Aleichem was held at the Union of Soviet Writers. In March 1985, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed perestroika, which originally did not envision any change in official Jewish policy. As late as October 1986 Soviet jails still held 13 Jewish activists, five of whom (Roald Zelichenok, Leonid (Arye) Volvovskii, Evgenii Koifman, Vladimir Lifshits, and Aleksei Magarik) were arrested under Gorbachev. However, to succeed in their intended reforms, the Soviet leadership came to realize that they desperately needed foreign policy successes and economic aid from the West, which increasingly were seen to depend on a liberalization of their policy toward Soviet Jewry. The Refusenik Community From the early 1980s, Soviet Jews found themselves in a hopeless situation. Their social status continued to decline; antisemitism prevented them from fully assimilating; almost all expressions of Jewish life were banned; and at the same time permission to emigrate was denied. The response to this situation was the growth of illegal, independent Jewish cultural activity, which was almost completely centered around the refuseniks. The first stirrings of public and cultural activity were felt among the aliyah activists in the 1970s. However, only the long period of hiatus in emigration allowed the Jewish movement the opportunity to attain an unprecedented breadth, stability, and continuity of leadership. Often, the veteran refuseniks best known in the West, particularly those who had been imprisoned, ceased playing a leading role but became symbols of the struggle and spokesmen of the movement to the foreign media. New less-known enthusiasts assumed an active role in the organizational, political, and cultural spheres. Veteran leaders, who returned to an active role after being released from prison, could be rearrested. Thus, in November 1982, Iosif Begun was imprisoned for the third time. During their years of "refusal," activists gained experience and knowledge, proved their mettle in confrontations   with the authorities, and established contacts with comrades in other communities. They also amassed an unprecedented amount of Jewish cultural material such as books, textbooks, and religious objects. Interested Jews were able to attend underground classes in Hebrew, Jewish culture, history, and religion, and to enjoy Jewish dramatic productions in private homes. There were activities for children as well. Channels were established for exchanges of information with Israel and the organizations for the rights of Soviet Jewry operating in the West. Thus, any persecution of refuseniks soon became known throughout the world. Those who were arrested (and their families) gained effective legal, medical, and material aid, as well as moral support. Jailed aliyah activists, referred to as "prisoners of Zion," knew that they were not abandoned; this often gave them the strength to avoid mental breakdowns and public recantations. Their sense of community helped refuseniks to compensate for the infringement of their rights and their pariah status. Hebrew teaching occupied a key role in the Jewish movement. Moscow was the center of Hebrew instruction where long-range programs were elaborated, accelerated teacher training organized for teachers from other locations, and teaching materials reproduced and disseminated. Iulii Kosharovskii was one of the main organizers of the teaching network. Teachers of Hebrew, who received special support for their efforts from Israel, became a main target for persecution; they constituted about half the prisoners of Zion. In Moscow alone, the Hebrew teachers Alexander Kholmianskii, Iulii Edelshtein, Leonid Volvovskii, and Aleksei Magarik were arrested between 1984 and 1986. In Leningrad, starting in late 1979, the center for the Jewish movement was the historical and cultural seminars headed by Grigorii Kanovich (not to be confused with the Lithuanian writer) and Lev Utevskii. In an attempt to halt the seminars, the authorities gave permission for both leaders to emigrate. At the same time a series of roundups of participants in the seminars took place. Activist Evgenii Lein was arrested in May 1981. After a year-long struggle to maintain the seminars, which had been open to all interested parties, the seminars succumbed. However, a group made up of amateur Jewish historians survived for five more years. Works by members of this group were published in Leningradskii evreiskii almanakh (see "the jewish press "). An attempt in 1985 to renew popular lectures on Jewish culture in Leningrad ended with the arrest of the organizers, Roald Zelichenok and Vladimir Lifshits. In contrast to Leningrad, where Jewish history was practically exclusively the domain of refuseniks, Moscow was the site of some permitted Jewish scholarship headed by the professional ethnographers Mikhail Chlenov and Igor Krupnik. In January 1982 there was an announcement of the formation, in conjunction with the journal Sovetish Heymland, of a Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Commission. The members of the commission hoped to be able to publish their research without interference. However, the ban on almost everything Jewish often compelled the scholars to restrict themselves to peripheral topics of little social relevance, such as the derivation of Jewish family names and descriptions of small subethnic Jewish groups in the Soviet Union. The celebration of traditional Jewish holidays and Israel's Independence Day became a widespread expression of national solidarity. In a number of cities, Purim was the occasion for the private performance of purimshpils, where sharp criticism of the authorities was often presented in disguised form. It is not surprising that the latter activity was particularly subject to government repression. Another indicator of the growth of national consciousness among Soviet Jews was the public meetings commemorating the mass murder of Jews during World War II. Such meetings were held in Riga at Rumbula forest, in Vilnius at Ponari, in Kiev at Babi Yar, and in Leningrad at the Jewish Preobrazhenskii Cemetery. The 1980s saw an increased interest in Orthodox Judaism, which had been among the most slandered and persecuted of all the religions in the U.S.S.R. In the course of previous decades, Jewish religious education had suffered particularly. There was only a handful of rabbis, mohalim (circumcisors), and shoḥetim (ritual slaughterers who provided kasher meat) in the whole U.S.S.R. There was no way, either legally or practically, that such knowledgeable Jews could be replaced. Simple Jews who know how to pray were a dying breed. Often Jewish intellectuals who were God-seekers turned to the Russian Orthodox religion due to their lack of familiarity with their own roots. In the 1980s in Moscow, Leningrad, and subsequently in other places, informal groups of young people who wanted to study Torah and Jewish tradition were established. Some of the participants became ḥozrim bi-teshuvah or "returners to religion." The original impetus for this religious revival was Zionist activity among the refuseniks, which first brought Jews together and provided them with basic knowledge, particularly of Hebrew, without which a mastery of the tradition is hardly possible. The Jewish religious awakening was made possible materially due to the fact that some of the aid from abroad to refuseniks included religious literature, religious objects, and kasher food. In the mid-1980s, there were up to 2,000 newly-observant Orthodox Jews, half of whom resided in Moscow and one fifth in Leningrad. Despite its relatively small core, the religious community had some impact on a broader range of Jews and even led to the conversion to Judaism of some non-Jews, a unique phenomenon in Soviet history. The religious stream within the total Jewish movement among Soviet Jewry was diminished in 1986–1987 with the emigration of a large segment of the newly religious Jews, including their young leadership. The religious groups were basically divided into Chabad, Agudat Israel, and religious Zionists. In Moscow religious activity originally centered around Vladimir Shakhnovskii, Mikhail Nudler, and Eliahu Essas (Agudat Israel), Mikhail Shnaider and Grigorii Rozenshtein (Chabad), and Vladislav Dasheskii, Pinkhas Polonskii, Mikhail Karaevano, and Kholmianskii   (the religious Zionists). Leningrad with the religious leaders Itzhak Kogan (Chabad) and Grigorii Vasserman (Agudat Israel) lacked the religious Zionist orientation. Although the Jewish movement in the 1980s included in its ranks only several thousand people, in the atmosphere of fear that dominated the Soviet Union at that time, it was virtually the only mass opposition movement in the country. It was not exclusively Zionist. Participation in illegal Jewish activity during their years of refusal, however, increased activists' national consciousness and instilled in many the desire to go straight to Israel as soon as they were free to leave. Many activists after their emigration joined Jewish organizations in Israel and the West (especially in the U.S.), and continued to study and teach Jewish history, Hebrew, and the Jewish religion. A number of books written in refusal have now been published (mostly in Israel). Among them are Ivrit ("Hebrew") by Leonid Zeilinger; Sinagoga-razgromlennaia no nepokorennaia ("The Synagogue – shattered but unconquered") by Semen Iantovskii (book appeared under the pseudonym of Israel Taiar); Evrei v Peterburge (The Jews of St. Petersburg (published in Russian and in English) by Mikhail Beizer; Delo Dreifusa ("The Dreyfus Case") by Leonid Praisman; and Ani Maamin (Ia veriu) ("I Believe") by Mikhail Shnaider and Grigorii Rozenshtein. Soviet Jewry and the West The Soviet Jewry movement would never have become an international issue had it not been for support from abroad. The following factors were involved in the struggle in the West: Israel's interest in mass immigration, which reflected both Zionist ideology and Israel's demographic problem; the desire of Western, especially American, Jewish leaders to rally Diaspora Jewry around a goal of importance for the whole Jewish people; the tendency of the American administration to utilize "human rights" and, particularly, the struggle of Soviet Jews for the right to emigrate, as a basic weapon in its ideological confrontation with Communism. Special organizations were established in the West for the struggle for Soviet Jewry. These included the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry, in the United States, and in Britain the Committee of 35. The organizing center in Israel was the Liaison Bureau for Soviet Jewry of the Foreign Ministry. The Bureau collected information about Soviet Jews, sent them literature and material aid, organized support from the Jewish and international press, and, on occasion, coordinated international protest campaigns in defense of prisoners of Zion and the right of emigration for Soviet Jews. Most aid from the Bureau was given to those refuseniks, especially teachers of Hebrew, who aspired to aliyah. Israel regularly provided upto-date information about emigration statistics, the level of state antisemitism, persecution of Hebrew, and the suffering of prisoners of Zion to both Jewish and non-Jewish organizations active in the struggle, as well as to political and social figures. Hundreds of foreign tourists who visited Moscow, Leningrad, and other open cities in the U.S.S.R. were in fact voluntary emissaries of international Jewish organizations or, sometimes, Israeli citizens with dual nationality sent by the Liaison Bureau, to bring in books, kasher food, clothing, and other goods, to provide moral support, to give lectures on Jewish history, to share Sabbaths and holidays with their fellow Jews, and to bring back to the West fresh information, texts of protests and appeals, along with various requests for the refuseniks. The tourists who made contact with Soviet Jewry were often halted by the authorities, searched, subjected to harassment and intimidation, and expelled from the country before the end of their visit; sometimes they were beaten by KGB agents. The Soviet authorities prevented former Israel president Ephraim Katzir, who was visiting the U.S.S.R. as part of a scientific delegation, from meeting with refuseniks. However, even during the most difficult times, the flow of visitors did not cease. The Public Council for Soviet Jewry (headed by Avraham Harman) supported by the Israeli government was founded in 1970. In the 1980s, a kind of rival to the council, the Soviet Jewry Education and Information Center (headed by the former refusenik and prisoner of Zion Yosef Mendelevich), was established in affiliation with the American Union of Councils. It favored a strategy of public protest while the more moderate National Conference and the Israeli Liaison Bureau pursued a policy of quiet diplomacy. Due to the efforts of Jewish organizations, the question of the rights of Soviet Jewry gained exposure in parliamentary discussions and in election campaigns in Western democracies. The issue was increasingly raised during intergovernmental contacts with the Soviet government and in the mid-1980s became a focus of demands made on the Soviet Union. In the American congress speeches were often to be heard about refuseniks and prisoners of Zion such as Anatoly Shcharansky, Iosif Begun, and Ida Nudel. When visiting the U.S.S.R., many senators and congressmen met with Jewish activists. U.S. president Reagan and British prime minister Thatcher spoke out in support of the struggle for Soviet Jewry and the issue was also raised in the European Parliament. The International Association of Lawyers encouraged legal experts to provide aid to persecuted and arrested Jews. The situation of individual Soviet Jews was taken up by professional associations in the West, particularly the international scientists' committee which took up the cause of refusenik scientists, including Victor Brailovskii, Alexander Paritskii, and Yurii Tarnopolskii. In New York mass marches and public meetings, which attracted up to 100,000 people, began in 1982. The well-known British historian Martin Gilbert visited Moscow and Leningrad in 1983 and interviewed a number of leading refuseniks. Although some of the material he collected was confiscated by customs authorities when he was leaving, one year later he published The Jews of Hope, which due to his fresh eyewitness point of view and the author's reputation, had considerable influence in mobilizing public support for Soviet Jewry in English-speaking countries and Israel (where the book appeared in Hebrew).   A key event in the struggle was the Third World Conference for Soviet Jewry held in March 1983. The preceding conferences were held in Brussels in 1971 and 1976. The choice of Jerusalem as the location for the third one signified the central role of Israel in the struggle. Originally the Israeli government had preferred to remain in the background so that the issue of Soviet Jewry would be seen not as a parochial problem but as a universal issue of the violation of human rights. Not wishing to complicate the already difficult position of Jewish activists in the U.S.S.R., Israel avoided criticizing the Soviet Union on issues unconnected with Jewish concerns. Tourists sent to the U.S.S.R. by the Liaison Bureau were forbidden to say that they were from Israel and told to travel on second passports. Although following these instructions made the visits less dangerous for the emissaries, this practice gave some Soviet Jewish activists the false impression that they were of more concern to their Western brothers than to the Israelis. The inclusion of the issue of Soviet Jewry in the agenda of the American-Soviet summit conference in Reykjavik in October 1986 was a considerable achievement. The Soviet delegation there was presented with a list, compiled in Israel, of the names, addresses, and dates of refusal of the many members of the Jewish refusenik community in the U.S.S.R. The continuing struggle harmed the international reputation of the U.S.S.R., especially after it signed the Helsinki Accords on human rights. On the other hand, the Soviet Union did gain from the international furor. It allowed the Soviets to raise the price on its "merchandise" of Jewish hostages, for example allowing them to exchange individual Jews for Soviet spies caught by the West (as it happened with Anatoly Shcharansky in February 1986) and to use the issue of Soviet Jewry – in terms of a possible concession on the Soviet side in return for American concessions – in its negotiations with the U.S. on limiting strategic and nuclear weapons. PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST Changes in Official Policy and in the Social Status of Soviet Jewry. The primary goal of the policy of perestroika was originally to help the Soviet Union emerge from its economic crisis by allowing a degree of democratization, permitting the holding of small private and cooperative property, the weakening of centralization and Party control in the periphery, and the broad encouragement of initiative on the part of the Soviet population. The latter were to be mobilized by granting them a number of civil rights entailing freedom of speech, public organization, and freedom of cultural life (glasnost). Owing to the difficulties of overcoming social inertia and to the opposition of the entrenched bureaucracy, perestroika only began to be felt by the public in early 1987. By late 1989 the changes assumed a character unforeseen by the architects of the policy. Despite the authorities' intentions, glasnost was utilized by the peoples of the U.S.S.R. to promote their national aspirations. With the unprecedented burgeoning of national movements that threatened the Soviet Union itself, the issue of the right of Soviet Jews to free emigration and national cultural expression – which had been a major concern of Western public opinion in the 1980s – was no longer so major. At this time of domestic turmoil the Soviet government decided to make concessions on Soviet Jews within the framework of the broadening of civil rights and in exchange for political and economic support from the West. In January 1987 a new government decree came into effect that regulated entrance into and exit from the U.S.S.R. The decree granted the right to emigrate only for family reunification with close relatives abroad. Still it was an advance, since Soviet emigration procedures were now embodied in law rather than secret government directives. The number of exit visas granted increased each month and in May OVIR began accepting applications to emigrate from people who did not have close relatives abroad. The same year saw applications also accepted for reunification with relatives in countries other than Israel. This change in policy raised the problem of "dropouts" or those Jewish emigrants who, from the Israeli perspective, denied their tie to the Jewish homeland and chose other destinations. An indication of a new policy toward emigration was the uncharacteristically mild reaction to the March 1987 demonstration of seven refuseniks in Leningrad. As a result of the demonstration one participant received permission to emigrate while a photograph of the whole group appeared in a local Leningrad newspaper. Early in the same year several Jewish activists were released from prison before serving their full terms. The curtailment of the Party's anti-Zionist campaign, a major turnabout, was first signaled by criticism in the journal Voprosy istorii KPSS (No. 1, 1987) of Romanenko's On the Class Essence of Zionism (see above). The end came to the ban on importation of Jewish religious literature, Hebrew textbooks, and books on Judaism. The long-standing Soviet domestic policy of proscribing national cultural activity outside the borders of officially designated national regions was rejected in July 1988 when the 19th CPSU Congress passed a resolution granting ethnic groups the right to satisfy their cultural and religious needs throughout the Soviet Union. This change of policy was particularly important for the Jews, almost all of whom live outside their supposed national region, the so-called Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan. One consequence of this new policy was the appearance of many independent Jewish culture associations in all parts of the country. With the simultaneous removal of the ban on discussion in the media of all issues relating to Jews, the number of publications and broadcasts on Jewish topics increased astronomically. The majority of them dealt with domestic concerns rather than the previously common condemnations of Israel. Furthermore, events in the Middle East began to be treated by Soviet journalists in a more objective manner, with Soviet coverage occasionally appearing to be more pro-Israeli than that in the West.   In 1988–1989 almost all remaining veteran refuseniks were given permission to emigrate and the emigration process itself was considerably simplified. The authorities practically ceased persecuting, or even condemning, those who wished to emigrate. Former Soviet citizens living in Israel and the United States, including former Jewish activists, were allowed the possibility of visiting their former homeland without hindrance. Previously minuscule, permitted tourism of Soviet Jews abroad, including to Israel, began to develop. The 1991 law on entrance to and exit from the U.S.S.R. not only guaranteed the right of all Soviet citizens to travel abroad but also allowed people to emigrate permanently without losing their Soviet passports (as was previously the case with emigrants who "repatriated" to Israel). It also specified timetables and procedures for handling emigration documents so that Soviet emigration legislation finally corresponded with international norms. Cultural ties between the Soviet Union and Israel began to flourish and, soon thereafter, economic cooperation as well. A series of bilateral diplomatic contacts led in December 1990 to the exchange of consular delegations and one year later to the establishment of full diplomatic relations. The Soviet ambassador to Israel, Alexander Bovin, was the last emissary named by Gorbachev before the formal liquidation of the U.S.S.R. and he remained as the Russian ambassador. Changes occurred also in the social status and employment profile of Soviet Jewry. Secret restrictions on the acceptance of Jews into institutions of higher education, graduate study, prestigious work, and so on were withdrawn. Jews increasingly appeared among Soviet scientists and cultural figures visiting the West and Israel. Although their numbers hardly increased in the top echelons of Soviet power – the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the government, the army high command, and the diplomatic corps – the number of Jews in secondary positions rose, for example, among government advisers. There was a perceptible increase in the activity of Jews in social and political life, where a majority of such activists belonged to the liberal democratic forces. Fifteen Jews were elected to the national congress of People's Deputies of the U.S.S.R. in 1989. The following year 15 Jews passed the first round of elections in the RSFSR, and 9 of them actually became deputies to the Russian Congress of People's Deputies. Some Jews, especially in the Russian hinterland, were elected to local city and all-Russian government councils. Jews actively participated in the fights for the general democratization of the Soviet Union, the rights of national minorities, liberalization of the economy, and protection of the environment. There were many Jews among the radically oriented journalists. However, in rare cases, Jews such as the secretary of the board of the Writers' Union of Russia, Anatolii Salutskii, supported Russian nationalist trends. Jewish Life During the period of glasnost, Jewish social and cultural life came to involve many people throughout Russia and the other Soviet republics. This activity was influenced both by the increase of national consciousness among other peoples in the U.S.S.R. and by the growing contacts between Soviet Jews and Israel. On May 21–22, 1989, a meeting of 120 people representing approximately 50 Jewish social and cultural organizations from 34 Soviet cities took place in Riga. The final document adopted by participants expressed their determination to defend the rights of Soviet Jews to free emigration to Israel and to cultural autonomy within the Soviet Union. The delegates called for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S.S.R. and Israel and the repeal of UN Resolution 3379 which equated Zionism with racism. In the same year 490 delegates took part in a congress of Lithuanian Jews, which elected a Council of Jewish Communities of the republic. A congress of Jewish community organizations from all over the country took place in Moscow in December 1989. Delegates from approximately 200 bodies and many guests from abroad, including the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Simcha Dinitz, were present. A national umbrella organization – the Council of Jewish Culture Associations of the U.S.S.R. (Vaad) – was established with three co-chairmen, Mikhail Chlenov (Moscow), Yosef Zisels (Chernovtsy), and Samuil Zilberg (Riga). After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., a Russian Vaad was established at a congress in Nizhni Novgorod in April 1992. Official, i.e., state-promoted, Jewish figures who, before perestroika, had exercised a legal monopoly in representing Soviet Jewry found themselves forced to compete with independent Jewish organizations. One example of the ill-fated effort by these court Jews to sustain their influence took place in early 1989 when a group of people close to the editor of Sovetish Heymland founded the short-lived Association of Activists and Friends of Jewish Culture. Both the leaders of Vaad and the "official" Jewish spokesmen became involved in efforts to resolve the Middle East conflict. With this aim in April 1990 Mikhail Chlenov met with PLO executive committee member, Abu Mazen, while in July former members of the Soviet Public Anti-Zionist Committee announced the establishment of a Peace Today committee (ostensibly on the model of the Israeli Peace Now organization), with its stated goal of facilitating Jewish-Arab dialogue. The second congress of Vaad in January 1991 condemned contacts between the Soviet government and the PLO. During the August 1991 crisis, Vaad chairman Chlenov did not openly criticize the coup leaders but restricted himself to an expression of concern about the future of Jewish organizations, the possible curtailment of emigration, and the danger of antisemitism. In contrast to Vaad, the opposing wing of Jewish public life is composed of those who consider any Jewish activity in the country either unnecessary or actually harmful unless it is directed toward preparing Soviet Jewry for immigration to Israel. In August 1989 the Hebrew teacher Lev Gorodetskii announced the founding in Moscow of the Zionist Organization   in the Soviet Union, which soon opened branches in Leningrad, Riga, Vilnius, Kiev, and Kharkov. Many Zionist youths groups, such as Ha-Shomer ha-Ẓa'ir, Dror, Betar, Maccabi, and Rabim, also began functioning. A significant feature in Jewish life was the commemoration of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust on the territory of the Soviet Union. This involved groups of Jewish veterans of World War II and concentration camp survivors. In Riga, Vilnius, Leningrad, Minsk, and many other sites, on the anniversaries of mass executions of Jews there, and even in cities which the Nazis did not occupy, increasing numbers of Soviet Jews had been gathering for memorial meetings on Holocaust and Heroism Day (the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising). In September 1989 official permission was granted for the first time for such a meeting at babi yar , organized by the Kiev Jewish community. Among the participants were local Party and government officials, leaders of the Ukrainian national movement, and the Church. Finally, after many years, an inscription was placed on the monument indicating, in Russian and in Yiddish, that Jews were the main victims at Babi Yar. By late 1989, there were almost 200 Jewish associations, clubs, and culture centers in, among other places: Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Leningrad, Cheliabinsk, Tashkent, Donetsk, Baku, Kharkov, Lvov, Chernovtsy, Kiev, Kishinev, Odessa, Minsk, Bobruisk, and Krasnoyarsk. Kiev in late 1989 had 12 different Jewish organizations, including cultural, religious, and even musical groups. In Kishinev the Menora cooperative was established in April 1989; there hundreds of people have studied Hebrew and the fundamentals of Judaism. Tbilisi even granted official recognition to the Aviv association whose goal was to prepare Jews for aliyah. Riga Jews have (since July 1988) a culture association, a Yiddish school, and a society for Latvian-Israeli friendship while Vilnius has its own culture association and branches of Betar, B'nai B'rith, and Maccabi. The greatest number of Jewish culture organizations were concentrated in Moscow. These included: Iggud morim (the Association of Teachers of Hebrew, founded 1988), the Association for Friendship and Cultural Ties with Israel (abbreviated ODISKI, summer 1988), the Moscow Jewish Culture and Education Association (MEKPO, September 1987), the Jewish Culture Association, the Gesher youth association, and the Youth Center for Studying and Developing Jewish Culture (abbreviated MTS-IRK, 1988). Early 1988 saw the opening of the Solomon Mikhoels Jewish Culture Center and the Shalom Jewish Culture Center. Efforts were undertaken to encourage the teaching and study of Jewish studies in the Soviet Union and, after 1991, in its successor, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Seminars and conferences on Jewish history with the participation of foreign scholars were inaugurated in Moscow and elsewhere. Jewish religious life ceased to be persecuted. In February 1989, at the initiative of the Israeli rabbi and scholar Adin Steinsaltz, a yeshivah, under the official name of the Center for the Study of Judaism, was established with the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Other yeshivot and Torah-study groups sprang up in a number of cities. Among the teachers were a number of Lubavitch Ḥasidim from Israel, who had formerly been Soviet citizens. Owing to the lack of trained rabbis, except in Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg, some American rabbis began serving as the spiritual leaders of the main republic synagogues. The national-religious stream in Judaism was represented by Maḥanaim (Hebrew for "two camps"), which had centers in Moscow and Jerusalem. The Bnei Akiva Orthodox Jewish youth movement became active in several localities, and in April 1990, for the first time, a progressive (Reform) group, Ineni (Hebrew Hineni or "here I am") was registered in Moscow. Camp Ramah, of the Conservative movement, also began to operate. In 1990–1991 Jewish religious holidays were celebrated in public places, including the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin\! Starting in 1992, Russian television began broadcasting programs on basic tenets of Judaism. A number of synagogues confiscated under Stalin were returned to their communities. Nonetheless, it would still be premature to speak of a real religious revival. The majority of newly-observant Jews have been emigrating and the Jewish communities do not have the means to either refurbish or maintain their recently regained synagogues. In connection with the emigration of many nationally oriented Jews, by early 1990 there had been a decline of interest in Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R. A number of Jewish periodicals had ceased appearing and fewer people attended lectures on Jewish history. Interest not only waned in the recently established libraries of the culture centers and synagogues, but those books in demand were increasingly limited to Hebrew study guides and material on aliyah and absorption in Israel. The growth in the number of Jewish organizations was accompanied by a decrease in the membership of each of them. At the same time the Jewish elite intelligentsia remained uninvolved in Jewish life. Israeli and Western Jewish organizations initiated and supported local Jewish institutions and associations. Consequently, the period of amateurs passed – to be replaced by the growth of a significant group of professional Jewish activists directly or indirectly subsidized from abroad. In this environment of support from abroad organizations proliferated, sometimes duplicating existing ones and occasionally being even basically fictitious. In Moscow alone, in 1992 there were several hundred groups. Soviet Jewry, which lacked the experience of autonomous and self-supporting community life, was not able to support its own institutions on the basis of voluntary contributions. This factor lent a somewhat unstable character to the considerable activity that was indeed taking place. At the same time, some Jewish organizations in Russia and the republics, first of all Vaad, were attempting to chart an independent course while simultaneously trying to gain influence in the international Jewish bodies which provide   some of their financing. In May 1991 Vaad became a member of the World Jewish Congress and also had representatives at the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture based in New York. In June 1992 at the 32nd World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, a Vaad delegation and the Zionist Federation of Russia demanded to be represented in all key bodies of the World Zionist Organization, which did not agree. There was also a conflict between Vaad and the Jewish Agency since the latter's goal for Soviet Jewry is maximum aliyah; Vaad was mainly interested in Jewish revival in Russia and would also have liked Jews who emigrate to be viewed as part of a Russian-Jewish cultural community rather than have them seen only as part of their new host communities, e.g., Israel and American Jewry. EMIGRATION AND ALIYAH The number of emigrants fell from 51,300 in 1979 to 1,320 in 1983. Then until 1986 the annual number of exit visas granted hovered around 1,000. Already in the banner year 1979 it was obvious that approximately two thirds of the emigrants preferred the United States to Israel as their destination. America automatically granted them the status of refugees persecuted on ethnic or religious grounds. The greater part of those who went directly to the U.S. without trying Israel came from the more assimilated regions of the RSFSR and the Ukraine; a small proportion came from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union during World War II and from non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities. Between 1983 and 1986 the proportion of those who went to the U.S. rather than Israel fluctuated between 59 and 78 percent. This situation was viewed with alarm by those Jewish activists within the Soviet Union who had fought for emigration under the banner of "repatriation" to Israel. The refusenik circles in Moscow and Leningrad then succeeded in somewhat lowering these two cities' proportion of "dropouts," as they were called by Israelis and Israel-oriented activists, in contrast to other centers of assimilation where pressure to consider aliyah was less effective. In 1987 the number of Soviet Jews emigrating was nine times that of the previous year. In 1988 almost 17,000 Soviet Jews took advantage of the increased opportunity to emigrate directly to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and elsewhere rather than Israel. Processes that increased under perestroika, such as the lack of basic commodities, environmental dangers, and the increase of overt antisemitism, encouraged almost everyone to consider emigration. The fact that the gates of emigration were open, combined with the fear that they might close again at any time, moved thousands of Jews from all over the country to leave. The number who emigrated between 1988 and 1990 rose dramatically. The vast majority chose to make their new homes elsewhere than in Israel. In this situation Israel demanded that those Jews who were leaving the Soviet Union on Israeli invitations go only to Israel and that the American government cease granting the status of refugees to Jews who were leaving the U.S.S.R. under the status of repatriates to Israel. After long negotiations on this issue, in October 1989 the American government introduced a quota on immigrants from the U.S.S.R. and ceased automatically granting refugee status to Israeli invitation holders. One result was the closing of the Italian transit camp at Ladispoli, the way station to the U.S. of a large number of Jews from the U.S.S.R. Another was the fundamental redirection of Soviet Jewish emigration. A more objective picture of Israel in the Soviet media and enthusiastic reports about Israel from Soviet tourists who visited that country also led to a sharp increase in the number of Jews emigrating to Israel. In 1990 over 185,000 Soviet Jewish emigrants went to Israel, establishing a record annual rate for immigration to Israel from a single country. In late 1989 the rate of emigration had been limited by the capacity of Soviet OVIR offices, customs, and transportation facilities and by the rate of dispatch of visas from Israel. Bucharest and Budapest served as transit points. By the summer of 1990, the pressure somewhat declined as the process of sending Israeli visas was speeded up and additional routes to Israel were established via Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and other European countries. These emergency measures considerably increased the flow despite attempts by the Palestine Liberation Organization to sabotage the Hungarian and Polish airlines and the refusal of the Soviet Union to allow direct flights to Israel. However, this last obstacle was removed with the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.S.S.R. Direct flights were then inaugurated from Moscow, Leningrad, and some republic capitals to Israel. In 1991–1992 word of the difficulties of absorption into Israeli life and the growing percentage of non-Jews included in the Jewish emigration as parts of mixed families once again turned a not insignificant proportion of the emigration toward the U.S., Germany, and other countries. Among the immigrants to Israel, the median age increased annually while the number of children per family decreased. The percentage of non-Jews also increased. These features reflect demographic processes in the country of emigration. Serious problems in the absorption of these immigrants in Israel stem from two basic problems: the gap between their professional profiles and the needs of the Israel economy; the lack of Jewish traditions and knowledge among most of the immigrants. (Michael Beizer) -In the Russian Federation Russian Jewry faced a new reality after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. at the end of 1991 and the creation of the Russian Federation, where most of the Jews who remained in the former Soviet Union after the years of mass emigration would continue to live. From the outset, the policy of the Russian government became even more liberal. Direct flights were begun from Moscow and St. Petersburg (the former Leningrad) to Israel. The Russian government even agreed to allow the Jewish Agency to operate in the Soviet Union. In 1992 the vice president of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi, the chairman of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and former   president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, all visited Israel. The 1993–94 period in Russia was characterized by a protracted economic crisis, rampant inflation, decreasing living standards, rising crime rate and political instability. The growing confrontation between the presidency and the conservative legislature led in October 1993 to President Yeltsin's order to dissolve parliament. The armed rebellion by supporters of the parliament was suppressed by forces loyal to the president; about 150 people were killed in the clashes. In the wake of the Parliament insurrection, 15 conservative and radical-right press organs were temporarily suspended by Yeltsin's order. The parliamentary elections which were held in December 1993 unexpectedly brought an impressive victory to V. Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. In 1991, Zhirinovsky, an aggressive nationalist and chauvinist, who had not been conspicuous before, obtained several million votes and finished third in the presidential election in which Yeltsin triumphed. In 1993 his LDPR captured the second-largest number of seats in the Duma, the lower house. The other big faction in the Duma comprised the Communists and the pro-Communist Agrarian Party. The victory of the hardliners marked a turn to a more conservative approach in government policy, both domestic and foreign. In December 1994 Russian troops launched an offensive against rebel forces in the breakaway autonomous republic of Chechnya, in the northern Caucasus. RELATIONS BETWEEN RUSSIA AND ISRAEL After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., Russia succeeded the Soviet Union in many matters concerning the Middle East. The former embassy of the U.S.S.R. in Israel, with Alexandr Bovin as ambassador, became the embassy of the Russian Federation. Normal relations continued between the two countries during the 1992–93 period. Russian authorities did not hinder activities of Israeli organizations, nor of the Jewish Agency in Russia. Economic and scientific cooperation developed between Russia and Israel. Israeli Aircraft Industries and the Aerospace Design Office of Russia launched the joint project of the Galaxy plane. In December 1994, the first meeting of the Joint Russian-Israeli Commission on Scientific and Technical Cooperation took place in Moscow; a number of other joint projects were discussed, e.g., in such areas as telecommunication systems, medical technology, and environment protection. In April 1994, Israel Prime Minister Yiẓḥak Rabin visited Moscow officially, and in the following years relations between the two countries remained friendly, with Prime Minister Ehud Barak visiting Moscow in 2000 and President Vladimir Putin visiting Israel in 2005. With Russia embroiled in largely Muslim Chechnya, its standing in the Arab world declined and it found itself aligned with Israel in the war against Arab terrorism. At the same time, Russian missile sales to Syria and aid to Iran's nuclear program were sources of friction between the two countries. Not insignificant in the close relations between the two countries was the existence of a kind of Russian diaspora of a million Russian Jews in Israel. Israeli exports to the Russian Federation were $319 million in 2004 while imports stood at $688 million (two thirds of this was in diamonds). DEMOGRAPHY The mass emigration begun in 1989 continued throughout the 1990s, only tailing off in 2002. Estimates based on the last three census returns for the area of the Russian Federation (see Tolts, 2004) show a decline in the "core" (self-declared) Jewish population from 570,000 in 1989 to 409,000 in 1994, and 254,000 in 2002. The figure further dropped to around 243,000 in 2004 (out of a total 395,000 for the former Soviet Union as a whole). In 2002, about half lived in the provinces, a third in Moscow, and a sixth in St. Petersburg. The overwhelming majority of Jews emigrating from the Russian Federation, as well as from the former Soviet Union as a whole, arrived in Israel, though the proportion of actual Jews among Russian emigrants to Israel dropped from 82 percent in 1992 to 43 percent in 2002, largely reflecting mixed marriages. By 2004 about half the "core" Jewish population of the former Soviet Union was living in Israel, a quarter in the FSU, and a quarter in other countries, mostly the United States and Germany. THE REVIVAL OF JEWISH LIFE For the Jews who remained behind, in the Russian Federation as well as in the former Soviet Union as a whole, the post-Communist period was one of organizational growth and diversification of Jewish life. The conception of Jewish life broadened; in a legal form, it started in 1989–91 as a cluster of "Jewish Culture Associations" and "Societies for Jewish Culture" in various cities throughout the U.S.S.R.; their aim was limited to the study and preservation of Jewish culture and history. By 1993–94 the network of the primary Jewish organizations in Russia included such bodies as: religious communities, social relief organizations, educational institutes, unions of Jewish war veterans and of the survivors of the Holocaust, research groups, Zionist organizations, branches of the Maccabi organizations, etc. There were, for example, 60 Jewish organizations in St. Petersburg alone in 1994, including: three religious communities – mainstream Orthodox, Chabad and Reform; the Jewish Association of St. Petersburg (JASP, playing the role of an umbrella organization); the Holocaust Research Group, affiliated to the JASP; the Ḥesed Avraham Welfare Center for the elderly; the Eva charity fund; the Children's Fund; local branches of Bnei Akiva, Maccabi and the International Association of Jewish businessmen; the Union of Jewish War Veterans; five day schools, four Sunday schools, four kindergartens and a Jewish university. The question of coordinating their activities was urgent. There continued to be a cleavage between the organizations aiming to revive diversified Jewish community life in Russia, and the aliyah-oriented organizations, which regarded reviving the non-Zionist community as useless and even harmful. The first type of organization was supported by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and, organizationally,   by the World Jewish Congress (WJC); the latter by the World Zionist Organization (WZO). The majority of the Jewish organizations set up in Russia in the 1990s have been nonreligious. The head of the Moscow Jewish Religious Community, Vladimir Fedorovsky, complained in an interview to Mezhdunarodnaia evreiskaia gazeta in 1993 that the synagogue had ceased to be the center of Jewish life; Jews of Moscow preferred organizations oriented toward Israel and aliyah. The leading body of Russian Jewry was the Council of Jewish Cultural Organizations (Vaad), which was established in April 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to succeed the Vaad of the U.S.S.R. Mikhail Chlenov, the former head of the all-Union Vaad, became its chairman, with Roman Spektor as deputy. The Vaad was recognized by the World Jewish Congress; in 1993 its delegation participated in the meeting of the Congress in Washington, together with the representatives of the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and Uzbekistan; it was the first case in which Russian Jewry and the Jewries of other former Soviet republics were represented at such an assembly. The Eurasian section of the WJC, embracing the Jewish organizations of the CIS, was formed, and Chlenov became its chairman. Another umbrella organization was set up in February 1993 at the first Congress of Jewish Communities and Organizations in Russia whose purpose was to unite communities of different directions, both Orthodox and liberal. The newly formed body was named the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations in Russia (KEROOR; in 1994 its name was shortened to the Congress of Jewish Communities in Russia) and Vladimir Fedorovsky became its president. An internal split in the Vaad emerged in 1993 and became open in 1994. The conflict flared up over the issue of the structure of the Vaad – whether it should be a federation of Jewish organizations throughout Russia, or of regional federations of Jewish organizations which should be set up, whose supreme coordinating organ would be the Vaad. The roots of the conflict were in fact much deeper; it marked a discontent between the old leadership which depended financially and organizationally on the support of Israel and Western Jewish organizations, and new leaders, businessmen, who partially subsidized Jewish activities in Russia and wanted to influence the Vaad. Besides, unlike the old leaders, who had been political dissidents in the Soviet period and based the Vaad on the pre-1990s underground Jewish network, some of these new leaders had had some administrative experience, and some had even been nominees of the Soviet authorities of 1989–91, and hence had better relations with the authorities in 1993–94. At the beginning of 1993, there were 32 Jewish communities in Russia. Restitution of synagogues confiscated by the authorities in the Soviet period continued. The network of Jewish education in Russia also grew; seminars and courses for teachers were conducted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere. By the early 21st century, Russia had 17 Jewish day schools, 11 preschools, and 81 supplementary schools with about 7,000 students, as well as four Jewish universities (see below). Chabad had stepped up its presence and made a significant contribution to rebuilding Jewish religious life. In 1998 Russia became part of the newly established Federation of Jewish Communities uniting 15 countries of the former Soviet Union and aiming to revitalize Jewish life, culture, and religion. Berel Lazar of Chabad was chief rabbi of Russia and chairman of the Rabbinical Alliance, founded in 1992 to spearhead religious life in the former Soviet Union. Chabad also founded the Association of Jewish Public Organizations in 2002 as a rival to the Conference of Leaders of Jewish Organizations, affiliated with the Russian Jewish Congress. THE JEWISH PRESS At the beginning of the 1980s, the total legal Jewish press in the U.S.S.R. amounted to two publications in Yiddish: the Moscow Jewish monthly journal Sovetish Heymland and the Birobidzhan newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern, plus an annual in the Judeo-Tat language, Vata Sovetimu. Issued in languages not understood by the majority of Soviet Jews and consisting largely of propaganda, the existence of these publications was intended to demonstrate that "Jewish culture" was permitted in the Soviet Union. Attempts in refusenik circles to establish illegal publications were strictly repressed and led to the gradual curtailment of all Jewish samizdat publishing. Evrei v SSSR ("Jews in the U.S.S.R.," Moscow) ceased publication in 1979, Nash ivrit ("Our Hebrew," Moscow) in 1980, Din umetsiiut ("Justice and Reality," Riga) in 1980, Evrei sovremennon mire ("Jews in the Contemporary World," Moscow) in 1981. The Riga journal Chaim, which appeared irregularly starting in 1979, could not fill the vacuum due to its minuscule print run and its distance from the main Jewish centers. An exception was Leningradskii evreiskii almanakh ("Leningrad Jewish Almanac," abbreviated LEA) which first came out in late 1982, at the height of the repressions, and succeeded in appearing regularly from 1984 to 1989. This publication focused on cultural and historical articles written by Leningrad refuseniks. Due to the size of its print run (up to 200, which was large for a samizdat publication) and its effective system of distribution, LEA succeeded in reaching distant corners of the country and in demonstrating the need for an independent Jewish press. Change came with the beginning of the general liberalization in the country. In 1987–1988 several Moscow samizdat journals appeared. There were Evreiskii istoricheskii almankah ("Jewish Historical Almanac") and Shalom with their cultural orientation, and several publications dealing with such topics as aliyah and absorption in Israel: Informatsionnyi biulleten po problemam repatriatsii i evreiskoi kultury ("Information Bulletin of Problems of Repatriation and Jewish Culture"), Paneninu le-Israel ("Looking towards Israel"), and Problemy otkaza v vyezde iz strany ("Problems of Refusal Regarding Exit from the Country"). There was also a revolution in terms of the technology of publication. While the first illegal publications were typed in multiple copies (occasionally copies were made via photography),   the samizdat publications of the transitional period were produced on personal computers from abroad and photocopied so that print runs were dramatically increased. Several publications were printed in Israel and sent back to the Soviet Union for distribution. In December 1988 the first legally permitted independent Jewish newspaper, Khash-akhar, was issued in Tallinn by the local Jewish culture association. This publication was typeset and appeared not only in Estonian, but also in Russian, which made it accessible to almost all of Soviet Jewry. Its print run was over 1,000 and it soon gained a reputation throughout the country. In Moscow in April 1989 the authorities launched the semiofficial Vestnkik evreiskoi sovetskoi kultury ("Herald of Soviet Jewish Culture," abbreviated VESK) in an attempt to compete with the independent Jewish press. After a year which saw a change of editor and of name – to Evreiskaia gazeta ("Jewish Newspaper") – this publication gained more of an independent status. In Riga in March 1990, there appeared Vestnik evreiskoi kultury ("Herald of Jewish Culture," VEK). In 1990 Jewish newspapers in Russian with real Jewish content began to appear in Kiev (Vozrozhdenie, "Revival"), Leningrad (Narodmoi, "My People"), Kishinev (Nash golos, "Our Voice"), Tashkent (Mizrakh, "Orient"), Moscow (Menora), Vilnius (Litovskii Ierusalim, "Jerusalem of Lithuania"), and elsewhere. These newspapers all gained legal status while those which were issued without permission ceased being persecuted. Thus the distinction between samizdat and permitted publications was erased. Sovetish Heymland softened its hard-line policy and began to publish more cultural and historical material. In 1990–1991 the former editor of Birobidzhaner Shtern, Leonid Shkolnik, began the independent newspaper Vzgliad ("View"), which included many items of Jewish interest. The geographical distribution and sharply increased print runs, the increased scope of topics treated, and the widely understood Russian language of the majority of publications have made the new Jewish press a significant factor in the formation of Jewish national consciousness and a source of elementary Jewish knowledge for many thousands of people. The press has also become a source of information about emigration and aliyah, and both a mirror and monitor of Jewish life in the country. The very fact of the legalization of the Jewish press has made a deep impression on the average Jews who saw that it was no longer necessary to fear public expression of Jewish life. However, there is also a negative side to the picture. A number of Jewish periodicals ceased publication after their first issues. Few managed to appear more frequently than once a month and the promised periodicity was often not maintained. The professional level of the Jewish press was frequently low. Articles on Jewish culture and history were often reprints or translations from abroad. Factual errors reflecting a lack of basic knowledge of Jewish traditions, Jewish history, and Hebrew among both authors and editors appeared in many articles. These problems stemmed from the lack of publishing experience of those involved, the lack of qualified authors with some Jewish expertise, the difficulties of publication in the Soviet Union, and the considerable turnover of staff as active members of Jewish culture associations often emigrated. In 1989 the Jewish press consisted of at least 30 publications; more than half of these appeared in Russia, the majority of them in Moscow. Over the following three years, due to the growing role of the Jewish press in the Ukraine, the undisputed dominance of Russia declined while Moscow continued to dominate the scene in Russia. Late 1991 saw the demise of Sovetish Heymland. In the same year, at least 50 Jewish newspapers and journals appeared, with at least one in practically every republic and some in cities in the hinterland. The Jewish press of the CIS represents a whole range of religious and political orientations, with Israeli and Western organizations sometimes supporting publications which favor their policies. This latter factor suggests some doubts not only about the spontaneity of the Jewish publication boom as well as its actual scope but also about its future. By 1990–91 there were 47 periodicals published in Russia (among them, 26 in Moscow). In 1992–93 their number shrank to 28 (17 in Moscow). This decline may be attributed to the large-scale emigration of Russian Jews, and to growing economic hardships accompanied by a sharp rise in publishing costs. Only those publications had a chance to survive which received financial support from abroad – either from Israel, or from Diaspora, mainly North American, Jewish organizations. The most influential and widely circulating Jewish newspaper in Russia was Mezhdunarodnaia evreiskaia gazeta ("The International Jewish Newspaper"), the successor of VESK (see above), which made efforts to mirror not only Russian-Jewish life, but also Jewish life in the entire area of the former Soviet Union. The paper was published in Moscow, twice a month, by Tankred Golenpolskii and Eliezer Feldman. The most popular Jewish newspaper in St. Petersburg continued to be Narod moi – Ami, published by the Jewish Association of St. Petersburg, also twice a month. In the northern Caucasus region, the most conspicuous newspaper was Vatan-Rodina ("The Homeland"), published twice a week by Mikhail Gavrielov in Derbent, Daghestan, in Judeo-Tat (the language of the Mountain Jews) and Russian. Among other relatively widely circulating newspapers were: Tarbut ("Culture," in Samara, formerly Kuibyshev), Stern-Zvezda ("The Star," in Ekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk), and from July 1993 on, Gazeta evreev Severnovo Kavkaza ("The Newspaper of the Jews in the North Caucasus," Nalchik, Karbardino-Balkaria). The Birobidzhaner Shtern ("The Birobidzhan Star") continued to be published in Yiddish and Russian in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The magazine Sovetish Heymland in 1993 changed its title to Di Yiddishe Gass ("The Jewish Street") and continued to appear in Russian and Yiddish. Papers were published by Jewish organizations abroad e.g., Rodnik ("The   Spring," or "Source," by the World Union of Progressive Judaism), Lekhaim ("To Life," by the international Jewish organization Chabad-Lubavitch), and several papers, by the Jewish Agency. Jewish newspapers were also issued in Briansk, Novosibirsk, and Perm. Two academic Jewish journals were published: Vestnik Evreiskovo Universiteta v Moskve ("Herald of the Moscow Jewish University"), from 1992 on, and Vreiskaia Shkola ("Jewish School"), issued by the St. Petersburg University, both supported by the JDC. ACADEMIC LIFE One of the most remarkable developments in Russia (as well as in some other countries of the CIS) in the field of Jewish life was the emerging and broadening of Jewish higher education and Jewish studies. The Moscow Jewish University has been functioning since 1991; in 1993 it gained official status, i.e., the right to give officially recognized university degrees to its graduates. In 1990, the St. Petersburg Jewish University was established; in 1994 it gained the right to give degrees in philology. Departments of Jewish Studies were opened in some old established universities: courses in Judaic studies were established at Moscow State University in 1993; the School for the Comparative Study of Religions, including Judaism, was set up in the Russian State Humanitarian University in Moscow. ANTISEMITISM AND THE JEWISH QUESTION During the years of perestroika, covert but effective state and bureaucratic antisemitism gradually declined while there was a rise in grass-roots anti-Jewish trends. The protracted economic crisis and weakening of the central authority produced populist spokesmen who found it easier to cast blame for all the failures of the country, past and present, on various ethnic groups, especially the Jews, than to offer practical solutions for the dire straits of the country. One factor feeding antisemitism was envy stemming from the reality that Jews could emigrate while for Russians this way out was basically barred. Further oil on the flame was the fact that Jews could now visit relatives abroad and receive material aid from them. With glasnost Soviet Jewry began encountering overt antisemitism in the press and on television, in the pamphlets of political parties, in conversations at work places, on the street and on public transport. Antisemitic parties and organizations sprang up like mushrooms. These included: Pamiat (Memory), Rossy (the (Original) Russians), Patriot, Rodina (Homeland), Otechestvo (Fatherland), Nationalnodemokraticheskaia partiia (National Democratic Party), Russkii nationalno-patrioticheskii tsentr (the Russian National Patriotic Center), Soius russikh ofitserov (the Union of Russian Officers), and Republikanskaia narodnaia partiia Rossii (the Republic People's Party of Russia). The year 1989 saw the establishment of the neo-Communist movement Obediennyi front trudiashchikhsia R.S.F.S.R. (the United Front of the Workers of the R.S.F.S.R.) and in 1991 its spinoff, Rossiiskaia kommunisticheskaia rabochaia partiia (the Russian Communist Workers' Party), which espoused antisemitism as an organic part of their ideology. About this time Vladimir Zhirinovskii became leader of the rightist populist group which called itself Liberalno-demokraticheskaia partiia Rossii (the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia). The Pamiat Association, originally a conservative movement concerned about the preservation of Russia's past and its environment, became more nationalistic in 1984 when its leadership was taken over by photographer Dmitrii Vasilev. The movement gained notoriety when it blamed Jews for the destruction of Russian churches, and for the serious problem of alcoholism in the country. Originally the authorities did not object to Pamiat's activities and even supported them. In May 1987 Boris Yeltsin, then first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the CPSU, received representatives of Pamiat after a demonstration it staged on Manezh Square. On May 31, 1988, Vasilev announced the transformation of the association into Nationalno-patrioticheskii front "Pamiat" (Pamiat: the National Patriotic Front), i.e., a political organization in opposition to the Communist Party. Between 1989 and the early 1990s, Pamiat split into several groups, the most extreme of which, Pravoslavnyi nationalnopatrioticheskii front "Pamiat" (Pamiat Orthodox National Patriotic Front), headed by A. Kulakov, espoused restoration of the monarchy while simultaneously expounding the necessity of continuing Stalin's antisemitic policy. Antisemitism has not been confined to words. Acts of vandalism have been directed against Jewish targets. In April 1987 the Leningrad Jewish cemetery was desecrated and in the following two years approximately 30 such incidents were recorded in the U.S.S.R. In Moscow attacks were carried out against a Jewish cafe and the editorial offices of Sovetish Heymland and arson was committed at the synagogue by the cemetery in Malakhovka. In 1992 a swastika was painted on the Moscow Lubavitch Ḥasidic synagogue and a firebomb was thrown into the building. Leningrad, the home of a number of antisemitic organizations, became the center of antisemitism in 1988–1990. It was a teacher at the Leningrad Technological Institute, Nina Andreeva who, evidently on orders from the central Committee of the CPSU, on March 13, 1988, published a letter, "I Can Not Yield My Principles," calling for the rehabilitation of Stalin and the restoration of the kind of law and order that existed before perestroika. In her letter Andreeva attacked the Jews as "cosmopolitans" and a "counterrevolutionary people," who were pushing the Russian people toward a rejection of socialism. In the summer of 1988 Leningrad's Ruminatsev Park was the daily site of Pamiat rallies. The city also regularly heard calls to expel Jews from Russian scientific, cultural, and educational institutions. In nationalist journals such as Molodaia gvardiia ("Young Guard") and Nash sovremennik ("Our Contemporary"), a group of Moscow writers and journalists, the neo-Slavophiles Valentin Rasputin, Vasillii Belov, Victor Astafev, and Vadim Kozhinov, utilized the traditionally high status of the writer in Russian society to protest ostensibly harmful Jewish influence on Russian culture. For example, they condemned the 1989   publication in the journal Oktober of the novella Vse techet ("All Is Flowing") by the late writer of Jewish origin vasili grossman , in which the Russian people is allegedly described as having a slave mentality. The January 1990 issue of Molodaia gvardiia contained praise of a painting, The Warning by Igor Borodin, which the journal claims shows an image of the biblical queen Esther who "after gaining power of the king in his bedroom, and also by clever machinations…urged (King) Artarxerxes to commit the bloody slaughter of 75,000 totally innocent people when there was no threat at all to the Jewish people." The painting (reproduced in the journal) shows Esther on her knees before the czar while under the throne are visible bloodied heads of famous figures of Russian and world culture and history. In 1992 Evreiskaia gazaeta reported the existence of 47 antisemitic newspapers and 9 such journals in Russia alone. Some scientists also denigrated the Jews. Writing appeared denying Jewish contributions to science. A particular target was Albert Einstein, whose discoveries were consistently attributed to others, as in the 1988 monograph of Prof. A. Logunov about Henri Poincaré. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich published a book Rusofobia ("Russophobia"), in which a "small people" (for which read "the Jews") was blamed for all the troubles of a "great people," the Russians. In 1992 antisemitism among scientists was revealed in elections to the Russian Academy of Sciences. None of the Jews nominated to become members of the academy was elected, in contrast to the election of a number of Jews during the pre-Gorbachev "period of stagnation." A significant indication of antisemitic attitudes between 1988 and 1990 was the repeated circulation of rumors about impending pogroms. The first such large-scale pogrom was predicted for June 1988 to coincide with the thousandth anniversary of the baptism of Russia. There were similar rumors in Dnepropetrovsk and other cities in the Ukraine before Easter 1989 and in Leningrad on the eve of elections to local and republic soviets on February 25, 1990. There were rumors of another pogrom set for May 5, 1990, the day of St. George, the patron saint for many nationalists. In that same month a Muslim mob burned and looted dozens of Armenian and Jewish homes in the Uzbek city of Andizhan. Although no exclusively Jewish pogrom took place, the number of reported attacks on individual Jews grew. Soviet Jews lacked confidence in the ability of the authorities to defend them in the face of failures to prevent or halt interethnic conflict in the republics or to halt the rise in crime in Russia itself. At the same time that the Jewish population of the country was decreasing due to emigration, the Jewish question increasingly became an issue in the internal Soviet power struggle. In pre-election campaigns, the democratic press often indicated its sympathy for the Jews and stressed the antisemitism of their political opponents while Russian nationalists often branded as "Jews" anyone who advocated radical reform, the introduction of a market economy, or civil rights. These "Jews" in fact included such non-Jews as Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev; radical opposition leader in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., Yurii Afanasev; editor of the perestroika-oriented journal Ogonek, Vitalii Korotych; and even Boris Yeltsin. Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and other nationalists saw the Jews in their republics as possible allies in their fight for self-determination against the central authorities and their local Jewish culture movements as forces opposing Russification. On May 28, 1989, a conference of the national movements of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia adopted a resolution condemning Soviet antisemitism in the past and present and calling for opposition to it. A similar resolution was adopted at its founding meeting in September 1989 by Rukh, the democratic national movement in the Ukraine. The growing antisemitism disturbed the liberal part of the Russian intelligentsia, which saw in it a threat to the overall process of democratization in the country. The "pogromlike" atmosphere was first protested in an open letter by a group of Moscow intellectuals led by the philologist Sergei Lyosov and the physicist Sergei Tishchenko. Almost simultaneously (on June 7) the Leningrad historian Natalia Iukhneva spoke out in public about increasing antisemitism in Russian society. She associated this growth with the unequal position of Jews and Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R. and rejected as false and unjust the attempt to condemn Zionism along with antisemitism. Gradually articles against antisemitism began to be featured in many perestroika-oriented journals and newspapers. Some publications even took a positive rather than defensive approach to Jewish topics. For example, the Moscow journal Znamia in 1990–1991 published a whole series of articles on Jewish topics, including a translation of the story "Unto Death" by the Israeli writer Amos Oz. Public opinion also had the opportunity to be influenced by the first objective film on Israel shot in situ by Evgenii Kiselev and shown on Soviet television between August and October 1989. Due to the cessation of government funding for "anti-Zionist" works, a number of their authors, such as Dadiani, Vladimir Nosenko, Victor Magidson, and Adolf Eidelman, switched camps and became opponents of antisemitism, perhaps with the hope of support from Israeli and Western Jewish institutions. The victory of democratic forces in the elections of local soviets in March 1990 led to the mobilization of law enforcement agencies against antisemitic agitation. For the first time in decades, the state prosecutor's office prosecuted antisemitic actions under article 174 of the Criminal Court of the RFSFR, which deals with the incitement of ethnic strife. The sentencing to a jail term of Pamiat leader Smirnov-Ostashvili (who committed suicide in prison) was viewed as a victory for democracy in the country. Public opinion was favorably influenced toward the Jews in August 1991 when one of the three victims killed defending democracy against the attempted coup turned out to be the young Jew Ilya Krichevskii. The fall 1991 repeal (supported by the Soviet Union) of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism also was a factor in deflating antisemitic propaganda.   In November 1992, almost a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the committee on human rights of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation inaugurated hearings on the problem of antisemitism in Russia. The committee concluded that there was a decline in antisemitic attitudes in Russian society in 1991–1992 and that antisemitic activity was basically restricted to extremist groups and parties. At the same time, legislative measures were discussed which, without infringing upon freedom of speech and the press, would stipulate punishment for arousing ethnic hatred. Antisemitism was increasingly being treated in Russia as not only a Jewish problem. Though official, state antisemitism had virtually disappeared in post-Soviet Russia, it was adopted by numerous radical right parties and organizations, the greatest and most influential of which had now become the LDPR. Its leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who allegedly had a Jewish father and in 1989, for a short time, was a legal advisor of the Jewish Cultural Association Shalom (allegations he denied in the 1990s), claimed he was not an antisemite. Nevertheless, after the December election of 1993 he made a number of harshly antisemitic statements, some of them in a characteristically anti-Zionist guise. On March 4, 1994, he told Die Zeit: "Why are the Zionists so bad? … Because they weaken Russia. The American Jews make America strong but the Russian Jews make Russia weak. They do this so that they can leave for Israel … Our greatest problems are the Americans and the Zionists." In November, during a visit to the United States, Zhirinovsky told the UN Correspondents' Association that "the majority of journalists who welcomed the (collapse of the Soviet Union) joyously are of Jewish nationality" and that new businesses in Russia were "headed by Jews and a lot of the population understand that most of the money in these banks and structures is dirty money." On October 21 he said in a speech to the parliament: "I tell the whole world: It is you from Tel Aviv and Washington who are doing everything bad that is happening to us." Besides this big party, there are many small antisemitic parties and movements filling a spectrum between Russian-Orthodox conservative to neopagan, and from National Communist groups to Nazis. According to various estimates, there were c. 80–100 such organizations at the end of 1993. Some of them, e.g., the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity led by Aleksandr Barkashov (its members wear black uniforms with the swastika emblem), sought contacts and cooperation with similar neo-Nazi groups in Germany and other western countries. The specter of a "red-brown" alliance, i.e., between hardline communists and neo-Nazis, with viciously antisemitic slogans and aims, began to appear. The most conspicuous antisemitic parties and organizations, apart from the LDPR and Barkashov's RNU, continued to be Pamiat, led by Dmitrii Vasiliev (see above), the imperialist National Salvation Front, the Russian National Council, led by the former KGB general Alexandr Sterligov, the St. Petersburg-based National Republican Party of Russia, led by Nikolai Lysenko, the neo-Communist Working Russia, led by Viktor Anpilov, and the quasi-Communist National Bolshevik Union, led by the writer Eduard Limonov. The radical right and conservative press thrived. Some of the former Soviet official newspapers, such as Pravda, Sovetskaia Rossiia and Literaturnaia Rossiia, turned into conservative nationalist papers; the latter two devote considerable place to antisemitic articles, including the so-called "Zionist conspiracy against Russia." However, in May 1993, Pravda also published an article entitled "The satanic tribe – who is hiding behind the murder of novices?" which claimed that a Russian Orthodox priest and two novices who were killed during the Easter holiday had been the victims of a ritual murder. The article was denounced by the pro-Yeltsin newspaper Izvestiia and condemned by both the Russian and the U.S. governments; Pravda published an apology blaming the author of the article for inaccuracies. In addition to these old established, relatively mass-circulation newspapers, numerous fringe newspapers, small with small circulations, but some with considerable ones, appeared. They are more openly antisemitic. Among the most prominent, Den/Zavtra may be mentioned. The paper was founded in 1992 under the title Den and edited by the novelist Aleksandr Prokhanov, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front; in 1993, after it was banned by Yeltsin, in the wake of the Parliament insurrection, it changed its name to Zavtra. The second conspicuous antisemitic paper was Al-Quds, established in 1992 by a Palestinian businessman and self-proclaimed head of the "Palestinian Government in Exile," Shaaban Khafez Shaaban. Al-Quds specialized in publishing materials alleging a Zionist conspiracy against Russia and the Palestinian people. In late 1994 the paper was closed down by the authorities. Following the Parliament insurrection in 1993, there were a number of anti-Yeltsin demonstrations and rallies, many of them with overtly antisemitic slogans. On November 7, 1994, in Moscow, on the 77th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution, a 15,000-strong rally of Communists was held in Lubyanka Square; some of the anti-government banners contained slogans attacking Jews, Zionists and the "Kike-Masonic conspiracy." On October 3, on the anniversary of the events of 1993, there was also a demonstration in St. Petersburg, at which anti-Jewish banners were displayed. Russian antisemites did not limit themselves to rallies and demonstrations. There were numerous antisemitic incidents; e.g., in May 1993 Jewish cemeteries in St. Petersburg and Nizhni Novgorod were desecrated; in June, windows were broken and swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on the Moscow Choral Synagogue; in July the attack on the synagogue was repeated. In December the synagogue in Marina Roshcha district in Moscow was badly damaged in a fire. In 1994, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated in St. Petersburg (where 160 gravestones were desecrated), in Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Smolensk, Kazan, Klintsy, Briansk region, and Nizhni Novgorod. Several cases of racially motivated attacks   on Jews were registered. On February 16, 1994, a firebomb was thrown into the office of the Committee for Repatriation to Israel in Novosibirsk; the office and adjoining library were badly damaged in the ensuing fire. In February, following the massacre of Muslims by a Jewish settler in a Hebron mosque, threats were made against the Jewish community and against the Derbent synagogue, in Daghestan. Also, there was street violence in Makhachkala, and on the local television the sheikh of Daghestan called for a jihad against the Jews. Numerous books of antisemitic content were published and an opinion survey of 1993 carried out by Robert Brym with the assistance of the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VTSIOM), and covering also Ukraine and Belarus, revealed antisemitic perceptions, strong by North American standards. In Moscow, negative attitudes toward Jews were more widespread among older people, low-income earners and non-Russians. Eighteen percent of Muscovites believed that there existed a global "Zionist conspiracy" against Russia, and another 20 percent were undecided. An added ingredient in the continued antisemitism that remained part of Russian life was the emergence of the so-called oligarchs, who divided up Russia's wealth and gained control of its media after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Jews among them, most prominently mikhail khodorkovsky , roman abramovitch , vladimir gusinsky , boris berezovsky , and leonid nevzlin , are perceived as having been targeted by the Russian authorities for prosecution for various economic crimes against the background of their Jewish origins. (Michael Beizer / Daniel Romanowski (2nd ed.) For information on the countries of the Former Soviet Union, see entries for individual countries. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G.D. Hundert and G.C. Bacon, The Jews in Poland and Russia: Bibliographical Essays (1984). GENERAL WORKS: Institute of Jewish Affairs, London, Soviet Jewry (1971), an extensive bibliography; L. Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, 2 vols. (1951); S.W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (1964). 1772–1917: J.S. Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia (1915); Dubnow, Hist Russ; J. Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew (1929); I. Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772–1844 (1943); J. Frumkin et al. (eds.), Russian Jewry 1860–1917 (1966); V. Nikitin, Yevrei zemledeltsy (1887); M.L. Usov, Yevrei v armii (1911); L. Zinberg, Yevreyskaya periodicheskaya pechat v Rossii (1915); Yu. Gessen, Istoriya yevreyskogo naroda v Rossii, 2 vols. (1925–26); S.Y. Borovoy, Yevreyskaya zemledelcheskaya kolonizatsiya v staroy Rossi (1928); N. Buchbinder, Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Arbeter Bavegung in Rusland (1931); A. Levin, Kantonistn… 1827–1856 (1934); S. Ginzburg, Historishe Verk, 3 vols. (1937–38); B. Dinur, Bi-Ymei Milḥamah u-Mahpekhah (1960). 1917–1970: International Military Tribunal, Trials of the Major War Criminals, 4 (1950), 3–596; S.M. Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union (1951); idem, Yevrei v Sovietskom Soyuze s nachala vtoroy mirovoy voyny (1966); L. Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917 (1978); N. Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival, 2 vols. (1988); J. Tenenbaum, Race and Reich (1956), 347–70; B. West (ed.), Struggle of a Generation: The Jews under Soviet Rule (1959); idem, Hem Hayu Rabbim (1968); L. Lénéman, La Tragédie des Juifs en U.R.S.S. (1959); J.B. Shechtman, Star in Eclipse: Russian Jewry Revisited (1961); B.Z. Goldberg, The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union (1961); E. Schulman, A History of Jewish Education in the Soviet Union (1971); E. Wiesel, The Jews of Silence (1966); Gli ebrei nel' U.R.S.S. (1966); Ben-Ami (A. Eliav), Between Hammer and Sickle (19672); S. Rabinovich, Jews in the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1967); L. Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (1970); A. Dagan, Moscow and Jerusalem (1971); Jews in Eastern Europe (1958– ); S. Agursky, Di Yidishe Komisariatn un di Yidishe Komunistishe Sektsies (1928); N. Gergel, Di Lage fun Yidn in Rusland (1929); A. Rafaeli (Zenziper), Eser Shenot Redifot (1930); S. Dimanstein (ed.), Yidn in FSSR. (1935); L. Zinger, Dos Banayte Folk (1941); J. Lestschinsky, Dos Sovetishe Idntum (1941; Ha-Yehudim be-Rusyah ha-Sovyetit, 1943); T. Belsk, Yehudei Ya'ar (1946); M. Kahanovitch, Milḥemet ha-Partizanim ha-Yehudim be-Mizraḥ Eiropah (1954); Y.A. Gilboa, Al Ḥorvot ha-Tarbut ha-Yehudit bi-Verit ha-Mo'aẓot (1959); idem, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry (1971); Ch. Shmeruk (ed.), Pirsumim Yehu diyyim bi-Verit ha-Mo'aẓot (1961); idem (ed.), A Shpigl oyf a Shteyn (1964); A. Pomeranz, Di Sovetishe Harugey Malkhes (1962); J. Levavi Ha-Hityashevut ha-Yehudit be-Birobidzhan (1965); A.A. Gershuni, Ha-Yahadut be-Rusyah ha-Sovyetit (1965); J. Litvak, in: Gesher, 12, nos. 2–3 (1966), 186–217; M. Guri et al. (eds.), Ḥayyalim Yehudim be-Ẓivot Eiropah (1967), 135–57; S. Nishmit, in: Dappim le-Ḥeker ha-Sho'ah ve-ha-Mered, Series B, Collection A (1969), 152–77; S. Redlich, in: Beḥinot, 1 (1970), 70–79; He-Avar (1952– ). ARCHIVAL MATERIAL: Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem: Unit 0–53/Ludwigsburg/, files nos. 1–10, 13–14, 15–17, 22–33, 36, 44–45, 57, 83, 86, 88–91, 93. Unit 0–53/F (JM-2996)/Ludwigsburg/; "Čhornaya Kniga." PUBLICATIONS: The Black Book, the Nazi Crimes against the Jewish People (1946); I. Ehrenburg, V. Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russia (2002); R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961); G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (19682); S. Schwartz, Yevrei v Sovetskom Soyuze s. nachala vtoroy mirovoy voyny (1966); Prestupleniya nemetskofashistskikh okupantov v Belorussii 1941–1944 (Minsk, 1965); Rozprawa sadowa w sprawie o bestialstwa popelnione przez niemieckich najeźdźiców faszystowskich i ich slugusów na terytorium miasta Krasnodaru i kraju krasnodarskiego w okresie przejściowej ich okupacji/July 14–17, 1943/ (Moscow, 1943). 1970– : Y. Ro'i, in: EJYB 83–85:405–10; Y. Litvak, in: EJYB 86–87:363–70; R. Vago, in: EJYB 88–89:405–5; M. Beizer, in; EJYB 90–91:388–95; idem, in: The Shorter Encyclopaedia Judaica in Russian, Suppl. 1, (1992), 31–41; idem, in: Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (hereafter Jews and Jewish Topics), 2:12 (1990), 69–77; idem, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 3:19 (1992) 62–77; T. Friedgut, in: Soviet Jewry in the 1980s (1989), 3–25; M. Altshuler, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 2:9 (1989), 5–29; idem, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 3:16 (1991), 224–40; Z. Gitelman, in: Soviet Jewish Affairs, 19:2 (1989), 3–4; Y. Florsheim, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 2:15 (1991), 5–14; idem, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 3:19 (1992), 5–15; M. Tolts, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 2:18 (1991), 13–26; idem, in: East European Jewish Affairs, 22:2 (1992), 3–19; A. Greenbaum, in: EJYB 90–91:179–83; I. Dymerskaya-Tsigelman, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 3:10 (1989), 49–61; B. Pinkus, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 2:15 (1991), 15–30; M. Gilbert, The Jews of Hope (1984); idem, Ukrainian Diary, September–October, 1991, manuscript; D. Prital (ed.), Yehudei Berit ha-Mo'atsot ("The Jews of the Soviet Union"), vols. 8–15 (1985–1992); "The Seeond Congress of Vaad," in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 3:16 (1991), 224–40; Z. Gitelman, in: Soviet Jewish Affairs, 19:2 (1989), 3–4; Y. Florsheim, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 2:15 (1991), 5–14; idem, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 3:19 (1992), 5–15; M. Tolts, in: Jews and Jewish Topics, 1:14 (1991), 31–59. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: U. Schmelz and S. DellaPergola, in: AJYB, 1995, 478; Supplement to the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, 2, 1995, Jerusalem; Y. Florsheim, in: Jews in Eastern Europe, 1 (26) 1995, 25–33; M. Beizer and I. Klimenko, in: Jews in Eastern Europe, 1:24 (1995), 25–33; Antisemitism World Report   1994, London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 143–153; Antisemitism World Report 1995, London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 196–206; D. Prital (ed.), Yehudei Berit ha-Moaẓot be-ma'avar, 16:1 and 17:2; Mezhdunarodnaia Evreiskaia Gazeta (MEG), 1993–1994; M. Tolts, "The Post-Soviet Jewish Population in Russia and the World," in: Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1, 52 (2004), 37–63. WEBSITE: www.fjc.ru .