Rabbi's book recalls struggle for Soviet Jewry

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When Rabbi Avraham Weiss attended his first demonstration at the Russian government residence in Riverdale the early 1970s, a man on the street identifying himself as a Soviet diplomat approached him.

“Rabbi,” he said. “You’ve crossed the line. Take your demonstrations to our offices in Manhattan, not our homes, where our families and our children live.”

But as Rabbi Weiss relates in his new memoir of the postwar movement to free Soviet Jewry, “Open Up the Iron Door: Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist,” he had no intention of complying with this request.

Instead, he“redoubled” his efforts by marching with fellow activists to the residence twice a month. They would go when the diplomats’ children were playing outside, behind the mission’s closed gates, and implore them over megaphones to ask their parents why it was that Jewish children like them living in the Soviet Union were forcibly separated from their families.

“Children have an innocence and a purity to go out there and ask their parents for answers,” Rabbi Weiss explained in a recent interview. 

It was in this same spirit of innocent inquiry that he carried his protest on behalf of Soviet Jews beyond Riverdale to embassies, missions, trade offices and consulates in countries like Poland, Austria and Turkey, he said.

As Rabbi Weiss’ book, which was scheduled to be released this month, shows, the road was not always easy. In each of those countries, he has been arrested. In both Turkey and Washington, D.C., he was detained for periods of days. And in 1986, while protesting a Soviet dance company’s performance at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Rabbi Weiss suffered a heart attack.

He said what sustained him was the sense of community among Soviet Jewry activists, especially in Riverdale. They frequently demonstrated with groups of just 10, 25 or 100 protestors for the freedom of Soviet Jews including Natan Sharansky, who was arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and espionage in 1977.

Avi Weiss, Russian residence, Soviet Jewry, Natan Sharansky, Nic Cavell
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