Until the Lubavitcher rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, was forced out of the USSR in 1927, his was the largest ḥasidic court to remain in the country. And even after his departure with many of his followers, Chabad-Lubavitch continued to maintain a significant network in the Soviet Union—much of it operating underground to avoid tangling with the authorities—which remained in place until the collapse of Communism. Many Chabad Ḥasidim nonetheless attempted to flee in the years just after World War II, raising the hackles of the political police. Dovid Margolin writes:

On June 6, 1950, Mikhail Popereka, a deputy minister of the Ukrainian branch of the MGB, [or] Soviet secret police—the precursor to the KGB—drafted an eleven-page memo on the status of the ongoing investigation into the case of the “Ḥasidim” and sent it to Viktor Abakumov, the minister of state security of the Soviet Union, [i.e., the head of the MGB]. Marked with a hand-written “Top Secret,” the report synopsized information gathered by the MGB over the course of its investigation into “the Schneersohn anti-Soviet organization” via foreign agents, informants, and interrogations.

An anti-Soviet center headed by the “tsaddik Schneerson”—standard shorthand for . . . Joseph Isaac Schneersohn in Soviet documents—had been set up in New York by American intelligence under the guise of a yeshiva, a European branch established in France, and all of it connected to an extensive anti-Soviet network within the Soviet Union. This, at least, is how the Soviet Union’s intelligence apparatus saw it, all the way to the top.

It was Abakumov who in October of 1946 first alerted Stalin to the threat posed to Communism by “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and launched into the post-war anti-Semitic campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” i.e. the Jews. This dark period would see the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—the Jewish organization Stalin had established during the war to rally support to the Soviet cause and raise much-needed funds, whose members were arrested and shot after the war—and the lead-up to the Doctors’ Plot, in which Jewish doctors were announced to have been part of a vast conspiracy to poison Soviet leadership, the development of which was only halted with Stalin’s sudden death in 1953.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.