The world’s largest and most expensive Jewish Museum opened to great fanfare in Russia late last year. And although it has only been open for less than six months, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow has become a must-see for any visitors to the Russian capital.

A high profile project, its construction cost around $50 million, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin donated a month’s wages. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who was born in what is now Belarus, flew to Moscow for the museum’s opening in November 2012.

There the 89-year-old Israeli leader told reporters that, “My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart.”

The history of the Jews in Russia is as complex and emotional as any childhood memories.

This large and engaging museum—which was primarily funded by oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin—is dedicated to the ambivalent history of Jews in Russia, land that has been the site of both immense Jewish achievement and suffering.

“We tried to make our museum not about how bad or how good it was to be a Jew in Russia, but simply about how it was,” said Borukh Gorin, the chairman of the museum, according to the Los Angeles Times.

To tell the tale, the museum has adopted a very modern approach. It employs interactive displays with personal testimony and archival footage in both Russian and English.

New York based designer Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the United States Holocaust Museum, created a museum that the Russian online television channel Dozhd described as a “Jewish Disneyland.”

As befits a major museum, it occupies a vast space—some 5,000 square feet. Across this floor space the museum offers visitors an array of interactive exhibits. Films in 3-D, interactive maps and touch screens all chronicle Jewish life in what was once the Russian Empire.

A visitor can touch a screen at one exhibit and appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a merchant, or a Russian-Jewish intellectual. If you touch a Torah in a virtual synagogue, the cantor’s voice fills the air.

The exhibitions are presented in chronological order. As visitors progress through the museum, they follow in the path of centuries of Russian Jewry, travelling across medieval Europe to the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and then onto Russian cities.

The Jewish presence in Russia grew as a result of Russia, Prussia and Austria’s division of Poland at the end of the 1700s. Along with the Polish territory it gained, the Russian Empire inherited approximately 1 million Jews. Most of the Jewish population was densely concentrated in rural areas in the north and west of the Russian Empire. Later Tsarist decrees forbade Jews from settling outside of a prescribed area, known as the Pale of Settlement.

Individual Jews had to apply for permission to live outside of the Pale (from where we get the expression, “beyond the pale”), applications which were almost always denied. As the Russian Empire expanded, especially south into the area known as New Russia (southern Ukraine), Jews were permitted to settle in this new terrain, which included the city of Odessa. The Ukrainian port soon became the center of flourishing Jewish life, one of the major Jewish centers of the world.

Visitors to the museum can sit down at a café in Odessa and interact with a virtual, dead Jewish writer, a representative member of the city’s intelligentsia.

In addition to conversation with long-dead authors, a visitor can partake in other interactive role-play at the Odessa café. By touching the table, the visitor is posed a question that was all-too pertinent for many Jewish residents of Odessa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“If your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do?”

The question is a good one, not merely hypothetical. Odessa was the site of pogroms in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905. Visitors can choose from one of four responses:

“A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.”

As it happens, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a resident of the city on the Black Sea, chose option C. In the midst of the anti-Jewish violence, Jabotinsky created the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group whose purpose was to safeguard Jews from attack in Odessa and throughout the Russian Empire.

Jabotinsky became convinced that the only ways for Jews to be free from the threat of violence was to be armed— “better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” he said—or, better yet, to live in their own country, the state of Israel.

Jabotinsky became a prominent Zionist, changed his name from Vladimir to Ze’ev, and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement. Jabotinksy died in New York in 1940, before his dream of a Jewish homeland was realized, but after the establishment of the Jewish State, his remains were transferred to Israel.

In addition to contributing to the development of Zionism, the bloody pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the mass emigration of Russian Jews to the West—the United States, primarily, but also France, the United Kingdom and Germany—and to pre-State Palestine. Then in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution granted equal rights to all minority groups in Russia, including Jews, while it also precipitated more anti-Jewish violence.

The museum outlines these periods, as well as the Holocaust. While the Shoah is by no means the primary focus of the museum, exhibitions detail some of the horrors in which over 2.5 million Russian Jews were murdered. Yet while many Russian Jews perished at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators, Russian Jews fighting in the Soviet Army also helped to liberate concentration camps. Once again, Jewish suffering and success are starkly juxtaposed.

The museum chronicles the Jewish contribution to Russia’s war effort during World War II. It houses a copy of a T-34 tank, which was made in a plant run by a Jewish man in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil and served as the Russian army’s primary tank during the war. The museum also honors Russia’s only female Jewish air force pilot, who received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, with a reproduction of the plane she flew during the war.

Exhibitions also address the post-War period, exploring what it meant to be a Soviet Jew. This section of the museum might be of particular interest to the many Russian-speaking Jews who left the former Soviet Union. There are now hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Russian-speaking Jews and their families who live in Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere outside of Russia.

While many Russian Jews desperately fought to leave the Soviet Union, hoping to immigrate to Israel for ideological reasons—part of the refusenik movement—or to the West, the museum also profiles the many and varied contributions of Russian Jews to the development of the Soviet Union in the fields of politics, literature, engineering, mathematics, literature and the arts.

At the start of the 20th century, Russia was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, perhaps as many as 5 million souls. But anti-Jewish violence and legislation led to mass emigration from Russia—to primarily to the United States, pre-State Israel and Western Europe. Then the Nazi genocide further decimated Jewish communities. After the defeat of the Nazis, Soviet authorities repressed Jewish religious and cultural life, as well as other religions. In the wake of the break down of the Soviet Union, yet more Russian Jews left the country for Israel and the West. These events radically cut the size of Russia’s Jewish population, which currently numbers approximately 200,000.

Although there may be fewer Jews in Russia than at any point in over 200 years, Moscow is now home to an impressive museum—earlier this month, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center received the “Museum of the Year” award from the Russia edition of the prestigious The Art Newspaper, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.

So many of the world’s Jews, from Nobel laureate and Israeli President Shimon Peres down, can trace their families’ histories to Russia. It is fitting that this major museum honors the heritage of a huge proportion of the world’s Jews and the inextricably intertwined modern histories of Jewish people and Russian lands.

Read the AP article here.

March 16th is considered Legionnaires Day, a day in which Latvians commemorate war veterans. Others believe that this day glorifies fascism.

Latvia has a complex history regarding fascism and communism. After gaining independence after WWI, the USSR occupied them in 1940. Nazi Germany then occupied them one year later, until 1944 when the Soviets returned. As a result, many Latvians feel the Nazi occupation, which forcibly conscripted many into the Waffen SS divisions, was a time in which they fought for independence from communism.

Approximately 80,000 Jews, or 90 percent of Latvia’s prewar Jewish population, were killed in 1941- 1942. Many Latvians claim they did not have a role in the Holocaust because this was before the Latvian Waffen SS units were formed.

Protesters of Saturday’s commemoration referenced a list of Latvian crimes committed during WWII.

Firefighters in Perm, a municipality located on the banks of the Kama River near the Ural Mountains, put out a small fire inside the center on Saturday, the government-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily reported.

The fire is believed to have been caused by two bottles filled with a flammable liquid that were thrown into the center from outside the building.

Police suspect the fire was a provocation ahead of an event that took place Sunday, when Orthodox Jews of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement introduced a Torah scroll to the synagogue operating in the center. Some 400 people attended the event, according to the Israel-based Russian-language news site Izrus.co.il.

For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Emily Hardman, ehardman@becketfund.org, 202.349.7224

WASHINGTON, DC – On Friday, 8 February 2013, the European Court of Human Rights announced its rejection of the Juma Mosque Congregation’s appeal against the government of Azerbaijan. The ruling came more than eight years after the mosque first sought relief from the Court when the mosque’s building was seized by government security forces and the mosque’s members expelled in 2004.

The mosque was targeted by the authorities because it would not agree to replace its existing religious leader, Ilgar Ibrahimoglu Allahverdiyev–a prominent democracy and religious liberty activist–with a government-appointed imam. Without a government-appointed and -controlled imam, the authorities refused to register the mosque, which meant the mosque could not own or rent property. The mosque had sought relief in the Azerbaijan courts and had then appealed the case to the ECHR with the help of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The mosque sought the ability to register itself as a legal entity without submitting to the appointment of a government imam and to remain in the mosque building it had used for worship for the more than 12 years since Azerbaijan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

In its decision, the ECHR did not reach the merits of the mosque’s religious freedom claims, basing its ruling instead on technical legal defenses raised by the government. With respect to the mosque’s claim for registration, the Court held that the mosque should have brought suit against a different government agency in addition to the ones it had sued. And with respect to the mosque’s building, the Court held that the original permission from the government to use the mosque could be revoked unilaterally without regard to whether the revocation was meant to suppress the mosque. The ECHR’s decision means that the mosque cannot legally operate in Azerbaijan or use its building, which is located in the historic center of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku and is one of the oldest houses of worship in Azerbaijan.

“Justice for the Juma Mosque Congregation has been both delayed and denied,” said Eric Rassbach, Deputy General Counsel of the Becket Fund and the lawyer that filed the Mosque’s appeal in April 2004. “It is bad enough that the Court rested its decision on dubious factual defenses by the government, but to take eight years to reach this decision is doubly damaging because it left the mosque’s rights in limbo for so long.” “What’s worse is that this decision will only embolden autocratic governments to engage in registration abuse against minority or dissident religious groups, especially in the former Soviet space,” Rassbach added.

Registration abuse occurs when a government uses its discretionary power to deny legal identity to a religious organization on arbitrary grounds. It is a widespread phenomenon in countries in transition to democracy and especially the former Soviet states; registration as a legal entity is typically denied to minority, non-traditional, or dissident religious groups.

The background of the case is rooted in the struggle for democracy in Azerbaijan. Allahverdiyev was targeted by government security forces after a 2003 post-election crackdown on dissenting voices in Azerbaijan. After first taking refuge in the Norwegian Embassy, Allahverdiyev was later arrested and given what the ECHR, in a separate appeal, found to be an unfair trial.

The Becket Fund was co-counsel on the case with leading European human rights advocate Prof. Bill Bowring of the University of London, Birkbeck College School of Law.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty  is a non-profit, public-interest law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions—from Anglicans to Zoroastrians. For 18 years its attorneys have been recognized as experts in the field of church-state law. The Becket Fund recently won a 9-0 victory in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, which The Wall Street Journal called one of “the most important religious liberty cases in a half century.”

For more information, or to arrange an interview with one of the attorneys, please contact Emily Hardman, Communications Director, at ehardman@becketfund.org or call 202.349.7224.

 ###

Additional Information:

• Juma Mosque Case Page
• European Court of Human Rights Decision (February 8, 2013)
• Asadbeyli v. Azerbaijan Judgment (December 11, 2012)

The Kyiv Post weekly on Jan. 21 quoted a statement by the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress – an organization headed by Rabinovich – as reading, “A senior official from the current government visited Rabinovich on Jan. 17 and, threatening harassment, including physical violence, demanded that the JN1 television channel be transferred to them within a week.”

No official was named in the report. Rabinovich reportedly made a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.

Alexander Zanzer, JN1’s Brussels bureau chief, told JTA that Ukrainian police recently inspected JN1′s offices in Kiev, “but it is not sure who is ultimately behind this newfound interest in us.” He added, “It would seem like someone decided they could use JN1 to exert control. I am not sure who it is, but we are speaking out against it before it becomes more serious.”

Co-owned by Rabinovich and fellow Ukrainian Jewish philanthropist and businessman Igor Kolomoisky, JN1, or Jewish News One, began broadcasting in 2011. Along with Kiev, it has offices in Brussels and Paris.

By David Lev

For the first time since before World War II, the small Jewish community in the Ukrainian town of Netishin held prayer services – and celebrated the Bar-Mitzvah of the grandson of the community’s last rabbi, 70 years after it had been scheduled to take place.

The religious revival in the town is due to a construction project in the town, in which a common grave of Jewish victims of the Holocaust was discovered. Tractor breaking ground for the project opened up the grave, which included the remains of numerous individuals, and Jewish holy books and scriptural scrolls that were apparently buried together with the victims.

According to elder members of the community, the Jews of Netishin were exterminated on Rosh Hashana in 1942, as the Nazi monsters invaded the town.

Upon the discovery, members of the town’s small Jewish community turned to Habad for assistance, and the Rabbi of the nearby town of Chmelnitzki, Rabbi Alexander Feingold, intervened with city officials for help. The mayor of Netishin immediately halted construction, and provided land and assistance to rebury the remains of the Jewish victims at an alternative site. The city also paid for the construction of a memorial stone on the new gravesite.

The incident awakened long-dormant feelings among many of the Jews in Netishin, who had long ago assimilated and had almost no connection to the Jewish community. One of the members of the community, Azriel, confided in Rabbi Feingold that he had been scheduled to become a Bar-Mitzvah as the Nazis invaded the town – and instead, at the age of 12, witnessed the murder of his family, loved ones, and neighbors, leaving him the only surviving Jew of Netishin.

Azriel remained in the town, and eventually changed his name to Vasily, and became estranged from the Jewish people. But after the discovery of the mass grave – which contained the remains of his grandfather, who was the Rabbi of Netishin in the pre-war years – something stirred in the man, and he decided he wanted to go ahead with his Bar-Mitzvah – 70 years later. Rabbi Feingold said that he felt privileged to be a part of such an amazing story.

This is the only remaining working synagogue in a city which boasted 77 synagogues before 1940.

Chief Rabbi Zalman Abelsky, a follower of the Lubavicher Rebbe, says that very few people, barely more than a minyan, attend Shabbat services, and only 20-25 turn up on major festivals.

This year, once again, city authorities refused to allow the Jewish community to put a Chanukiah in the town centre.

“Last year the Jewish Community wanted to install the Chanukiah near the Chekhov Theatre, in the centre of town, but the mayor responded with irritation and recommended we install it near the monument of the 1941 ghetto. In other words, they believe that our place is in the ghetto,” said Ilya Mariash, the editor of internet news site Jewish Village, published in Russian.

The mayor, Dorin Chirtoaca, is the deputy leader of the Liberal Party, which is part of the centre-right coalition, the Alliance for European Integration. His party leader, Mihai Ghimpu, argues that the mayor has to carry out a balancing act.

“These problems are not simple, they are delicate. The mayor wanted to avoid a row, you can see how the church calls protests outside parliament every so often. You may recall that this row was started by the church,” said Mr Ghimpu.

And indeed, in December 2009, a group of Christian Orthodox believers, led by the priest Anatolie Cibric, removed the Chanukiah which had been installed, with permission, in the city’s central park.

The 2010 Human Rights Report of the US State Department on Moldova reads: “A crowd led by Moldovan Orthodox priest Anatolie Cibric gathered, engaged in antisemitic speech, dismantled and removed the menorah from its base.”

Mr Cibric was unrepentant: “Chanukiah means illumination, we have been illuminated by Christ’s light and we don’t need to be illuminated by other religions. They can install their symbols outside their headquarters, but to install this symbol in a public square named after Saint Stephen the Great it like an invasion”, he said. He also denied any allegation of antisemitism: “It’s like a flag planted on the Reichstag, that’s Chanukiah in the capital of a state. The allegation of antisemitism is a business project of the Jews. I deny this allegation of antisemitism, I don’t protest against Jews, I protest against symbols forced upon us.”

By Petru Clej

(CNN) – Driven by desperation, Marina and Lev Furman stepped out of their home in Leningrad and took a 20-minute walk into uncertainty. Trailed by KGB agents, they bundled up and set out in the weak winter light for Palace Square, site of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

They brought signs demanding freedom. And they pushed a baby carriage holding their 9-month-old daughter, Aliyah, who had already proved in her short life that she, too, could handle risks.

Friends told the Furmans they were crazy. Such demonstrations were forbidden in the square. The couple arrived in silent protest and spotted a mob of police and KGB agents waiting for them. Knowing they’d be taken away, they chained themselves to Aliyah’s carriage.

For years, they’d asked for permission to leave. Each time, their requests were denied. Told once more they’d never be allowed to go, they were taking a final, calculated, bold stand.

On this day, though, they knew they weren’t alone. The date was December 6, 1987.

Some 4,500 miles and a world away, 250,000 people were preparing to protest in Washington as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was preparing for his first White House summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The demonstrators wanted to make sure the Furmans and other Soviet Jews weren’t forgotten.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrives for his first U.S. summit with President Ronald Reagan.

Known as Freedom Sunday, the rally would be the culmination of a decades-long populist campaign the likes of which the world rarely sees. Americans of all stripes were coming together to demand human rights in a faraway land.

Driven by students and housewives and fueled by post-Holocaust guilt, civil rights activism and a newfound sense of Jewish pride after Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War victory, the movement brought together Jews and non-Jews, religious and secular.

It’s a part of a recent past that’s nearly forgotten but that once enjoyed the support of top-tier politicians, congressional wives, Catholic nuns, actors, musicians and civil rights icons, includingMartin Luther King Jr.

If a new coalition has its way, the Soviet Jewry movement will find its place in history books and serve as a model for change in a time when global human rights abuses continue.

“It created a unity that today seems impossible,” said Gal Beckerman, a journalist whose 2010 book about the campaign won widespread praise. “For Jews, this was the movement that allowed them to bridge their American and Jewish identities. … They were flexing their political muscle for the first time.”

Their mission was to keep human rights issues on the table for as long as it took, even as diplomats and politicians negotiated nuclear disarmament and trade agreements. In the end, this relentless push would play a part in ending the Cold War, bringing down the Soviet Union and ultimately freeing more than 1.5 million Jews — many of whom watched from afar as the Jewish state of Israel grew, even while their own religion and identity was suppressed under Communist rule.

Among those working behind the scenes was Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz.

Part of the administration’s agenda, when it came to negotiations, was human rights, said Shultz, now 92 and a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

“We developed a way to put it that I wrote out and read very slowly,” he said, describing talks with his Soviet counterpart. “The gist was … any society closed and compartmented will fall behind. So you’ve got to loosen up if you’re going to be with it. And part of it is respecting the diversity and views of your population.”

Shultz also met with “refuseniks,” the term used for anyone who’d been refused exit visas. He attended a Passover seder with them at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. And he unofficially slipped a list of refusenik names to his Soviet counterpart, asking for their release.

While Shultz said it would have been inappropriate for him to attend the rally in Washington — then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was among the speakers — he loved the idea of Gorbachev turning on his TV to see the crowd on the National Mall. The event helped mark the beginning of the end. The gates were poised to open.

“It had a very positive impact,” Shultz said.

After 2005, emigration was all but assured. Numbers have remained in the low thousands, says Mark Levin of NCSJ.

On all counts, the Soviet Jewry movement was a success. But somewhere along the way, Americans and Jews forgot to tell the story. A new push, led by a group called Freedom 25, is out to change this.

Its leaders realized this chapter in history was lost on people younger than 30 — even those who’d been educated in Jewish day schools. So they began documenting stories, enlisted a coalition of organizations and created a social media-driven virtual “march” that has already reached more than 3 million people.

This movement is not only something Americans should be proud of, they say, it’s a model for what can be done when people pull together, take risks and put aside their differences to focus on the needs of others. They plan to develop curricula and distribute tools to help “teach this crucial lesson in activism and mobilization, so ordinary people can be empowered to once again do extraordinary things.”

“There is just so much cynicism these days,” said Michael Granoff, 44, one of Freedom 25′s co-chairs. “One person can make a difference. Your activism matters. … You cannot be excused for not acting when a young mother sits in a prison in Tehran, jailed by a regime.”

‘Crazy enough to marry’

Marina Garmize-Gorfinkel became a refusenik in Kiev, Ukraine, the day her grandfather died.

They were a small family — just Marina, her mother and her mother’s father. Everyone else in her mother’s family had been killed at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev, where Nazis gunned down nearly 34,000 Jews in two days in September 1941. Marina’s father had died of a stroke when she was only 7.

Now it was 1979, and Marina was 19. She had applied for exit visas for the three of them and been refused. With her grandfather gone, she would fight for herself and her mother. She began organizing protests against the government.

She was a small woman, only 5-foot-1, but the Soviet regime considered her activism a threat. She was warned to stop, arrested three times and beaten twice. In 1980, police forced her into a cell, sent in 30 drunken men and told them to rape her.

One of the men recognized her as the daughter of his own girl’s beloved kindergarten teacher. He protected Marina from being raped but couldn’t stop the beatings, which left her hospitalized for several months. When she got out, she and her mother left town and headed to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, another Soviet republic at the time and now an independent country.

The people there, she said, were kinder and the KGB and police less fierce. Through other refuseniks, she eventually met Lev Furman, an Orthodox Jew 13 years her senior. He was religious in ways she knew nothing about. He taught Hebrew underground when Zionism and teaching the language were forbidden. His first wife had left him when the KGB threats became too much.

“He said, ‘Look, I need a wife. I need someone who can help me if I’m arrested,’ ” Marina remembered. Only immediate relatives could visit someone in prison or make appeals on their behalf. She told him, “Fine, we’ll get married on paper. I’ll help you.” But Lev liked her and wanted a real marriage. She agreed. The two wed within a week, in July 1986, and she moved with him to Leningrad (which has returned to its historical name of St. Petersburg).

“We took big risks in life. Marrying someone you’d known for a week wasn’t the biggest risk,” she said. “We were both only children and never knew if we’d survive another day. And we’d both found someone crazy enough to marry us.”

They continued their fight for freedom and were bolstered by visitors from around the world. Lev was committed to building a Jewish resistance where there was next to no Jewish life. He worked with young people and distributed textbooks and copies of Leon Uris’ “Exodus” that had been smuggled in by others. Young women from Finland, which shared an open border at the time, brought Lev books sewn into the linings of their coats.

Almost immediately after they married, Marina became pregnant. The KGB found a new way to threaten her. They said they would kill Marina when she gave birth if the Furmans didn’t stop their activism.

She was inclined to listen, but Lev wouldn’t have it. The tide was shifting. Gorbachev was now in power, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika — openness and reform — were just beginning. Gorbachev had freed Anatoly Sharansky, the poster boy for the Soviet Jewry movement, in February 1986.

Sharansky — who later changed his name to Natan and became an Israeli politician, human rights activist and author — had been sentenced in 1977 to 13 years of forced labor in a Siberian prison camp, or gulag. But he was released four years early. Sharansky was now traveling the U.S., speaking on college campuses and drumming up support for a huge rally in Washington. All signs pointed to change. Now wasn’t the time to give up.

Marina, who understood the importance of communicating with the outside world, had taught herself English by studying a dictionary and listening to the BBC and Voice of America. She wrote a letter to a contact in Great Britain about the latest threat against her. It was passed to the BBC, which broadcast the letter every day for a week.

This infuriated the KGB as much as it rallied the movement. After the threat became public, the Furmans had visitors from abroad nearly every day. Articles were written about them. Letters poured in by the hundreds, from not just activists but politicians, including U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy. Letter-writing campaigns flooded the heads of the Soviet government, the KGB and immigration officials.

“If your name was known, it was like insurance,” Marina said.

Unable to see his sick wife for a week after she gave birth, Lev Furman painted a message on a wall outside the hospital.

Even with all the attention, Marina nearly died when an IV line feeding an overdose of medication, supposedly for a weakened heart, was given to her during labor. A doctor who found her alone in a room, away from the other new mothers, saved her. She remained in the maternity hospital for a week, but Lev was barred from seeing her or knowing what was going on. On a wall outside the hospital, he painted her a message: “Marishka, you are my hero!”

Their newborn baby, Aliyah, seemed to arrive determined not to add to her parents’ stress.

She slept through the night from the day they brought her home. The KGB ransacked the family’s small apartment when Aliyah was 2 months old, and she didn’t even wake up.

“God gives everyone what they can handle,” Marina said.

Finding a cause — and a voice

People had tried for years to get Constance “Connie” Smukler and her husband, Joseph, involved. But the Philadelphia couple already had their causes, and these Soviet Jews were faceless, their issues foreign.

Starting in 1973, their perspective changed when the matter became personal. They were visiting Israel when they met and befriended a man who begged them to help free his brother.

Irma Chernyak had applied for an exit visa and been denied. The request to leave cost him his job. The aeronautical scientist was now operating elevators — and going on hunger strikes.

Connie tried to bring attention to his story by calling media and speaking about him in synagogue. But she wanted to know more about the man for whom she was fighting. “I can’t keep working for him without meeting him,” she told her husband. So in July 1974, with the kids off to summer camp, the Smuklers made their first trip to the Soviet Union.

They spent their days meeting with refuseniks in apartments they found by memorizing addresses or referencing information written in code. Believing the flats were bugged, they brought magic slates, the child’s toy that lets a person write on a plastic sheet, then lift it to erase the words.

In one Moscow flat, they sat and waited as, one by one, refuseniks came to see them. Having studied their faces, names and bios over the past year, they had become “like movie stars” to the Smuklers. “There’s Slepak, Lunts, Prestin, Abramovich,” Connie said, remembering that day. “It was an embarrassment of riches. We were seeing all of them.”

When they finally met with Irma Chernyak, they fell in love with him, Connie said.

“When we said goodbye, we didn’t know what would happen to him, and I started to cry,” she said. “He said, ‘Connie, don’t cry for me. For the first time in my life, I’m a man, not a mouse.’”

They saw Chernyak again in the summer of 1975 and told him they’d return to see him a year later. But in February 1976, at 4 a.m., their home phone rang. The Israeli Embassy in Vienna, Austria, was calling. “We just want you to know that Irma Chernyak has come out of the Soviet Union, and he wanted us to call you.”

The embassy planned to send him to Israel, but the Smuklers had other ideas. The couple was flying to Brussels, Belgium, the next day to attend a world conference on Soviet Jewry, and they wanted Chernyak to join them. They also suspected he had been released ahead of the conference on purpose; letting people go made the Soviets look better.

At the gathering, the Smuklers realized how global this movement had become. There were delegations from countries where they knew activism was strong, such as Britain and France. But there were also delegations from countries that surprised them, including Argentina, Mexico and Zaire (now known as Democratic Republic of the Congo).

As the lights went down, the Israeli delegation walked on stage. Among them were Israeli leaders such as Menachem Begin and Golda Meir. Each one held a candle.

Connie Smukler, center, meets with prominent refuseniks in a Moscow flat in 1975. Natan Sharansky is standing.

What happened next still makes Connie cry.

“The last one was Irma (Chernyak),” she said, her voice cracking. “He was the newest Israeli citizen.”

Soviet Jews had become pawns, author Beckerman said — let go when the Kremlin needed good PR and refused when anger at the West was strongest. After the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, for example, the numbers dropped.

Much of the concern was about appearances. To let people flee in droves, Beckerman said, would be an admission that life under the Soviet regime wasn’t paradise.

“The threat of people leaving was an existential one,” he said. “The leaders didn’t believe their own propaganda at the end, but they needed the people to believe.”

In the 1970s, Connie became a target of Soviet propaganda herself. She began receiving hundreds of letters from citizens who’d been told by the KGB to tell her how wonderful their lives were. She had to sign for each envelope. Eventually, she told her confused and concerned postman the whole story. The letters kept coming for five years.

Connie, now 74 and recently widowed, was one of 12,000 who traveled from Philadelphia to Washington for the December 1987 rally. Like so many other American Jews at that time, the suburban housewife and mother of three didn’t want to stand by silently as she believed her parents’ generation had done during the Holocaust. In the process, she found her voice.

“I became a very independent young woman,” she said. “My raison d’être for the rest of my life is to get this story out.”

Threats of Siberia

The Smuklers were in this fight with others across the country, including Joel and Adele Sandberg of Miami, who raised their three kids in the Soviet Jewry movement.

People gathered in their home for meetings. When refuseniks got out and went on speaking tours, they’d stay in the Sandberg home. The kids were schlepped to protests whenever a Moscow-based circus, symphony or ballet came to town.

The Sandbergs enlisted the help of people outside the Jewish community. They armed hundreds of tourists with letters, books and jeans and sent them to the Soviet Union to meet with refuseniks and gather information. Selling a pair of jeans on the black market could feed a family for a month. The case histories of refuseniks were published and distributed to media, members of Congress and activists worldwide.

Joel, a 69-year-old ophthalmologist, was active in a group that tracked prisoners’ health and made sure refuseniks got medicines they needed. When they learned the Soviet regime was forcing some refuseniks into psychiatric hospitals, having deemed them crazy for wanting to leave, they made noise.

“At one point,” he said, describing the lengths they’d go to help someone in need, “we sent over a heart valve with a congressman.”

Adele and Joel Sandberg present their book of refusenik case histories to Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 1978.

In 1975, leaving their 6, 4 and 2-year-old kids with grandparents, the couple made their only trip to the Soviet Union.

Their unintended last stop was Kishinev (now Chisinau), the capital of Moldova.

After passing through a group of KGB men keeping watch outside an apartment building, they climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of Mark Abramovich, the leader of the city’s refusenik community.

“We are friends from Miami,” they said. They had arrived unannounced and were the first American visitors to Kishinev in more than a year.

Abramovich opened the door. “Are you afraid?” he asked.

“No,” Adele remembered answering (“Of course, I was scared to death,” she admitted later.)

“I, too, am not afraid,” he answered. “Come in.”

Over the course of four nights, Abramovich brought refuseniks to the apartment to meet with the couple. When the Sandbergs would leave, an escort would take them back to their hotel and point out the plain-clothed KGB agents. “See that lady on the bus? She’s KGB.”

Then it happened. The morning they were leaving Kishinev for their next stop, KGB agents stopped them as they left their hotel room with their luggage. The men led them to a small room in the hotel. They took their passports and said they’d be deported to Siberia. They were scared but believed the threat was empty. There were plenty of stories of Americans being tossed out of the Soviet Union, but none of outsiders being sent off to Siberia.

For 10 hours, the Sandbergs were peppered with questions. The three officials wanted to know who sent them, where they’d been, who’d they’d seen.

The agents played good cop, bad cop. One would scream a question in Russian. Another would translate it screaming in English. A third would offer them a drink. “Of course, we were afraid to drink,” Adele said. They knew to stay vague and speak carefully.

When the agents started to search Joel, Adele panicked. Hidden inside her underwear were all the notes they’d gathered about the refuseniks they’d met, information that was critical to their case histories and getting them help.

She pulled a tampon from her pocketbook and made a big scene about needing to use the bathroom. Once inside, she sat on the toilet and frantically memorized her notes. She struggled to keep the names straight, they sounded so alike, before ripping up the papers and flushing them down the toilet as agents came in to take her back for more questioning.

When Adele was given a piece of paper to sign and told to describe what she was doing in Kishinev, she wrote about wanting to find her roots.

The announcement that they’d be released came suddenly: “There’s a train going to Romania, and you’ll be on the train.”

The Sandbergs foolishly asked if they could instead go to Moscow.

“Well, you can stay, and we’ll do this again tomorrow,” an agent said. So they got on the train to Romania.

For four days in Romania, while they waited for a flight to the West, they were followed. Even as the plane was about to take off, they held their breath. Two uniformed men walked directly to their seats, demanded their passports and checked to be sure the right people were leaving. After they landed in Vienna, the Sandbergs kissed the ground.

Comfort in ‘social network’

The Sandbergs’ oldest daughter, Sheryl, was raising awareness with her own brand of activism. She was only 1 when she attended her first rally for Soviet Jews, the Miami Herald once wrote. By 8, she was sending letters to her Soviet “twin,” Kira Volvovsky, as part of a program that matched children of refuseniks with young American Jews.

Kira Volvovksy with her father, Leonid (who became Ari, after moving to Israel), in 1971.

Kira’s parents first applied for exit visas in 1974. Within 48 hours, they’d lost their jobs in computer science.

Six years later, in advance of the Olympic Games, the family was among the “undesirables” exiled from Moscow to Gorky, a city 250 miles to the east and now known as Nizhny Novgorod.

Kira said she was the only Jewish girl in her school. She heard the jokes and guarded her words. She often felt alone.

She found comfort in letters she received from American peers.

With only so many children of refuseniks to go around, Kira had almost 100 pen pals. They’d write about their dreams, share anxieties about upcoming tests, worry about boys — and realize they weren’t so different. Her “twins” would say prayers on her behalf and tell her story at their bat mitzvah ceremonies.

These girls became what Kira called her “social network” — a fitting description given that Sheryl is now the COO of Facebook.

“I remember feeling when I was writing these girls, and they were writing me, that we had the same issues,” said Kira. “They wrote about the same stuff I was feeling.”

Sheryl Sandberg declined to be interviewed. But Kira said what she remembers about her most “is she had such pretty handwriting and the stationary was so beautiful. I remember copying her handwriting because I wanted to write like an American girl.”

While she and her pen pals often thought about the same things, Kira’s path was paved with challenges her American counterparts couldn’t fathom.

Her father taught Hebrew and Jewish studies underground. He wanted nothing more than to go to Israel. But in 1985, he was arrested for slandering the Soviet regime and sent to Siberia, where he toiled in a forced labor camp for a year and nine months.

His arrest aroused an international outcry. Author, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote about Kira’s dad in The New York Times.

He worked in a plant making 70-pound stone blocks and, after an accident, sewed covers for tree trunks to be used during Siberian winters. Kira and her mother were able to see him only once, for four hours, during that time. They flew 11 hours each way for that chance.

His hands were ruined, she remembered, and “he was half of himself.”

Kira’s parents encouraged her to apply for a visa on her own when she was 19. She was granted one almost immediately in late 1987 and arrived in Israel four days after the rally in Washington. Her parents got visas two weeks later and joined her. She doesn’t know whether the rally helped gain their release, but she suspects it did.

Kira Volvovsky in Jerusalem, 25 years after she arrived in Israel.

Now 44, Kira lives in Jerusalem with her husband and their three children; she works as a Web developer and designer. Her father teaches physics and math in a yeshiva. To this day, he still cannot make fists with his hands.

The path to freedom

As the Furmans approached their certain arrest that December morning in Leningrad’s Palace Square a little more than 25 years ago, they weren’t afraid. Lev, who’d found solace in his religion in a land where being religious was nearly impossible, believed God had put them on this path and would protect them.

Marina had learned long ago not to think about worst-case scenarios. In all their years of trying to secure visas to leave the Soviet Union — 10 years for Marina, 14 for Lev — they could have been sent to Siberia or “accidentally” run over by cars, simply forgotten. She’d survived an attempt on her life when her daughter was born. Little could rattle her now. She also felt like she didn’t have a choice.

“I couldn’t imagine my daughter having the same life I had,” she said.

After the police and KGB tried to scare them by pretending to dump Aliyah from her carriage, the Furmans were shoved into a bus, taken to a local prison and interrogated.

“Who helped you prepare for the protest? Are you working for the Zionist lobby? Why do you say these horrible things about our country? Do you think your American friends will get you out of prison? Do you think they care? What are you planning to do next?”

The Furmans had played this game so many times before. Now, with hundreds of thousands descending on Washington for the rally, they played it once more.

Lev didn’t say a word, the approach he’d always taken. Marina gave short answers. “No one helped us. We are not connected to anyone. We just want to live in Israel.” That last sentence she’d say repeatedly, whenever they kept pushing: “We just want to live in Israel.”

They were then put in separate cells. Even 9-month-old Aliyah was alone in a cell for several hours before being returned to her mother.

When asked whether Aliyah cried during all of this, Marina said, “She did better. We put her on the table in the interrogation room, and she threw up on their papers.”

Marina and Aliyah were let go after five hours. Lev was detained for 10 days.

He got out the first day of Hanukkah that year, and on the last day of the eight-day Jewish festival, the Furmans were finally granted visas to leave the Soviet Union. Marina’s mother came to Leningrad from Tbilisi to leave with them, as did Lev’s father.

Marina has no doubt that the rally in Washington, and to some degree her own family’s protest in Leningrad, forced the Soviet government to finally let her family go.

Marina and Lev Furman, with their baby Aliyah, took great risks to leave the Soviet Union.

“It wouldn’t have happened without that rally, or it would have happened much later,” she said. “The D.C. rally showed Gorbachev how powerful the Soviet Jewry movement really was and that for the American people, it was a human rights issue and not just a Jewish issue.

“I don’t think he had the courage to start the reforms, and when he found out about the rally, it really changed him.”

A year after the rally, Gorbachev spoke to the United Nations about changes in the Soviet Union, saying “the problem of exit and entry is also being resolved in a humane spirit” and “the problem of the so-called ‘refuseniks’ is being removed.”

And in late 1991, soon before the Soviet Union dissolved, Gorbachev ended what the Chicago Tribune called “three quarters of a century of official silence about the treatment of Jews.”

In a statement tied to the 50th anniversary of the massacre at Babi Yar, Gorbachev admitted that “the poisonous seeds of anti-Semitism arose even on Soviet soil.”

“The Stalinist bureaucracy, publicly decrying anti-Semitism, in practice used it to isolate the country from the outside world,” he said. “The right to emigrate has been granted, but I say frankly that we, society, deeply regret the departure of our countrymen and that the country is losing so many talented, skilled and enterprising citizens.”

The Furmans went to Israel, where they had a second daughter, Michal, now 18; in 1998, they moved to a suburb of Philadelphia. Lev, 65, an aviation engineer who’d been barred from his field in the Soviet Union, now works as a spiritual counselor to Russian Jews in hospice — helping them find peace in their final days. He goes to synagogue regularly and studies Torah on the Jewish Sabbath.

Marina, 53, is a regional director of the Jewish National Fund, a nonprofit that builds parks, forests and reservoirs in Israel, in addition to offering education and desert revitalization programs. And, on occasion, she speaks about her experiences.

While addressing Jewish college students recently, she asked them to raise their hands if they’d heard about the genocide in Rwanda. Every arm shot up. She asked if they’d heard of the Soviet Jewry movement. Only one student had. For this reason, she’ll keep speaking.

Aliyah, the baby who once threw up on prison interrogation room papers, is now a 25-year-old financial adviser living in Philadelphia.

When people ask where she’s from, she doesn’t know where to start.

Aliyah means “ascent” in Hebrew and is the term used to describe immigration to Israel. She can’t separate herself from what her parents fought for even if she wanted to.

“The story is tied to my name. It’s who I am,” she said. “My life now is enchanted, and it’s thanks to them.”

While she carries her parents’ past with her, she also thinks about those who came before them. The relatives who were gunned down by Nazis at Babi Yar. Others who died in the German siege of Leningrad. A grandfather whose first wife and twins were killed by Nazis, and his home taken over by others while he was off fighting for the Soviet Union.

When she thinks about her ancestors, her emotions catch on one theme: “I so wish they could see us now. Look where we are. Look at how proud we are to be Jewish. Look at the life we’re living and how much love our family has,” she said. “I just have to believe they’re looking down from heaven and seeing.”

There’s a funny tension inside Aliyah. She knows her parents struggled so she could have a normal life. When they were her age, they were being trailed and arrested by KGB agents, risking their lives in the struggle for a people’s freedom. Today, Aliyah runs half marathons, can’t get enough of Pitt football and hangs out with friends in bars.

The Furmans — from left, Michal, Aliyah, Marina and Lev — visit St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) for closure in 2012.

“They fought so I wouldn’t have to,” she said.

She knows the normalcy she enjoys gives her parents great pleasure. When they cheer her on in races, she says they yell louder than anyone. Still, Aliyah feels an obligation to look beyond herself and be a part of change. Her parents had no choice but to fight. They couldn’t have succeeded, though, without others across the globe who chose to be engaged.

“It sometimes feels like life is too easy, and we forget that there are things that are important to stand up for,” she said. “People hate controversy and hate making people uncomfortable, so they’re silent — and that’s dangerous. We need to remember the world is bigger than us.”

It’s a lesson she hopes she, her peers and others — no matter their cause or passion — will be strong enough to embrace and keep teaching.

Click the above link to view it, or read an excerpt below:

Prof. Dr. Heiner Bielefeldt
Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland

Dear Mr. Rapporteur,
We write as an informal group of organizations and individuals who are scholars, religious leaders, human rights advocates and practitioners to express our deep concern about rising restrictions on religion in the Republic of Kazakhstan. According to the 2012 Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “Conditions for religious freedom declined sharply in Kazakhstan during the reporting period.”

We urge you to visit Kazakhstan at the earliest possible opportunity, perform a review of the situation, identify existing and emerging obstacles to the enjoyment of the right to freedom of religion or belief, and present recommendations on ways and means to overcome these obstacles.

Your visit would be consistent with recommendations that were made to Kazakhstan in 2010 as part of the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR). In fact, Kazakhstan accepted the recommendation “To reach out to the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief to arrange a visit at the earliest possible opportunity (United States of America).”

At the same time, Kazakhstan rejected the recommendation “To abolish requirements for the registration of religious groups from the existing Administrative Code, in accordance with the laws adopted in 2005 on the elimination of extremism and the strengthening national security, and to review the provisions of the Law on Freedom of Religion and Religious Associations in order to effectively guarantee freedom of belief and a non-discriminatory legal system for the registration of religious entities (Mexico).”

Further, Kazakhstan rejected the recommendation “To consider the rules for the registration of religious groups, and to take steps to promote interfaith harmony, including with regard to those faiths considered to be non-traditional in the country, in order to adhere to the Constitution and to international norms (Norway).”

Finally, the subsequent rising restrictions on religion are the result of two new laws that were enacted without debate and signed by President Nazarbaev in October 2011 – a new Religion Law and an Administrative Code Law that amends nine other laws and legal provisions related to religious activity and religious associations.

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