Table Of ContentLET MY
PEOPLE
GO
LET MY
PEOPLE
GO
The Transnational
Politics of
Soviet Jewish
Emigration
during the
Cold War
Pauline Peretz
Translated by Ethan Rundell
O Routledge
S^^ Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014043968
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peretz, Pauline, author.
[Combat pour les Juifs soviétiques. English]
Let my people go: the transnational politics of Soviet Jewish emigra-
tion during the cold war/Pauline Peretz; translator, Ethan Rundell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-5675-1
1. Jews--Soviet Union--History. 2. Jews--Soviet Union--Migrations.
3. Refuseniks. 4. United States--Relations--Israel. 5. Israel--Relations--
United States. 6. United States--Relations--Soviet Union. 7. Israel--
Relations--Soviet Union. 8. Soviet Union--Relations--Israel. 9. Soviet
Union--Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DS134.85.P4713 2015
325’.247089924009045--dc23
2014043968
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5675-1 (hbk)
Translated with the help of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la
Shoah, Paris.
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I: Israel, Instigator of Mobilization within the
Diaspora, 1953–63 11
1 The Jewish Community Reaches Political Maturity 13
2 Mobilization in the Postwar Years 39
3 An American Campaign Orchestrated by Israel,
1955–63 65
Part II: From Community Mobilization to Humanitarian
Movement, 1964–71 99
4 An American Movement in Support of the Rights
of Soviet Jewry, 1964–66 101
5 The Six-Day War: A Turning Point for the
American Jewish Community, 1967–71 135
Part III: The Emigration of Soviet Jewry: A Central Issue
in Soviet-American Relations, 1972–Late 1980s 191
6 The Emigration of Soviet Jewry: An Obstacle to
Détente, 1972–74 193
7 Jewish Rights or Human Rights in the
Soviet Union? 1975–79 245
8 Jewish Emigration as a Barometer of US-Soviet
Relations in the 1980s 297
Conclusion 331
Acknowledgments 338
Appendix 340
Chronology 349
List of Acronyms 351
Select Bibliography 353
Index 363
Introduction
In December 1987, on the eve of the summit that would bring together
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington, DC, a crowd of
two hundred thousand people demonstrated on the Mall, demanding
that the secretary general of the Communist Party allow Jews to leave
the Soviet Union. This mass rally was an expression of the incredible
support enjoyed by Soviet Jews in the United States at the end of the
Cold War. But of all the victims of the Soviet regime, why did they alone
benefit from such help when so many others deserved help too? Because
Israel and the American Jewish community initiated an unprecedented
mobilization on behalf of Soviet Jews, and the United States govern-
ment embraced the struggle once becoming convinced that the Jews’
emigration was a humanitarian issue requiring its intervention.
Immediately after the Soviet Union opened its borders, numerous
publications addressed the consequences of the mass arrival of Soviet
Jews in the United States and Israel, with the result that scholars
have generally neglected the origins of the emigration. Whenever the
American mobilization on behalf of Soviet Jews has been the object of
historical study, it has been portrayed as an effort to compensate for
the community’s inability to assist European Jews during World War II.
Published in 1999, A Second Exodus, edited by Murray Friedman and
Albert Chernin, is the outcome of this effort to reevaluate past com-
munity action.1 Already in 1979, however, William Orbach had begun
studying this mobilization as a social movement and distinguishing
among its actors and objectives.2 His approach defined a new direction,
allowing scholars to break with the logic of a community satisfied with
itself and its actions and instead to explain in nonideological fashion
the succession of objectives (ranging from gaining respect for cultural
and religious rights to winning the right to emigrate) and stages of the
mobilization (from the emergence of the Soviet Jewish question in com-
munity circles and public opinion to the definition of this question as a
humanitarian concern, setting it on the agenda, and finally changing US
1
Let My People Go
policy toward the Soviet Union). The perspective needed to be as broad
as possible, which meant studying the movement to aid Soviet Jews
from its beginnings in the 1950s up to the opening of Soviet borders.
The analysis therefore follows a tortuous path, leading from Israel and
community circles in the United States, where the question of Soviet
Jewish emigration was born; to Congress, where it was reformulated;
and then to the White House, where it was appropriated. This is the
only way to explain how Soviet Jewish emigration became a foreign
policy objective of the United States during the Cold War, initiating
a period when human rights became a decisive element in America’s
policy toward the Kremlin.
Until the publication of this book in French, the international dimen-
sion of the American mobilization in support of Soviet Jews had been
largely overlooked.3 The movement had generally been understood as
isolated and unconnected to the activities of other diaspora commu-
nities. My research, however, has revealed the activities of an Israeli
office named “Nativ” that, beginning in 1953, secretly sought to secure
the immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Nativ’s operation was two-
pronged, combining direct action among Jews behind the Iron Curtain
with a campaign to promote awareness in numerous Western countries,
which was most successful in the United States. To study the American
movement, therefore, it was absolutely necessary to explore the Jewish
state’s role as a catalyst and subsequent influence.
Until the middle of the 1990s, the activities of Nativ were clandestine,
and the silence around the organization was broken only in 1995 with
the publication of a memoir by Nativ’s second director and the appear-
ance of several articles in the Israeli press.4 Through this dissemination
of first-person testimony, Nativ personnel were expressing their desire
finally to be recognized for the role they played in the mass immigration
of Soviet Jews and the immense success it represented for Israel. Up until
that late date, the existence of the Israeli organization had never been
publicly avowed; there had only been talk of an “operation” organized
by the Israelis to come to the aid of Soviet Jews. The scholarly works
that mentioned this operation were often written on the initiative of
Nativ, using information furnished by the secret bureau and the schol-
ars connected with it.5 Moreover, these publications were subjected to
censorship, both by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by Nativ
itself. They thus remained silent in regard to the most sensitive issues.
My aim has been to reintroduce Israel as the missing yet absolutely
decisive actor in the history of the American movement. Instead of
2
Introduction
attempting to exhaustively describe the operations organized by Nativ
(something that would have been extremely difficult, in any case, for
lack of sources), I have sought to answer a number of questions: How
did the cause of Soviet Jews, originally an Israeli concern, become an
American one? How did the Soviet Jewish emigration, initially a Zionist
objective, come to be defined as the aim of an American movement for
the defense of human rights in the Soviet Union? Understanding the
role Israel played in setting the agenda for a segment of the American
Jewish community requires a careful examination of the relations
between the Jewish state and its diaspora: To what degree did Israel
exercise influence over the American Jewish community, and on the
basis of what model should these relationships be conceptualized?
What made this influence possible? Finally, did it represent a threat to
American democracy? This last question is unavoidable, given that the
American movement led to a major change in foreign policy.
The US Congress’s adoption of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in
1974 was the movement’s most visible and lasting consequence. This
amendment, which conditioned the extension of economic advantages
to the Soviet Union on its respect for the right of minorities to emi-
grate, was the first time that the emigration of Jews had been placed
on the agenda between Washington and Moscow. The context of its
adoption has until now been studied only by Paula Stern,6 but she
underestimated the role played by non-congressional actors: the White
House and, above all, Jewish organizations. She also failed to recognize
that Jackson-Vanik represented the successful outcome of a long cam-
paign by American Jewish organizations and Israel to sensitize public
opinion and reformulate the Soviet Jewish problem in humanitarian
terms. My aim has been to situate the amendment in the flow of the
movement and to consider the role played by the Jewish lobby in the
amendment’s adoption. An abundant literature addresses the lobby’s
influence on US policy in the Middle East.7 The question here has been
displaced to a different context: the goal is to measure the role Jewish
organizations played in American foreign policy, with respect not to
the Jewish “symbolic homeland,”8 Israel, but rather to the Soviet Union,
a superpower that was, during the Cold War, the second-largest home
to the Jewish diaspora.
This study participates in an old debate concerning the role of special
interest groups (and, more particularly, of ethnic interest groups) in
US foreign policy. Special interest groups are an essential component
of American political life, and indeed the Bill of Rights recognizes the
3
