Stalin’s Last Days, and His Plans for Soviet Jews

In The Last Days of Stalin, Joshua Rubenstein tells the story of the end of the Soviet dictator’s reign and his death in March 1953, a period marked by intensely anti-Semitic policies and actions. In his review, David Mikics recounts some of the grislier episodes, including the so-called Doctors Plot, while noting that Rubenstein casts doubt on one hypothesis about the anti-Semitic project:

On January 13, 1953, Tass, the Soviet news agency, dropped a bombshell. They announced in Pravda that “a terrorist group of doctors” had been killing important public figures by sabotaging their medical treatment. Nine doctors had confessed; six of them were Jewish. . . . A months-long harassment campaign began against Russian Jews, ending only with Stalin’s death. Gangs of schoolchildren hounded their Jewish classmates; irate citizens demanded that Jews be fired from their jobs, expelled from Moscow, and punished for their supposed avoidance of the front during World War II. . . . Traditional Russian anti-Semitism vastly accelerated the momentum of the Doctors’ Plot. . . .

In one crucial respect Rubenstein alters our picture of the anti-Jewish campaign. People have long thought that in 1953 Stalin was planning to transfer Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan, the Siberian Jewish “homeland” developed in 1928, just as he had earlier transferred the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars, the Ingush, and other ethnic groups. Scholars have supposed that this massive deportation failed to occur only because Stalin died before he could make it happen. But Rubenstein finds no actual evidence of a plan to transfer the Jews.

He argues that the anti-Semitic atmosphere was so intense in the months before Stalin’s death that many simply assumed such a project was in the works; the deportation swiftly became a worldwide rumor and within a few years would be reported in the Western press. [Stalin’s successor Nikita] Khrushchev later said that he himself had convinced Stalin not to deport the Jews, but he seems to have invented this story to give himself credit for undoing one of Stalin’s evil plots. . . .

One important spur for Stalin’s anti-Semitic phase was Golda Meir’s visit to Moscow in September 1948. . . . Meir, then still named Golda Meyerson, was the new Jewish state’s diplomatic representative. When she visited Moscow’s Choral Synagogue on the High Holy Days, thousands of Russian Jews crowded rapturously around her, an event that must have shaken Stalin. Here was evidence that Soviet Jews, as Rubenstein puts it, “remained Jews with longings and dreams that extended beyond the physical and spiritual borders of the Soviet state.” . . .

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Golda Meir, History & Ideas, Joseph Stalin, 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