GoIda's last cause

William Wolff

In the foyer of the Salle Albert I they were queuing up last week to send hundreds of 'wish they were here' postcards to the Soviet leader Mr Leonid Brezhnev. At the same time the post offices in London, Paris and New York were delivering hundreds of letters from 'them' saying they had no intention of coming

They were the Soviet Jews. And the simplistic method of propaganda was one of the most striking and least important factors which the two sides in this historic battle over their future have in common. Far more significant is the fact that on both sides action and reaction spring from a profoundly similar motivation. If you prick a Jew these days, he will not merely bleed. The smallest pin prick will conjure up immediate visions of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the starvation huts of Bel

sen. That may seem unreasonable more than thirty years after the liberation of the death camps. But to Jews the catastrophe was so deep and so personal—almost every Jew had relatives among the six million who perished—that it will take much more than a generation for the wounds to scar, let alone heal.

Similarly if you raise your voice to a Russian, physically or metaphorically, the image to which he reacts is that of Stalingrad and the 900 days of the Leningrad siege with its 680,000 civilian dead. A total change of status and fortune for bOth Russians and Jews has not been enough to transmute those nightmares into memories.

One practical consequence for those who deal with Jews as with Russians is that they must expect over-reactions which are otherwise inexplicable. And that is how the Russians came to do for the Second World Conference on Soviet Jewry last week what they did for Mrs Margaret Thatcher last month. They gave Mrs Thatcher the biggest boost of her first year as Conservative Party leader by their over-reaction to one speech.

By the same token last week's Soviet Jewry conference here gained immeasurably in publicity by the Russian attacks launched on it before, during and after the event. For world-wide publicity was one of the prime objectives of the conference. Five hours before it began the point was put succinctly by Mr Greville Janner, QC, MP, in addressing his 170-strong British delegation in the Mexican bar of their hotel. 'This is a demo,' he told his tribe, 'not a conference.'

And from more than thirty countries the leaders of the Jewish communities had come to make this the biggest demo in the history of world Jewry. For the freedom of more than two million Soviet Jews—their freedom to go if they want to, and freedom to tend their own culture if they want to stay—has galvanised and unified Jewish communities throughout the world as nothing has done before.

At the head of this mammoth gathering came Golda Meir. The Israelites of old had prophets. Israel and world Jewry today have Golda. And in the Salle Albert I she got the ovation and she supplied the inspiration. The Soviet Jewry cause is intensely personal to her. She was born in Kiev before her parents took her to America to acquire that Milwaukee accent. She went back to Russia as Israel's first ambassador. And the experience of seeing tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, believed long lost to Jewry and Judaism, turn up in and around Moscow's Archipova Street synagogue, marked her for the rest of her life. At the age of seventy-eight, and growing visibly smaller and more frail, she has made the fight for Soviet Jewry the last of an embattled life. And last week she promised Mr Brezhnev, as well as her own cheering thousand, that the Jews of the Soviet Union will be free.

That promise begged all the questions. To start with: how many Soviet Jews actually want to be free? Of course those

forty now serving sentences in prison or Siberian exile as a direct or indirect result of their Zionist or Jewish cultural activities. Of course the Refusniks, estimated to number 3,000, who have asked for exit visas, been sacked from their jobs and then refused permission to leave. Beyond that all is guesswork. Mr Samuel Zifs, the silverhaired Moscow lawyer sent to Brussels to put the Soviet view, told fringe meetings that, as of February 1, only 1,400 applications for exit visas were outstanding. Mr Josef Almogi, the chairman of the World Zionist Organisation, said that in the past six years 285,000 Soviet Jews had asked their relatives in Israel to send them invitations—the first step in the emigration process. But only 119,300 have come out. From this he concluded that 165,000 were waiting for permission to leave. It could, of course, also be that this 165,000 had second thoughts and not applied for exit visas.

How many more want to come out ? The highest guesstimate that was put to Britain's Chief Rabbi, Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, during his December tour of three of the leading communities in the Soviet Union, taking in Refusniks and official leaders, was that at most half a million want to golf all obstacles, visible or hidden, were removed. That would still leave more than one and a half million who want to stay. For the first time in the history of the Soviet Jewry movement this fact found official recognition. And the upshot of three days of heated argument in the hotel and caucus rooms was that the conference demanded not only freedom to go, but religious and cultural freedom for those who want to stay.

But the biggest and most universal question raised by the conference was whether demos in the outside world are enough to bend the will of a totalitarian super-power.

On this the conference leaders were sanguine, at least in public. They pointed to the steeply rising emigration graph that followed the first world conference on Soviet Jewry in 1971-14,000 that year, 31,000 in 1972, 35,000 in 1973. But after that the graph sagged to 20,000 in 1974 and 13,000 last year.

The post hoc ergo propter hoc implication was that because the sharp rise followed the 1971 conference, it was caused by that conference. But other and even more important events took place arounck that time.

It was the high noon of the détente relationship and the high emigration figures of 1972 and 1973 were the result of a bargain privately struck by Mr Nixon and Dr Kissinger with Mr Brezhnev.

The graph began to sag after the US senate passed the Jackson amendment linking emigration to most favoured nation treatment for Russian trade. It sagged because Mr Brezhnev was willing to yield to private pressure in return for détente bargains, but his pride in his super-power status made him unwilling to yield in full view.. The rhetoric of Golda Meir's promise here may yet prove not only inspirational but prophetic.