Being raised by parents who fled the Soviet Union and immigrated to America after decades of systemic antisemitism in the USSR, I am filled with gratitude for the ability to be openly Jewish, a privilege unknown to the generations of my parents and grandparents. It is largely because of this upbringing that seeing the global response to October 7th has been so alarmingly familiar to the Soviet stories and cautionary tales I was repeatedly told growing up. For myself and many other Jews, October 7th served as a glaring wake-up call that antisemitism remains alive, rearing its ugly head in every generation. It is our job to be educated on our history, to be able to recognize existential threats and defend ourselves against them, fulfilling the mitzvah of keeping Judaism alive for every generation that follows.
My parents grew up during the stagnation era of the USSR, a period of economic devastation and sheer corruption, and immigrated to America three years after the Soviet Union fell to shambles in 1991. Here are some important lessons they have shared with me:
1. First of all, was anyone openly Jewish in the USSR despite the ban on religion? Did you ever come across orthodox or visibly Jewish Jews?
Never. Most synagogues, like churches, were destroyed following the Revolution, but there was a historical synagogue in the center of Moscow that remained, for archival purposes. It was always surrounded by KGB officers who took note of anyone that entered, so no one did. All Jews were aware of their status as Jews as an ethnicity, but Jewish practice was also known about from grandparents and great-grandparents. Our grandparents spoke Yiddish amongst themselves and we observed aspects of certain holidays, such as eating matzah on Passover. Shabbat was impossible to observe – everything was scheduled on Saturdays: mandatory extracurriculars such as school events, “volunteer” events, party parades… they always fell on Saturdays.
2. Were you ever personally discriminated against or treated differently simply because you were Jewish, by the State or just by your peers?
MY: Yes. Oftentimes in school by peers – everything was fine in times of peace, but as soon as there was some conflict it would be “this Jew did ____”. I was often singled out by my teachers for having a Jewish last name and had to use my mother’s Russian maiden name to apply to university. The practice of changing your last name was very common – my cousin applied to university three times and only got in when she used a non-Jewish last name. My father, even being a party member, was never granted permission to leave the country and was explicitly told this was because he was Jewish.
DY: I had professors in university physically change my answers on written work to be able to give me a lower grade. I was one of the only Jews and this certainly was not done to the other students.
3. A significant number of Jews participated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a result of Tsarist-era antisemitism. A notable one of these Jews was Leon Trotsky. Did the Party [the Communist Party] explicitly keep up the practice of antisemitism from Tsarist times?
If you were a nobody, a regular civilian and worker, it didn’t matter to the Party what you were as long as you fulfilled your role as a loyal Soviet citizen and kept up with your production quota. It only mattered once you got important or high up in the Party. To enter the Party as a Jew you needed serious connections, and even then you were always discriminated against. Most changed their names so the Party could maintain the fiction of Russian purism. A notable example: Lev Davidovich Bronstein became Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was also driven out of the very party he helped found and executed by his “comrades.”
4. You often tell me that mockery and dismissal of religion is the first warning sign that an authoritarian regime is incoming. What are some other warning signs we should beware of?
Family, faith, and freedom. The clearest sign that we are in danger is when a government backs societal efforts, or itself promotes, going against family and against religion. Third is going against freedom of speech. The rest of the freedoms follow suit.
5. Having lived through actual communism and packed up your whole lives to come to America – the land of the free, what do you have to say to the young, self-proclaimed American communists and socialists of today?
The idea of communism is seductively idealistic. However, it is blatantly counterintuitive to the current state of human nature. The ideals of communism can only succeed in a society where every single person is on the same moral plane. This is impossible to attain in our physical world where we are meant to have dichotomies, making communism inherently impossible to successfully achieve. The contemporary attraction towards communism can be attributed to either naive idealism (and severe lack of education) or malevolent desire for chaos.
6. Why Jews?
Jews are always the scapegoats. We make great achievements everywhere we go because we follow the Torah as our blueprint, invoking admiration from some but jealousy from others. Jews are the litmus test of civilization: a society can be judged on a scale of good or evil by how they treat their Jews.
My book recommendations to grasp the realities and inherent failure of communism:
- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
- Cancer Ward, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, National Photo Collection of Israel
