“My life has been one extended miracle,” writes former refusenik Rav Yosef Mendelevich, whose book Unbroken Spirit was recently released in English. From that day in 1970 when he and his refusenik friends tried to hijack a plane out of Russia, through eleven years in Soviet prisons and finally to the tranquility of raising a Torah family in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich recently spoke to Mishpacha about that day in June that shook the entire Jewish world.
On June 15 1970 a group of 16 refuseniks entered Smolnoye (later Rzhevka) Airport nearLeningrad. Each one was holding a ticket for a local flight to Priozersk — ostensibly to attend a wedding. In reality they planned to hijack the plane and fly it toSweden. But as they entered the airfield for boarding they were arrested and taken into custody by the Soviet secret police.
One of those 16 refuseniks was a 22-year-old Latvianborn Jew named Yosef Mendelevich. Today he is Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich father and grandfather of a blessedly large family Torah scholar and director of the Russian-speaking programs ofJerusalem’s Machon Meir yeshivah. For four decades his face and name represented a cause uniting chassidim Litvaks and Mizrachim organizations from Agudah to the World Jewish Congress individuals from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to the Belzer Rebbe’s granddaughter.
Now with his just-released book Unbroken Spirit: A Heroic Story of Faith Courage and Survival (Gefen Publishing House) and a perspective that comes with new years of quiet he can tell the story behind the story.
Cloak and Dagger in Riga
Yosef Mendelevich was born in 1947 in Riga the capital of Latvia a Baltic nation that became part of the Soviet Unionafter World War II. Both of Yosef’s parents stemmed from Dvinsk where his maternal grandfather Reb Yosef had been the shamesh of the Rogatchover Gaon.
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