by Yosef Mendelevich
Eight Jews stood in the Soviet Union's courtroom and declared their loyalty to the Jewish People, and to our past, present, and future. And it happened on Hanukkah.
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| Mendelevich in prison (for movie) courtesy |
We had been sitting in prison for half a year after the attempted plane hijacking. Our dream to escape to Israel had been thwarted at the last moment on the runway by the KGB. The interrogation of the group had ended. We were already sick and tired of waiting for the trial. Let it be already, we all felt, and we would know what our sentence would be.
Death? Life imprisonment? We signed the announcement which we had received, according to which the trial would take place on November 15. A week before the trial they brought to the cell an additional announcement, that the trial had been postponed and would take place on the 15th of December. Darn it! More waiting!
Finally, this date also arrived. They woke us up at 5 a.m. Each prisoner was seated in a separate vehicle. Through a slit in the side of the prison-services vehicle I saw that we were traveling in a long convoy. The windows in houses along the route were still dark. The impression of secrecy was troublesome to me, as if we had been given the death sentence and now the Soviet authorities were taking us away in a clandestine manner to conceal the crime which they were about to commit.
At the entrance to the court there stood dozens of soldiers and police. Though we were not terrorists who had set out to kill innocent people, we were considered a danger to the state. We were champions of freedom. That’s why we were so dangerous in the eyes of the oppressive Soviet regime.
The courtroom was noisy. Some 150 people had entered it, all of them by invitation. Select people. The Soviet elite. What could be more pleasurable than to see how Jewish blood was about to be shed? More interesting than sitting in a theater.
There are three benches for the accused with room for exactly twelve people. Each of us has been assigned a sergeant, to ensure that we do not speak with fellow prisoners. The Soviets had kept us isolated from each other during all the months of interrogation because they understood that if we were together we would strengthen one another, and their intention was to weaken us, so that we would admit that we were traitors to the Motherland.
Despite all the warnings, my friend Arie managed to whisper to me during one of the days of the trial: "Today is the first candle of Hanukkah." Suddenly, everything became clear to me. The postponement of the trial date had occurred because Hashem wanted us to be tried on a day on which he had wrought a miracle for His people, as we say, "You stood by them in their time of misfortune."
I knew that Hashem was sending me a blessing from Heaven, as if to say, "Yosef, you have been numbered among the soldiers of the Maccabees." I was proud and fortified. When the judge asked me: "What caused you to want to hijack the plane?" I answered him as befits a descendant of the Maccabees: "Did not Hashem give the Land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? I am one of their descendants. Therefore my place is in Israel."
The judges were stunned by such chutzpa and called me "a religious fanatic."
However, this was not the main part of the miracle. The judge called each of the accused one by one, and each of us declared his wish to be in Israel. No one was afraid and none feared the punishment. Eight Jews stood in the courtroom and declared their loyalty to the Jewish People, and to our past, present, and future.
For fifty years the Soviet authorities had lied to the world and claimed that the Jews in their empire were loyal to the regime and were willingly erasing themselves from the ranks of the Jewish People.
The claim was difficult for the Jews of the world to accept. Had not the Besht and the Gra, the Baal HaTanya, the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Kook, and many other giants of Jewish Faith emerged from Russia and Eastern Europe? How could it be that their descendants wanted to abandon the holy heritage which they had preserved for almost two-thousand years of exile and murderous persecutions? But slowly the Jews of the West became accustomed to the Soviet lies and propaganda, and they believed what they read. Because the Jews of the Soviet Union were not allowed to speak, the world believed that the flame of Judaism had died.
And then we rose up and from inside the Leningrad courthouse we announced "Am Israel Chai." We were not dead. We had come back to life from the valley of the dry bones, and we were going to Eretz Yisrael. This was a true Pirsumei Nisa – a publication of the miracle. The Jews of Silence had come back to life! We in the courtroom, each of us lit the Hanukkah light from our marrow and from our blood. The news got out. The Jewish world was in uproar.
Jews all over the globe rose with the cry: "Let My people go!" Thus did this miracle of Hanukkah in Leningrad and our ancient exodus from Egypt unite. In Israel and in America, in France and England, hundreds of thousands of Jews demonstrated opposite the embassies of the wicked Russians and the Iron Curtain of oppression and deceit began to crumble.
On one of the nights of Hanukkah after we had received our harsh sentences, a special messenger arrived in my cell: "Write an appeal!" he urged.
"I have to consult with a lawyer,” I answered.
"There is no time. Write it now."
I sat down and wrote on a small piece of paper: "They accuse me of betraying the motherland, but my motherland is Israel. And I will not betray it. Although Russia is the land of my birth, it is my right not to live here. Because you have prevented me from leaving Russia legally, I was forced to try and escape. Therefore, this is not a just sentence."
He read my words and said: "Is this how one writes an appeal?"
Perhaps, under different circumstances, he would have thrown the paper in my face for its being so bare of detail and legal expression, but what I didn't know then, the international pressure on Russia had zenithed and there was an atmosphere of urgency in the air, like Pesach night of old. Everything must end this night. The verdict was already prepared, but if we didn't write an appeal, how would it be possible to refute the injustice?
The moment the cruel regime failed in its machinations against the Jews, when its schemes were uncovered and visible to all, its leaders tried to quickly hide themselves. Brezhnev summoned to him the head of the spy services. Who had been so utterly stupid as to attempt to set a trap for the Jews? Now the Soviet empire has fallen into the trap, like the foes of the Jews in the past, and the whole world is shouting that our Jews want to emigrate to Israel.
That same night they punished the perpetrators of the KGB plot to catch the Jews "in the act" of hijacking the airplane. The stupid officers who thought to trick the Jews received special treatment: they were all reduced in rank, fired from work and exiled to Siberia. The next day the Supreme Court of Justice deliberated the case in Moscow and reduced all of our sentences. All in all, I was forced to serve eleven years. After a few days, the Soviet regime leadership decided to begin to award exit visas to the Jews. This was a Hanukkah miracle. All of this time we knew nothing about the great events because we were all in solitary confinement.
A year after the trial they moved us out to a forced labor camp. In the prison train they placed each one of us in a separate cell compartment. We were labeled "extremely dangerous security prisoners." What an honor! When I finally sat down on the bench in the compartment, I opened a bag with letters sent to me during the year. I had not received any of them because of the rules of isolation. I read the first letter and couldn't believe my eyes:
"I am writing to you from the Russian border. We have received Aliyah visas. It is because of you. Thank you!"
Another letter expressed the same appreciation, and another, and finally– a telegram form my sisters: "We have received exit visas. Halleluyah!"
It was a wonderful feeling of thanksgiving to Hashem for the loving-kindness He had shown us. Instead of being shot we had been granted to see a miracle of Hanukkah and the exodus from Egypt in our time. Although we were being transported to a Gulag of darkness and long incarceration, our fellow Jews were beginning to leave Russia with pride and with hearts filled with the spirit of freedom.
As Sholom Aleichem would say, “To make a long story short,” another miracle occurred to me precisely in the last year of my imprisonment. On Hanukkah, after eleven years of incarceration and struggle to keep the Torah in prison, I was freed. Finally my dream came true. I was on my way home to Israel.
[Adapted from the book, "A Hero of Jewish Freedom" by former Prisoner of Zion, Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich - translated by David Herman. Available at Amazon Books.]
Yosef Mendelevich
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/401332
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