Natan Sharansky’s Fourth of July, and His Long Road to Freedom

On July 4, 1974, Natan (then Anatoly) Sharansky—who had spent the previous fifteen days in a Soviet prison—married Avital (then Natalia Stieglitz) in Moscow. The next day, Avital departed for Israel, but Natan was denied permission to leave the country and scant years later would be arrested on fictitious charges of espionage. It was not until 1986 that he was released, thanks to sustained pressure on the Soviet government from President Reagan, various members of Congress, and the American Jewish community. In a powerful interview with David Samuels, Sharansky describes his role in the refusenik movement and his wife’s activism during his imprisonment. He begins by explaining how he formed his sense of Jewish identity:

[As a child], I didn’t know anything about Jewish communities. I knew nothing about Judaism; I knew nothing about Jewish history, nothing about the Jewish religion. I knew very well that I was a Jew because that’s what was written on my parents’ ID cards, and there was a lot of anti-Semitism and discrimination—that’s all. . . .

I first realized that I had a history, a people, and a country in 1967, after the Six-Day War. For the Soviet Union, Israel’s victory in that war was a great humiliation. [As a result], Jews suddenly discovered that all the people around them, friends and enemies, Jews and non-Jews, connected this country with them. And so we wanted to understand what this connection meant. That’s when, in the underground, we started reading about ourselves and about our history in the books that were brought to us by American Jews. And we found out that we had such an exciting history, beginning with the Exodus from Egypt and continuing into the present.

There were Jews coming [to the Soviet Union at the time] from all over the world. They would say, “Oh, your father is from Odessa. My grandfather is from Odessa. We are family; we want to help you.” And we discovered there was the state of Israel, which also wanted to help us. So that’s how we discovered our identity, and that’s what gave us the strength to start fighting for our dignity and our freedom.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Avital Sharansky, History & Ideas, Natan Sharansky, Refuseniks, Ronald Reagan, Six-Day War, Soviet Jewry

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society