It was a decades-long movement that freed 1.5 million Soviet Jews and
helped bring down the Iron Curtain. It was marked by risks, helped by
outsiders -- and then largely forgotten. Now new activists want the
campaign to find its way into history books and be a model for change in
the face of fresh human rights abuses.
It was a decades-long movement that freed 1.5 million Soviet Jews and
helped bring down the Iron Curtain. It was marked by risks, helped by
outsiders -- and then largely forgotten. Now new activists want the
campaign to find its way into history books and be a model for change in
the face of fresh human rights abuses.
Marina and Lev Furman, with
daughter Aliyah, gained international attention as they fought for exit
visas to leave the Soviet Union. Here they are on the cover of The B'nai
B'rith Jewish Monthly in November 1987.
(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.
Defying the KGB: How a forgotten movement freed a people
updated 9:43 AM EST, Sun December 30, 2012
Marina and Lev Furman, with
daughter Aliyah, gained international attention as they fought for exit
visas to leave the Soviet Union. Here they are on the cover of The B'nai
B'rith Jewish Monthly in November 1987.
HIDE CAPTION
Two cities, two protests -- one cause
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- December marks the 25th anniversary of a massive rally that helped change history
- Soviet Jews, joined by activists who lived abroad, took risks and pursued freedom for decades
- Starting in the 1960s, the human rights campaign gained popular, political and diverse support
- It helped bring down the Soviet Union and, new activists say, should be a model for change
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, including Martin 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.
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