Since March, the U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich has been imprisoned in Russia on trumped-up charges of espionage. He is currently being held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, whose previous inmates include Natan Sharansky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Raoul Wallenberg. Kennedy Lee calls on Americans to make a greater effort to procure Gershkovich’s release, and turns to the mass mobilization of Jewish public opinion in the U.S. in support of Soviet refuseniks for guidance:
Today, the movement to free Soviet Jewry is remembered the world over as one of the most successful campaigns for human rights in history. In fact, Gershkovich’s own parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, were two of the beneficiaries of the movement for Soviet Jewry, and moved to the United States when Soviet authorities finally relented and allowed Jews to emigrate en masse.
The movement for Soviet Jewry not only provided Jews and their allies in the cause of human dignity with a sense of common purpose; it also became the first mass, sustained campaign to expose the moral hollowness of Soviet ideology. The movement unmasked human-rights abuses and the disregard for the dignity of the individual so prevalent under Communist totalitarianism. In particular, the leadership and moral clarity of Natan Sharansky, a political prisoner of conscience and crucial figure within the movement, inspired those of his generation and freedom-seeking peoples for decades to come.
Lessons from the movement for Soviet Jewry are applicable today. The images of Evan Gershkovich standing prisoner in the Russian defendant’s cage should unite and inspire world Jewry and human-rights advocates once again. It is time for a new movement to form that is no less coordinated, no less unrelenting in its pursuit of justice. In that effort, we should welcome any and all allies, as the United States Congress and President Reagan did in the 1980s, who view Moscow’s crimes in Ukraine and at home as an affront to human dignity.
Alas, the organization founded in 1978 to shine such a light on Soviet crimes, Helsinki Watch—now Human Rights Watch—is at present more concerned with the imagined sins of the Jewish state.
Read more on Providence: https://providencemag.com/2023/06/evan-gershkovich-is-the-product-of-human-rights-activism-why-have-we-given-up-on-it-today/