VITEBSK, Belarus – The latest incarnation of Limmud FSU (former Soviet Union) took place for the first time in Belarus over the weekend, one of the most storied countries in Jewish history.

Once home to a thriving Jewish community decimated by World War II, Belarus produced nine Israeli presidents, two Nobel Prize laureates and dozens of world-class rabbis, intellectuals and artists. Notable among these figures are President Shimon Peres, former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, former president Chaim Weizmann, the Soloveitchik rabbinical dynasty, and renowned artists Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Nahum Goldmann.

In Vitebsk, a four-hour drive outside the capital of Minsk, over 500 young Jewish men and women converged from Friday to Sunday to learn more about their shared history.

Even Peres’s daughter, celebrated linguist and author Prof. Tzvia Walden, flew in from Israel with her husband, Sheba Medical Center deputy director Prof. Raphael Walden, to speak at the historic conference and to honor her father’s childhood home outside of Minsk.

“I am honored to be here to represent my father,” said Walden when the Belarus government designated his modest childhood home a national monument last week. “I know he would have been so happy to be here with all of you.”

Still, Belarus’s tragic history – shrouded by the mass murder of 800,000 Jews who had lived there for centuries – was never far from the minds of the many participants who traveled from other FSU countries, America and Israel to attend the gathering.

“We must never forget the genocide that took place here,” said famed Belarus architect Leonid Levin, who is chairman of the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Organizations and Communities, on Friday at a memorial site where 5,000 Jews were slaughtered. “This is our past. This is part of who we are.”

Prominent philanthropist and businessman Matthew Bronfman, who chairs Limmud FSU’s International Steering Committee, said he had traveled from New York to attend the conference in Vitebsk to help reconnect young Jews with a once-severed history.

“Our conferences embody the very spirit, energy and excitement of a new and young generation who are eager to reconnect with their own rich intellectual and religious heritage, from which they and their parents were cut off during 70 years of Communist rule,” he said.

He added that Limmud was “a revolutionary approach to questions of Jewish identity and education, and has become an inseparable part of the circle of Jewish life for young and not-so-young Russian-speaking adults.”

The volunteer-driven Limmud Jewish education conferences, first conceived in Britain 33 years ago, have since branched out internationally in nearly 10 countries, including Canada, Australia, the US, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, and most recently Belarus.

Limmud FSU was founded in 2006 by Chaim Chelser, of Israel, co-founded by Sandra Cahn, of New York, and Mikhail Chlenov, of Russia, and Aaron Frenkel, of Monte Carlo, is the president. The organization presents world-class Jewish scholars and professionals on topics including Diaspora Jews in the 21st century, Jewish art history, Torah and business, Israeli society, science and the soul, Jewish philosophy and Jewish-themed dance classes.

“We combined Limmud with Vitebsk, the capital of culture of the former Soviet Union – the country of Chagall and many other distinguished artists, as well as the former home to two great Israeli leaders and Nobel Prize winners, Shimon Peres and Menachem Begin,” said Chesler.

He praised the governments of Minsk and Brest, known to be politically restrictive, for having agreed to honor Peres’s childhood home and recognize Begin.

“It is a great achievement for Limmud to work on a joint effort of this kind with these governments, and shows that there is still a future for Jews in this part of the world,” he said.

Yana Osipova, an 18-yearold college student from Belarus, said Sunday that she was attending the conference to learn from world-class professionals.

“I belong to a Jewish club in my city and I live a Jewish life, so this project is interesting to me because many interesting people with different interests are here, and they’re willing to share their experience and knowledge with other people, and they do it with pleasure,” she said.

She added that there was “no problem being Jewish in Belarus.”

“There are some people who sometimes laugh at Jews, but that’s not a problem – especially when you meet and learn from people like this,” she said.

Participants certainly had a breadth of options, with speakers including senior Peres adviser Yoram Dori; Susan Goodman-Turnarkin, senior curator emeritus at the Jewish Museum of New York; Israeli Ambassador to Belarus Yosef Shagal; director, producer and screenwriter Boris Maftsir; and actor and director Shmuel Atzmon, founder of the Yiddishpiel Theater in Tel Aviv.

Vasilisa Smirnova, a cosmetics business developer from Moldova, said this was her seventh Limmud conference.

“I’ve become a Limmud addict,” she said over the weekend. “For me, this is important because I find Jewish culture very deep and very wise, and because I am young and looking for answers. I have found that Jewish culture helps me find answers to questions like, ‘Who I am in this world?’ and ‘What I should do?’” Kate Kozenkova, a 19-yearold college student, traveled four hours from Minsk to attend the conference, even though she is not Jewish.

“It’s a great opportunity to meet new people from all over the world, and I think it’s a good forum for promoting Belarus, which I love,” she said. “I think that the Jewish culture and community are great. I have never seen such close relationships between people who have never met before – they speak and connect with their hearts.”

While Kozenkova said she did not have any Jewish friends in Minsk, she noted enthusiastically that she had made several over the two days of the conference.

“For me, it’s your culture that I love – there are so many unbelievably interesting things about it that inspire me,” she said.

The people, she continued, “are so open and kind….

They smile at each other and are like a big family, and it doesn’t matter where I’m from or what I do…. It’s like an island paradise of Limmud.”

For Julia Davyelava, a musician and English teacher from Belarus, the Vitebsk event was her first Limmud conference.

“I wanted to learn what Limmud was all about because I’m a creative person and have interests in different spheres – philosophy, psychology, religion and literature,” she said. “I attended amazing lectures and now feel like I’m taking with me a little piece of gold from the beauty I saw here.”

While the vast majority of attendees said they were pleased with the lectures at the event, Anastasia Rosenberg, a Jewish Agency employee from Moscow who has attended five conferences, said she was disappointed by Vitebsk’s limited offerings on art history.

“I was an art history major, and I had hoped for more information about art in the sessions, since Chagall is from here, but I felt that the presenters were too broad in their presentations,” she said. “I just wish they offered more details about the art of great Jewish artists like him, and not general facts that I already knew.”

Despite her complaint, though, she said she was grateful for the program’s overall ability to educate her in a number of other areas of Jewish history and culture.

“Every Limmud is a step forward in life because you learn so much every time you attend,” she said. “This is why I keep coming.”

Natasha Lukyanava, a pianist and English translator from Minsk, said Limmud organizers had paid for her to attend the conference when health problems left her short of cash.

“I wasn’t able to pay to come because I was having trouble with my back and was unable to work,” she said. “But I wanted to come because I wanted knowledge – it’s just something from inside me. And Limmud let me come without paying.”

She said organizers had provided her with train and hotel fare so she could meet a friend at the conference, who helped her over the two days.

“I thought, if God wants me here, He will provide for me,” she said with a smile.

“And He did.”

She added that it was her dream to make aliya one day.

“I have been to Jerusalem a couple of times, and I really felt connected to it – like the saying, ‘If I forget Jerusalem, may my right arm wither away,’” she continued. “I felt like [Israelis] were my family, and I hope to come back to see them again soon. I feel like it is my country because the Old City’s Jewish Quarter has an atmosphere like Minsk.”

Meanwhile, Limmud FSU COO Roman Kogan, who has been instrumental in arranging all of the program’s conferences throughout the former Soviet Union, America and Israel, said he was delighted at how well Belarus’s first Limmud panned out.

“We are very proud to launch the Limmud FSU project in Belarus,” he said after the conference concluded.

“We worked very hard for many years to make this happen, and for the first conference here, it was brilliant in terms of the quality of the program.”

He thanked the numerous volunteers and presenters who had contributed.

“For Belarus it’s a huge project, because it gives the young generation of Belarus Jews an alternative platform for building their Jewish community and life, and I hope it will become a regular Limmud destination and continue to grow, because Belarus has a very rich Jewish history.”

Indeed, Kogan said he hoped Limmud would help reestablish a Jewish presence in a land where Jews once thrived and contributed to the world.

“We hope Limmud will contribute its own piece to this colorful mosaic for today’s Jews,” he said.

The synagogue and surrounding complex will be handed over to the Jewish Community of Tomsk after the municipality finds alternative housing for some 15 families who are currently living there, Mayor Nikolay Nikolaychuk said, according to Chabad.org.

The rabbi of Tomsk, Levi Kaminetsky, told JTA that the city will invest about $1 million in finding the families apartments.

The wooden synagogue, he said, was built 107 years ago by Jewish Cantonists, young children torn away from their homes to serve in the Czar’s army. It is in need of major renovation and may end up serving as Tomsk’s second synagogue, or a school for the children of the community of a few hundred Jews.

Also last week, a new Torah scroll was introduced into the city’s functioning synagogue, Or Avner, and the cornerstone was laid for the construction of a new Jewish community center.

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.

Since 2004, it has served as a lifeline for religious minorities fleeing the Islamic theocracy of Iran.

The amendment, named for the U.S. senator from New Jersey who introduced the measure, has kept open a critical path to American safe haven for certain foreigners persecuted because of their religion.

That path was in danger of closing early this month. The amendment was subject to a sunset clause — meaning that funding had to be renewed every five years — and the sequester’s across-the-board programming cuts did not augur well.

But on March 6, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives handed the program a lifeline when they included it in a “continuing resolution,” a stopgap measure that funds critical government programs while Congress and the White House continue to negotiate a budget. The resolution passed by a vote of 267 to 151. It now goes to the Democratic-led Senate, where leaders have said they will work to pass a version that both parties and the White House can stomach.

“We’re grateful to House leadership and appropriators for including this provision to protect Iranian religious minorities,” said Melanie Nezer, the policy director for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the lead Jewish group advocating for the amendment’s renewal. “This is probably the only way this provision could be extended this year, and it looks like there’s a good chance Congress will reopen the door soon to those needing to flee Iran.”

The amendment hit a roadblock in 2011 when the Republicans recaptured the House and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) ascended to the chairmanship of the body’s Judiciary Committee. Smith, a hardliner on immigration, at first would not allow the amendment to advance to appropriations, saying his committee needed to take a closer look.

“Whether some potential refugees should be singled out for special treatment is open to question,” Smith wrote in a May 2011 rebuttal to National Review, a conservative magazine that had joined an array of liberal and conservative opinion makers in advocating for the amendment.

In 2012, incremental extensions of the amendment managed to get through despite Smith’s opposition, and the amendment was extended through Sept. 30. With the new Congress, Smith lost his chairmanship because of term limits, but for months it wasn’t clear whether the amendment would pass.

In recent years, the primary beneficiaries of the provision have been Iranians. Under the amendment, religious minorities in Iran may apply for visas to travel to Austria, where U.S. officials consider their eligibility. The program processes some 2,000 applicants a year, mostly from Iran, although some former Soviet Union applicants also are accommodated. Iranians eligible under the amendment include Jews, Christians and Baha’is.

Overall, the Lautenberg Amendment is believed to have opened the door to some 400,000 people, many of them Jews and Christians from the former Soviet Union, but also religious minorities in Vietnam and Burma.

Last Friday, Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, raised the amendment’s precarious status in a meeting on immigration reform between President Obama and leaders of immigration groups.

“It makes no sense that every year we have to fight to get protection for Iranian refugees fleeing persecution,” Hetfield said he told the president. “This, too, should be fixed.”

The Chicago Jewish Federation, involved for years in absorbing Jewish and other refugees into the city, has been a lead group in lobbying for Lautenberg’s renewal.

“A lot of people have been helped by this, and not just Jews,” said David Prystowksy, director of government affairs for the Chicago federation. “Especially in the situation with Iran where we don’t have an embassy, this specific lifeline is critical.”

The amendment was designed to open up an avenue for emigration for Soviet Jews who did not qualify for refugee status, which in the United States requires proof of a risk to life or freedom for an applicant. Instead, the Lautenberg amendment requires proof that a member of a designated minority faith is subject to discrimination, for instance in hiring practices or at educational institutions.

With its inclusion in the continuing resolution approved by the House, the amendment is all but guaranteed survival. It has the backing of two influential Senate champions, Lautenberg himself and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

Even with passage, however, the latest continuing resolution lapses on Sept. 30. Advocates of the amendment want it to become permanent law.

“If the program isn’t authorized within a year, it could shut down,” warned Stephan Kline, a lobbyist for the Jewish Federations of North America. “It’s more difficult to get a program up and running than to keep it running.”

Permanence would make sense, said Joel Rubin, a former top aide to Lautenberg who now is director of policy for the Ploughshares Fund, a group that advocates nuclear disarmament.

“It served to shine a light on religious intolerance in the Soviet Union,” he said. “It goes to the core principles of our country, which is religious freedom and a safe harbor.”

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov led some 1,000 zealots who laid carnations at Stalin’s grave by the Kremlin wall in Moscow, praising him as a symbol of the nation’s “great victories” and saying that Russia needs to rely on this “unique experience” to overcome its problems.

Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Communists and other hardliners credit him with leading the country to victory in World War II and turning it into a nuclear superpower, while critics condemn his repressions. Historians estimate that more than 800,000 people were executed during the purges that peaked during the Great Terror in the late 1930s, and millions more died of harsh labor and cruel treatment in the giant Gulag prison camp system, mass starvation in Ukraine and southern Russia and deportations of ethnic minorities.

“Those repressions touched every city, town, and village,” Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the presidential human rights council, said on Tuesday. “We can never forget this.”

The liberal Moskovskie Novosti’s cover Tuesday read “Stalin. Farewell” with the dictator’s face scribbled over with childish graffiti, while staunch Communist daily Sovetskaya Rossiya ran a cover story on Stalin headlined “His time will come.”

An opinion survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment found Stalin has remained widely admired in Russia and other ex-Soviet nations despite his repressions. Its authors noted that public attitudes to the dictator have improved during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 13-year rule, as the Kremlin has found Stalin’s image useful in its efforts to tighten control.

Roman Fomin, who organized a group laying carnations at the grave, said a leader like Stalin “would definitely be for the good of the country and the country would be developing much better than it is now.”

Putin, whose professed ideology draws heavily from Soviet statism, has made efforts to give Stalin a more positive historical evaluation. School history textbooks have been released stressing Stalin’s role as an “effective manager” of the 1930s Soviet industrialization campaign, though historians express far greater skepticism about his supposed economic achievements.

Liberal newspaper Vedomosti dismissed “the crazy dichotomy of achievements and losses” in an editorial Tuesday. “You can’t put economic achievements and human losses side by side, but even if you try, you won’t find any justification for the Stalin myth,” it said.

Pro-Kremlin lawmakers campaigned this year to rename the city of Volgograd to Stalingrad — its name from 1925 to 1961 — in commemoration of the battle against Nazi Germany there, widely considered both World War II’s bloodiest and its turning point. Most Russians, however, oppose the move and see Stalin’s death primarily as the end of an era of political repression, according to a poll by the independent Levada Center published Monday.

Opposition politicians have criticized the government for failing to clearly condemn Stalin’s repressions. Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal former presidential candidate, demanded Tuesday that the government “recognize what happened as a crime” and compensate Gulag prisoners who built some of Russia’s biggest industrial enterprises, including metals giant Norilsk Nickel.

Much of the resurgence in Stalin’s popularity owes itself to nostalgic perceptions of him as a strong leader in line with Russian traditions, rather than a longing to reinstate Communist dictatorship. One old woman made the sign of the cross after laying flowers at his grave; another carried a drawing of him in the style of Russian Orthodox Christian icons.

A surprisingly large number of Russians even believe that Stalin had mystical powers. As recently as 2003, about 750,000 people voted for a party that aimed to continue what it said was Stalin’s attempt to battle the ancient Egyptian priesthood of Ra, which supposedly runs the world from its base in Switzerland. Zavtra, a newspaper run by a popular novelist and columnist, frequently runs pieces like one from about the same time predicting that Stalin would return from the dead and saying that “if you put your ear to the Volga steppe outside Stalingrad you can hear his footsteps.”

“Russian society is living through a period of crisis of historical consciousness and, in my view, the only remedy for this ailment is creating an archive describing” the Stalin era, said Andrei Sorokin, Director of the Russian Archive of Socio-Political History.

In 1989, at the peak of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to liberalize the country and expose Stalinist crimes, only 12 percent of Russians polled described Stalin as one of the most prominent historical figures, while in the Carnegie poll last year, 42 percent of Russian respondents did so.

The poll revealed that the dictator also has continued to enjoy wide popularity in his native Georgia, where 45 percent of respondents expressed a positive view of him. Efforts to shed the nation’s Soviet legacy by Georgia’s pro-Western President Mikhail Saakashvili have failed to change public perceptions of Stalin.

Georgian communists, who flocked to Stalin’s hometown of Gori for the anniversary on Tuesday, hope that the government of Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose bloc defeated Saakashvili’s party in parliamentary elections last fall, will restore the Stalin monument torn down on Saakashvili’s orders.

“Stalin has given a new impulse to the development of mankind,” said 58-year old history teacher Aliko Lursmanashvili who heads the Gori branch of Georgia’s Stalin Society uniting the dictator’s admirers.

Mixing communist symbols with religious rites, communist participants in the rally went to a local church to light candles to remember Stalin after they had rolled up their red flags.

____

Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili contributed to this report from Gori, Georgia.

The gravestones will be transferred to the only remaining Jewish cemetery in the area.

Below is a translation of the letter Meylakh Sheykhet sent to the mayor of Lviv regarding a variety of issues involving Jewish cultural preservation, including the use of headstones as pavement:

Mr. Andriy Sadovy    

Mayor of Lviv

February 18, 2013

Dear Mr. Sadovy:

In response to your letter dated December 13, 2012 we would like to state the following:

On April 23, 2010 the Lviv City Council Executive Committee issued Decision No. 446 wherein it resolved to carry out the International Design Competition for Sites of Jewish History in Lviv in order to “motivate to reconsider and represent the important places in Lviv connected with the history of the Jewish community as part of a multicultural heritage of the city.”

Decision No. 446 is illegal as it involves land issues for the abovementioned places that can be decided upon exclusively by the elected members of the Lviv City Council.

In addition to the Lviv City Council Executive Committee the following organizers of the International Design Competition for Sites of Jewish History in Lviv were announced at a public hearing: Ukrainian-German project entitled Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv jointly executed by the Lviv City Administration and German Society for International Cooperation GTZ (headquartered at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Bohomoltsya 6 St., Lviv).

Decision No. 446 of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee was adopted in spite of its contents, which stated that the responsibility for the implementation of the competition was assigned to the Executive Committee, but during the public hearing, contrary to this, the responsibility for the competition was assigned to Sofiya Dyak, project coordinator at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe.

As seen from the text of the Decision, the legal basis of the competition was grounded in the municipal regulations of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee, without providing justification for this decision from relevant substantive law of Ukraine and international agreements, including the Agreement with UNESCO for the preservation of Ensemble of the Historic City Centre that had been inscribed in the World Heritage List.

The Lviv City Council Executive Committee breached the competition procedure in several ways:

1. The pre-requisite conditions of the competition were not agreed with the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Lviv Regional State Administration, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris, France and with the Jewish community of Lviv and the world.
2. Contrary to the Decision No. 446 the Lviv City Council Executive Committee removed itself from liability for the competition, delegating the powers to a foreign organization that has not been designated by any authority in the Decision No. 446.
3. The requirements mentioned in points 1.1 … 1.4,2.2 … 2.3, 3.1 … 3.15 of the Decree No. 231/806 dated November 30, 2004 by the State Committee of Ukraine on Building and Architecture at the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine were not kept.
4. The Law of Ukraine on Architectural Activity as well as the Regulation for the Organization of Competitions was not taken into account in the Decision No. 466 of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee.
5. The competition lacks important provisions:

5.1     Restrictions according to the special status of areas inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage List.

5.2     Special status of the land of burial sites at the Old Jewish Cemetery (Krakivsky market), places of mass execution by the German Nazis and the territory of the Yanivsky Camp, as recognized by the laws of Ukraine, international agreements between Ukraine and the United States as of March 4, 1994, the Vienna Convention 1969.

At the public hearing, the members of the City Council and Executive Committee, the Ukrainian community leaders, and representatives of the Jewish community of Lviv stated that the international competition and the way it was organized did not comply with the laws of Ukraine and international agreements, the interests of preserving the Jewish heritage in Lviv. It was stated that this competition had become a misrepresentation of historical truth, illegal appropriation of land, illegal granting of land to be used for the trading lots of the Krakivsky market and to build a hotel on Fedorova St. – the land, which belongs to the Lviv community – through unlawful delegation of crucial powers to foreign organizations, namely the German Technical Cooperation GTZ, project for the Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Bohomoltsya 6 St., Lviv).

The question of proper preservation of the cultural heritage is regulated not only by the above-mentioned provisions of the substantive law and international agreements, but also by the Protocol of 1996 following a meeting in Lviv, recommendations of USAID and the Government of Ukraine Decree dated December 21, 2010 and the Vienna Convention 1969.

However, despite the need for implementation of the grant of the U.S. Embassy, ​​the Lviv City Council organized a controversial competition, disregarding the existence of the U.S. Ambassador grant for scientific research in this same area of ​​the medieval Jewish district of Lviv on 23-27, 28 Fedorova Street. Thus, the Lviv City Council turned a blind eye to the ongoing international cooperation in the project under the US Ambassador Grant, ​​abandoning substantial assistance to the city of Lviv in the study and restoration of the medieval Jewish Quarter, and ignoring the decision of the Government of Ukraine and the request of UNESCO.

In view of the activities of the German Technical Cooperation GTZ, project for the Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv and Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, at 6 Bohomoltsya St., Lviv – the decision to delegate them the powers of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee has translated into a conflict of interests – a situation that contradicts the Rule of Law in Ukraine and its international agreements.

The Lviv City Council Executive Committee continues to ignore the need to honor the memorial places of the Jewish people in Lviv and the surrounding, tortured by the Holocaust, namely:

1. The Old Jewish Cemetery continues to be used at the behest of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee as a market place – the Krakivsky market – despite the status of this land as a burial site that forbids privatization and misuse of such land. Moreover, the Lviv City Council Executive Committee ignores the Decree of the Central Government dated December 21, 2012 – issued by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine concerning the inscription of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Lviv into the National Register of Monuments of Ukraine as a historical monument of local importance.
2. The Lviv City Council Executive Committee continues to defend in court the illegal construction of the hotel on the Fedorova St. 23-28, ignoring legislation and international agreements of Ukraine, requirements of the World Heritage Centre in Paris, ignoring the unique surviving synagogue building complex Turei Zahav, built during 16^th -18^th century and not facilitating their authentic preservation. The construction of the hotel, if it were to happen, would ruin – with its physical weight, communication requirements and historical architectural disharmony – the historic environment and the remnants of Turei Zahav (Golden Rose) Synagogue.
3. At the Citadel – Concentration Camp Shtalag-328, the site of the Tower of Death, where the German Nazis killed 20 000 Jews, among many other POWs from the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition – now operates a fashionable restaurant and other recreational facilities, disharmonious to this memorial site.
4. Regarding the mass graves in Bilohorshcha, Lysynychi, Vynnyky, Brukhovychi, in Lviv on Pasichna Street – the Lviv City Council Executive Committee did not give any positive response to the documents submitted by our organization.
5. With the acquiescence of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee there is an anti-Semitic “Jewish tavern” called At the Golden Rose and an anti-Ukrainian restaurant Kryivka.

Your references to the untidiness of the territory of the local Jewish history only emphasize the idleness on the part of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee in ensuring proper care for the historic sites (which does not cost so much) because timely and proper cleaning, monitoring respect for the parking ban on the holy memorial site of the Great Synagogue on Arsenalna square and other areas are part and parcel of the public utility services of the city. Actions of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee must clearly meet all the substantive law of Ukraine and international agreements in the field of preservation of historical and cultural heritage.

Hence we request you to:

1. Consider this letter and provide an answer based on the legislation of Ukraine and international agreements, the requirements of UNESCO.

2. Void the Decision No. 446 dated April 23, 2010 of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee.

Yours faithfully,

Meylakh Sheykhet

Director

By Adam Soclof

In 1948, prominent Yiddish theater actor and director Solomon Mikhoels died in what was later revealed to have been a political assassination ordered by Joseph Stalin’s security police chief Lavrenti Beria. (The death murder was believed by many, including his daughters, to have been carried out in the form of a staged car accident). A similar account was conveyed by a JTA writer in 1987:

He was sent to Minsk by the Cultural Affairs Ministry as a member of the Stalin Prize Committee, purportedly to inspect theaters. Late at night, on Jan. 13, 1948, he was called from his hotel by an official. He was mowed down by a truck, and although his death was reported an accident, it is generally believed that the KGB killed him. The Soviet government made an extraordinary funeral for Mikhoels, attended by tens of thousands of Jews.

As noted by JTA 50 years later, Mikhoels’ death marked the beginning of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Soviet Union that eased only after Stalin’s death in 1953.

In 1953, exactly five years after Mikhoels’ death, the Soviet newspaper Pravda published “The Doctors’ Plot,” an article that alleged a conspiracy by 9 doctors, 6 of them Jewish, to kill Soviet leaders with aid of American intelligence and the American Joint Distribution Committee.

Mikhoels was among the names identified in the plot, which Nikita S. Khrushchev later claimed was promulgated by Stalin. In 1957, Miron S. Vovsi, Mikhoels’ cousin and one of the doctors named in the plot, was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Read the CIA’s 1953 report detailing the Doctors’ Plot here.

PHOTO: Memorial tablet on the house in Daugavpils where Soviet Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels was born on Mar. 16, 1890. (Alma Pater, CC BY 3.0)

(h/t David B. Green of Haaretz)

Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia in the years after the fall of Communism, Masha Sergeeva, 21, grew up with limited understanding of—or pride in—her Jewish identity. That’s all changed now.

“My uncle, my mom’s brother was a refusnik, and went to Israel in the first aliyah in the ‘80s,” explains Masha. “But my mom worked as an engineer at a closed Soviet weapons factory. No one was supposed to leave the country—so to have a brother who studied Hebrew, clandestinely went to synagogue, and then emigrated raised a lot of questions.”

Growing up in a secular home, Masha had little exposure to Jewish traditions—that is, until she happened upon the local university Hillel (via their R&B and Hip Hop dance classes). She also found out about the JDC-supported Adain Lo (http://adainlo.spb.ru/) community center in St. Petersburg, which offers families, children, and young adults a variety of engagement opportunities.

“I started to get involved and attended Madrich (counselor) and leadership trainings where I got to hear speakers discussing Judaica, psychology, Jewish history, group management, and lots of other topics I found interesting,” she recalls.

Then, through her Jewish circle of friends, she found out about Lehava—“the seminar that changed our lives in significant ways,” says Masha.

JDC’s Lehava program in St. Petersburg is an intensive Jewish leadership development experience spread out over a series of four weeklong seminars and a concluding week inIsrael. The participants learn a diverse range of skills, from how to build a CV and fundraise … to writing business plans and assessing risk … to developing their ultimate projects for their community.

“The professionals who put on the trainings come from a vast variety of backgrounds and all love their work in a way that’s really evident and contagious. For this reason, the Lehava program was extremely stimulating for me and very apropos to that period of my life.”

At end of the yearlong course, Masha’s project was one of three to be awarded funding and realized. She curated an exhibit of photos of Israel at a St. Petersburg nightclub to show young people and the general public real images of Israelis and every day life in the often-stereotyped country.

“I wanted people to see what Israel is actually like and to help break long-standing preconceptions about the country and Jewish people,” she explains.

The show was a resounding success. It was also a personal turning point for Masha.

“I’d always loved photography but never got involved professionally. When I went to school for Business I knew I didn’t really love it. Lehava helped me make the right choice for my future,” she says. “It helped me challenge myself and realize my project. That experience was so rewarding, it empowered me to pursue my profession.”

Masha decided to pursue a career in art management. She continued her studies and started organizing other exhibition. Last year, she worked on curatorial projects at the State Hermitage Museum, Russia’s Contemporary Arts festival, and traveled to Israel and US for work, too.

With her current project, Kislorod (or Oxygen), Masha has set out to help young Jewish artists start professional careers and find their own place in the modern art world. Working with her partner Konstantin Benkovich, 30, a graduate of JDC’s parallel leadership track program inMoscow, she won a grant to give young Jewish artists increased exposure and visibility.

Over the past year, they’ve put on a series of educational workshops and seminars, as well as six contests for young artists that received hundreds of submissions and were judged by prominent artists. The winning pieces were curated into six exhibitions in four cities in Russiaand Belarus, and received extensive media coverage.

“We are creating an international union of Jewish artists who show their work widely. Historically, we’ve seen the collaborative approach help many artists. We love the idea and are always looking for new partners and collaborators.”

The pair is excited to promote Jewish culture and history in a modern and creative way.

“We want our exhibitions to get people thinking and talking,” says Masha, who evaluates her projects’ success by the impressions of the viewers. “Some visitors are surprised the work they’re seeing is by young artists. Others expect traditional work and are surprised to see really contemporary art. Many find their existing stereotypes about Jews and Israel collapsed by the artwork. For us, more than anything, seeing people moved emotionally is incredibly gratifying.”

(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.