Как раввин в СССР ездил. Еврейские страшилки

Знаете ли вы, как страшно был жить евреям в Советском Союзе? Скорее всего, не знаете, поскольку, раз читаете этот ЖЖ, наверняка там родились. А вот если бы вы родились в Америке, да бывали в еврейских лагерях - вот тогда бы узнали всю правду.

К счастью, все тайное становится явным: на днях уважаемое издание предало некоторые факты гласности:

In the summer of 1965, nine Orthodox rabbis traveled to the former Soviet Union. One day, feigning illness, Rabbi Rafael Grossman—then the rabbi of a synagogue in Long Branch, New Jersey—left the group. He had his own private agenda: to locate a congregant’s long-lost brother. Lacking fluency in the Russian language or a sense of Moscow’s geography, and relying only on an address scrawled on the back of a 10-year-old envelope and the efficacy of his own prayers, he succeeded.

At first, the congregant’s brother’s family wouldn’t open the door; they feared that the rabbi was a KGB dupe. Speaking in fluent Yiddish, which at that time was still Ashkenazi Jewry’s lingua franca, the rabbi eventually won their trust.

Inside their apartment, Grossman discovered another surprise: the man’s young son, whom the man and his wife had been raising inside the confines of the apartment, home-schooling him, never allowing him to play with his peers—all this to escape the sting of Soviet antisemitism.

The couple swore Grossman to secrecy; they were terrified that the communist authorities could take away their son and send them to Siberia. But the rabbi felt compelled to violate his oath. From his home in the U.S., he mounted a private lobbying campaign. With the help of several prominent members of Congress, he secured exit visas and the family moved to Israel. But he never shared their names publicly.

Grossman used the story to highlight the plight of Soviet Jewry and to reinforce Jewish identity. “I heard it throughout my childhood at college campus kumsitzes and speeches,” said Hillel.

Поводом же для статьи стало то, что по этой прекрасной истории недавно сделали комикс. Так что похоже, этой истории суждена долгая жизнь.