Was Stalin's move to crush the Jews simply a violent spasm of anti-Semitism, or the far-reaching endgame of a cunning mind?
S omewhere in the vast kingdom of sadness that was Stalin’s gulag, Purim night of 1953 arrived and found a group of Jewish prisoners gathered around to hear the Megillah. At their head, prison garb obscuring his rabbinic pedigree, sat an inmate, later famous as the “Rabbi of the Russians” — Rav Yitzchak Zilber, who risked all to teach Torah in defiance of Soviet oppression.
As the story of salvation in ancient Persia was retold, an embittered prisoner called Isaac Mironovich found the mockery of a Purim too much to bear.
“Who needs your maasehs about what happened 2,500 years ago?” he burst out, almost lunging at the Megillah reader. “Tell me, where is your G-d today? Do you know what is about to happen to the Jews of the USSR? The Germans finished off six million — here they’re about to be done with another three!”
A shocked silence fell on the group as Mironovich’s words hit home. It was the height of the so-called “Doctors’ Plot.” Russia’s top medical experts — the majority of them Jewish — had recently been accused of attempting to kill the Kremlin leadership in the service of American and British intelligence. The impending show trial of the doctors was expected to be followed by the deportation of vast numbers of Jews who would disappear into the ravening maw of the Soviet labor camp system.
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