Free When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman Page B

And—quite conveniently for his legend—he died so early in the war that, though proxies carried on his work, it is impossible for history to judge whether his more vocal efforts might have saved more Jews than the supposedly perfidious Jewish leadership did.
    All this reading stirred the Cleveland men to action. What they needed was a cause. As it happened, Rosenblum and Caron came across an article published in the January 1963 issue of
Foreign Affairs
by Moshe Decter, a man described only as the head of an organization that neither of them had ever heard of: Jewish Minorities Research. The article, written in an authoritative and dispassionate tone and filled with facts, was titled "The Status of the Jews in the Soviet Union."

    Fiddler on the Roof
opened in the fall of 1964 at the Imperial Theater on Broadway with the round, robust Zero Mostel sweating and swiveling his hips in the lead role of Tevye the milkman. Based on the folktales of Sholem Aleichem, the show was heartily embraced by the emergent Jewish middle class as a kind of origin myth. They loved it. It was their own story—a family in the old country suffers and struggles with "Tradition!" but then, as the curtain descends at the end of the show, their bags are packed and some are off to America. Even though most American Jews were descended from little shtetls like the play's Anatevka—poor Jewish villages in the Russian Pale of Settlement—this sweetened musical version of their history was the closest the vast majority had come to thinking about these roots, let alone imagining that any Jews might still be living there. Only a contrarian intellectual warrior like Irving Howe, writing in
Commentary
weeks after the musical's premiere, could wring a cultural critique out of something as schmaltzy and heartwarming as "Sunrise, Sunset." He saw beneath this light entertainment a "spiritual anemia." He hated the effect Broadway had on Sholem Aleichem's bittersweet tales, twisting "everything into the gross, the sentimental, the mammoth, and the blatant." And Howe had a bigger point about the Jewish community, about the sad reasons why they might love the show so: "American Jews suffer these days from a feeling of guilt because they have lost touch with the past from which they derive, and often they compound this guilt by indulging themselves in an unearned nostalgia."
    Howe was frustrated with American Jews' ignorance of their origins, the necessary amnesia that had accompanied speedy assimilation. But
Fiddler
also exposed their ignorance of Soviet Jewry. For most of these Jews sitting comfortably in their red, plush seats at the Imperial, the thought that Jewish life continued long after the mournful closing number, a goodbye to "intimate, obstinate Anatevka," seemed almost unbelievable.
    In the late fifties and early sixties, there was only one force struggling to make sure that the Jews behind the iron curtain were not completely forgotten: the Israeli government. It had its reasons, of course. In order for the Jewish State to stay both Jewish and democratic, there needed to be a consistently large Jewish majority. It was clear that American Jews would not be leaving their streets of gold anytime soon. That left the Russian Jews, who, at two to three million, constituted the second-largest Diaspora population in the world. As early as February of 1952, with Stalin still in the Kremlin, David Ben-Gurion read to the Knesset the text of a diplomatic note he had sent to the Soviet leader that made it clear Israel's main goal was "the return of Jews to their historic homeland." Later, in 1960, Golda Meir specifically referred to 9,236 Russian Jews who wanted to be reunited with their families. She was responding to an earlier, characteristically flip comment by Khrushchev that there were no Jews in the Soviet Union who wanted to emigrate.
    But there was a problem—namely, the Cold War. Israel was still a fragile new state, and it put supreme value on