8 - The early and mid-1960s: the Soviet Jewish national awakening

Summary

By the early to mid-sixties the Jewish national movement still had no official — or unofficial — organization, no leaders or institutions and no forum for discussing its content, strategy or tactics. It was a movement born out of need and circumstance. As such, it developed without guidance, without decisions to implement and without discipline or compulsion. Indeed, its very composition and purpose made it the antithesis of Bolshevism. Its sole unit was the primary cell, and its activists (as they came to be known) were those who had the courage and ability to spread the word and to consolidate the movement by establishing contact with other cells, with sympathetic visitors and, above all, with the Israeli embassy. The two latter groupings, in turn, provided written materials and moral encouragement. They also provided the channel through which reports of the Soviet Jewish plight could reach the rest of the world, so that pressure from the outside could reinforce the growing pressure from within.

This period witnessed a change in the groups described in previous chapters. Not only did they grow in both number and membership but they consolidated their ranks in order to prepare for an aliya that seemed more possible than ever before. The most active and vocal of these groups were in Moscow and Riga, in both of which cities there were a number of “cells.” As before, they still centered largely around ex-camp inmates with their wider connections, greater purposeful-ness and, often, lesser fear.