Hidden Heroes

One afternoon in the early ’90s, I was in my downstairs machsan-office when the phone rang. The woman on the other end described herself as an avid reader of my columns in Yated Neeman. She further identified herself as a resident of Deerfield, Illinois, the Chicago suburb neighboring the one in which I grew up.

My immediate response was, “I’m not stupid. No one in Deerfield is reading Yated Neeman.”

But Pamela Cohen was telling the truth, and over the past quarter century, she and her husband Len — his calm and perpetual good humor the perfect ballast to her passion and energy — have become among our closest friends. Now, Pamela has written a book, Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union (Gefen Publishing House). It is a must-read for anyone interested in Soviet Jews’ many sacrifices for the right to leave their prison, and of the battle waged on their behalf by their Jewish brothers and sisters abroad. Historian Jonathan Sarna calls that struggle “perhaps the most successful human rights campaign in human history.”

Fittingly, one of the tributes to the book was written by former Prisoner of Zion Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich: “Pamela Cohen wrote a book. It is not only hers. It is ours. We wrote the book together, the page in the history of Am Yisrael.” It was Mendelevich’s arrest in Leningrad, June 15, 1970, as a co-conspirator in a plot to hijack a plane and fly it to Israel, that brought the idyll of Pamela’s life as a young suburban mother of three to an abrupt end, and catapulted her into the Soviet Jewry movement.