The family ended up in Atlanta, Georgia, where Vladimir became a senior professor at Emory University, and the couple raised Olya and two children born in the U. With both Vladimir and Lena now in their 70s and as his retirement neared, they decided it was time to take that final step. However, it eventually helped her contact the Jewish Agency to begin the immigration process. The couple submitted the required papers last year, she says, and underwent a Zoom interview with the Jewish Agency emissary in Washington.
They brought their U. According to Lena, the process began to go awry this fall when she received letters from Jerusalem insisting that she submit original documents from the former Soviet Union.
Inquiries to law firms in Israel found that locating the originals in Russia would cost thousands of dollars, with no guarantee of success. What upset her most was when she was told it was her responsibility to reach out to Russia — presumably through the Russian consulate in the U.
This is beyond ridiculous and very painful. Hebrew-language media, she says, is not much more enlightening. Hadas remembers drawing a map of Israel on her notebook in geography class in 9th grade. In the same vein, rejecting a norm that is instilled in Israelis from a very young age is fraught with obstacles — educational, mental and parental. Her twin sister is currently serving, not, Hadas tells me, because her views are so very different from her own but because of the inherent difficulties of even contemplating — let alone following through — on such a remote possibility for yourself.
The IDF is a central artery in school life. From the first days of kindergarten, until the last weeks of 12th grade, the ideological connection runs deep. Hadas has friends who think exactly the same way she does, but they, she says, are serving in the army. Out of students in her year, she is the only one to refuse the draft.
The mourning was public and vocal. In such an environment, Hadas says, to speak out could have you labeled a traitor. But after careful reflection and concluding that military service did not square with her ideals, Noa had a bigger problem to deal with — her mother. Noa, the youngest and only daughter after two sons, enjoyed an especially close relationship with her mother, Iris, a high-school principal and a single parent since Noa was I was shocked.
When Iris realised that she could not be dissuaded, and after her daughter promised to do civil service instead, Iris gave Noa her full support. After Noa was handed down her first sentence she served a total of 98 days she asked her mother to be her voice outside. Jewish history and the Bible, which they perceived as the basis of the Jewish national tradition, appeared more relevant to them in their current situation than Russian culture, a culture that frequently reflected and underscored their humiliation and discrimination.
For the most part, neither the policy of refusing exit permits to a number of would-be Jewish emigrants nor the dubious criteria for doing so changed substantially over the years. However, emigration did experience a decline in , subsequently rising to unprecedented heights in and , and shrinking once more in the s, when it became increasingly difficult to obtain exit permits.
In that decade, the trend of issuing fewer exit permits was accompanied by a policy of not alienating applicants for emigration, enabling them rather to reacclimatize and even ameliorate their position—a measure intended to lessen pressure on the regime domestically and from abroad. This leniency did not apply to the remaining refuseniks from the s, who continued to be harassed and persecuted. The composition of the refusenik community changed radically once the majority sought to leave for the West rather than for Israel, that is, as of —, although officially all applicants were obligated to request visas for the latter.
The percentages of those who chose the West first exceeded 50 percent in and continued to comprise the majority until Most refuseniks in the s were simply Jews who had filed applications to leave as of late , when the clampdown began, and who desired primarily to leave the Soviet Union, rather than to reach a Jewish national home.
In the s, the number of refuseniks was far larger than in the previous decade, when there were probably never more than 2, at any given moment at least until By , there were two or three times as many—according to some accounts, more than 10, Yet, it was the hard-core refusenik community—and those who had prepared the ground before them—that made Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union a fundamental issue of the cold war and of American—Soviet negotiations in the s and s, and laid the groundwork for the major period of Jewish emigration in the s.
Slepak was told that because he had worked as an engineer years earlier, it was feared that he would divulge Russian secrets to the West.
The explanation was absurd, since any technological know-how that Slepak and the several thousand other refuseniks had, had long been superseded by the West's. The refuseniks' plight was horrendous. As soon as they applied to leave Russia, they were fired from their jobs; because the government is the only employer in Communist societies, it became impossible for them to find other work.
Many Jews throughout the world sent the refuseniks money, a hefty percentage of which the government confiscated. Although many refuseniks were highly educated, they often had to accept whatever jobs were offered them for example, cleaning streets at night to avoid being arrested as "parasites" a Soviet classification for any able-bodied person unemployed for two months.
Yosef Begun, a Jewish mathematician who taught an underground Hebrew class, was fired from his job when he applied to live in Israel, then convicted for not working and exiled to Siberia.
In Novosibirsk the Poltinnikov family, Isaac, Irma, and their daughter Victoria, all three physicians, were refused permission to leave for Israel for nine years. Throughout this period, they were forbidden to work in their professions and were constantly harassed.
The KGB periodically arrested them, subjected them to long interrogations, and on one occasion killed their dog. When the family was finally given permission to emigrate in , Irma and Victoria concluded that it was a KGB trick, that they would all be arrested at the airport. Isaac Poltinnikov did leave and went to Israel.
He immediately invited his wife and daughter to join him.
0コメント