This wasn’t just a couple of Jewish Agency contacts in Moscow with an interest in moving to Israel. It was an entire secret network, an entire Orthodox community that functioned under the Soviet radar
It really defies logic. How did a Yekkeh-born Jewish jeweler living a quiet life in North West London — me, that is — get to lead a relief effort that sent 250 emissaries and cases full of contraband to support the Russian Jewish underground in Moscow? Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time, but with hindsight, I realize that entire chapter of my life was orchestrated from Above.
Back in the late 1970s, all of us Jews living in Western countries knew that Russian Jews were imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, and those who found expression for their Judaism or wished to emigrate faced starvation and imprisonment in the Soviet gulag. Of course, there were demonstrations and protests in London on their behalf, but I was an armchair activist at most. At the time, an organization called Herut UK was looking for people to take literature and hasbarah about Israel into the USSR. In January 1980, a friend of ours who was involved in Herut approached my wife, Linda, as a potential courier, since she didn’t have that “Jewish” look.
Although Linda was not keen on the idea of a trip to Communist Russia, I was up for the adventure. Before I traveled, I met with the Herut representatives and I was briefed about the situation there, about the spiritual awakening of Russian Jews, cut off from their heritage for over half a century. Beginning in 1971, as the Soviet authorities began to court better relationships with the West, many Russian Jews took advantage of Western pressure to relax restrictions on Jewish life and immigration by applying to leave the country and emigrate to Israel. The response to those requests was anything but welcoming. These refuseniks, as they came to be known, were fired from their jobs, could rarely find work, and found themselves targets of KGB stalking. Some even had their homes bugged. Refuseniks needed an invitation from abroad just to have a miniscule hope of emigrating, but even if the invitation got past the mail censors, it could take years to process an exit visa. While they waited, they were desperate for Jewish literature, education, and support, and that was what I was asked to provide on my visit.
I was given the number of a refusenik named Rabbi Eliyahu Essas, a Moscow-based baal teshuvah who, I would soon discover, had created a veritable Torah community of several hundred fearless Jews under the noses of the KGB.
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