I last met Australian Jewish historian
Professor Suzanne Rutland at a major international Jewish Studies Conference in
Moscow in 2006. There, in the bustling
foyer of the massive hotel where the conference was taking place, she happened
to mention to me that she and the veteran Australian political journalist Sam
Lipski were collaborating on a book about the Australian contribution to the
struggle for Soviet Jewry. So it was
wonderful to catch up with Suzanne (and Sam) again a few weeks ago when the
result of their joint endeavours – Let My
People Go: The untold story of Australia and the Soviet Jews 1959-89 (Hybrid
Publishers, Melbourne) – was launched in Melbourne by Greg Sheridan, foreign
editor of The Australian newspaper,
whose columns supportive of Israel over the years will, I’m certain, be
familiar to many of Elder’s readers.
In a delightfully droll but profoundly
perceptive speech, Sheridan nailed it when he said:
“There’s a certain small stream of
Australian braggadocio which thinks we’re a great power and can solve the
world’s problems… But the other extreme is [the self-perception that] we’re
really a backwater, we count for nothing, our opinions don’t matter … The truth
is Australia is a very significant middle power”.
The ultimate success of Australia’s long
and tenacious campaign for the prisoners of Zion and the refuseniks testifies
to that. As Sam Lipski has remarked,
securing the freedom of the trapped and persecuted Jews of the Soviet Union was
the third most momentous occurrence in twentieth-century Jewish history, the
others being, obviously, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of
Israel.
The book’s final text is the work of Lipski,
who pays due tribute to the formidable research that Suzanne Rutland undertook
in Jerusalem, notably in Isi Leibler’s extensive private archive, in Sydney,
and in Canberra, and to her drafts and suggestions. As Lipski notes in the book:
“Australian Jews had mobilised and
lobbied on other major issues before Soviet Jewry. In 1947-48 a small group of Sydney Jewish
leaders had helped to persuade Labor’s External Affairs Minister Herbert Evatt
to support the partition of Palestine and the emergence of Israel. In 1950 a broader coalition of Melbourne and
Sydney leaders could not prevent the Menzies government, supported by Labor,
from allowing 100,000 German settlers to come to Australia.”
But the campaign for Soviet Jewry “reflected
a greater militancy, especially in Melbourne, a new sophistication in engaging
and informing sympathetic parliamentarians, and a new readiness to involve the
mainstream media”. What makes the story
so compelling is the fact that Lipski is no mere narrator of events: he was
himself involved in the campaign, and he brings an insider’s eye – and the
observations of a sophisticated political analyst – to the unfolding events.
Isi Leibler, whose very substantial archive
proved so rich a resource in Suzanne’s research, was, of course, one of the key
players in the saga. The book tells of the little-known seminal meeting in 1959
between the then 25-year-old Australian, a religious Zionist and already the
“coming man” of the Jewish communal
leadership scene in Melbourne, and the 60-year-old Israeli Shaul Avigur, who
headed the Lishkat Hakesher (“The
Liaison Bureau”), more commonly dubbed the Lishkah. Founded in 1952, it aimed to forge contacts
with the three million Jews of the Soviet Union beset by Stalinist oppression
and antisemitism, kindle Jewish education among them, and eventually see them
settled in Israel.
It was owing to Leibler’s meeting with
Avigur, and Leibler’s ensuing drive and tenacity in pressing the issue, that the plight of Soviet Jewry became a
central focus of the Australian Jewish community. As early as 1958 the Executive Council of
Australian Jewry, the community’s federal roof body, resolved to request the
federal government to urge the United Nations to seek amelioration of the Jews’
situation in the Soviet Union, to ask the Conference of Jewish Organizations
convening in New York that year to raise global awareness by publicising the
plight of Soviet Jewry, and to call on Australia similarly to inform the
public. But only in 1962 did these initiatives
begin to bear fruit.
In
April that year Liberal federal MP Billy Wentworth, a staunch anti-Communist
who had sought advice on the subject from Leibler and who would be in touch
with him again, asked the Minister for External Affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, about
the extent and purpose of antisemitism in the Soviet Union – to which Barwick
responded that there were indeed “indications of a recrudescence of
antisemitism in Russia”. The upshot was
that in October that year, Barwick announced that Australia would raise the
matter the following month at the United Nations. Thus, on 2 November, at the UN General
Assembly’s Social Committee, Australia’s representative Douglas White described
examples of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, adding: ‘should the USSR find
difficulty in according to Soviet Jewry full freedom to practise their
religion, it should, we believe, permit them to leave the country. Indeed, it has a moral obligation to do so
under article 13, paragraph 2, of the UN Declaration of Human Rights …
”
This initiative, presenting the plight of
Soviet Jewry as a human rights issue, set a precedent for the West, and convinced
the previously wary Israeli government no longer to prevaricate on the issue. Moreover, Canberra had acted without prior
consultation with Washington. Over the years, as the situation of Soviet Jewry
grew more visibly dire (especially after 1967 with the publication of overtly
antisemitic material) there was a groundswell of support in Australia for
Soviet Jewry, emanating from various sides of politics, and involving a
campaign by Jews themselves, officially started in 1970 by their federal roof
body.
In 1965 appeared Leibler’s influential
small book Soviet Jewry and Human Rights
– endorsed, crucially, by a sympathetic
Australian Communist, Rex Mortimer, thus undermining the odious stance taken on
the issue by sections of the Communist Party and elements on the political
left, including, especially reprehensibly, the Jewish Senator Sam Cohen.
In 1967 Leibler, representing Australia,
received a standing ovation at the World Jewish Congress in Strasbourg when he
accused the WJC’s president, Dr Nahum Goldmann, of shtadlanut, of opposing public
rallies to publicise the cause in favour of exclusive reliance on unobtrusive
overtures.
Unlike his
Labor predecessor Gough Whitlam, Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser proved
sympathetic to the plight of Soviet Jewry, allowing refuseniks’ highly sensitive
documents to be sent out of the country in the Australian embassy’s diplomatic
bag, and declaring that his government fully supported its American
counterpart’s “strenuous efforts in negotiations with the Soviet Union to allow
free emigration of Jews and others who wish to leave…” During Fraser’s prime ministership, owing to
a petition introduced into federal parliament in November 1976 by Billy
Wentworth, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence’s
Inquiry into Human Rights in the Soviet Union was set up. Chaired by Kim Beazley, who had been a
minister in the Whitlam government, it heard first from the former refusenik
Professor Alexander Voronel, a distinguished scientist living in Israel, and tabled
its lengthy landmark report in November 1979.
As a former
president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Robert Goot, put it at
the Lipski/Rutland book’s Sydney launch:
“A significant part of this wonderful book
focuses on events surrounding the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the way in which
that event not only presented opportunities for the Soviet Jewry movement, but
also demonstrated the lack of leadership consensus on how to leverage those
opportunities – to boycott or not to boycott. We read of the appointment of Isi
Leibler’s company Jetset as the Australian Olympic Committee’s official travel
agent for the games and the controversy that generated; the opportunities that
the AOC appointment provided Isi Leibler to visit Russia, meet with and advance
the cause of the refuseniks; the Hawke visits [to Israel and to Russia]; the
Australian government’s boycott of the games; and much more. It is a part of
the story filled with excitement, allegations of conflict of interest,
leadership schisms, intrigue, shady KGB operatives; lots of vodka, some beer
(in deference to Hawke), hope and despair, but above all of Soviet Jewish
heroes. In short, the book conveys a fascinating plot, larger than life
characters and most importantly for Soviet Jewry, a happy ending. And not only
is it true, but it recounts a part of the saga that is driven uniquely by
Australians.”
In 1987, Leibler was invited by Moscow’s
chief rabbi to address worshippers from the pulpit of the KGB-controlled
Archipova Synagogue at Rosh Hashana. “Giving a Zionist address in broken
Yiddish to a packed synagogue in the presence of refusenik friends ... was an
unforgettable experience”, he has recalled.
The book ends with the opening in Moscow in
February 1989 of the Solomon Mykhoels Cultural Centre, named in honour of a
famous Yiddish theatrical figure murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1948. Leibler affixed the mezuzah to the Centre’s
door in the presence of over 70 Israeli and international Jewish communal
representatives and to the echo of encouraging messages from, among others,
Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher. Concludes that chapter:
“[The far-reaching consequences of
Gorbachev’s perestroika] still lay in the future. But enough had happened for Isi Leibler to
look back 30 years to a meeting with Shaul Avigur…. Israel’s legendary
spymaster … had asked him to work for Mission Improbable: to bring the Soviet
Union’s imprisoned and persecuted Jews to Israel. And to work for that goal from Australia, a
relatively minor player in the Cold War, with a small post-Holocaust Jewish
community of limited influence.
In 1959 the signs were not all that
propitious. But over the next 30 years
Australian Jews and their leaders worked with Australian governments,
parliamentarians, diplomats and opinion makers and took up the Soviet cause
with growing fervour. They made a difference....”
Sam Lipski began his speech by pointing out
that, entirely by serendipity, the date of the book’s launch, 17 May,
coincided, to the very day, with the concert for former refuseniks held in 1988
at the Melbourne Concert Hall – a joyous event entitled “From Russia With Thanks”
that I remember well. To thunderous
applause the elderly scientist Professor Alexander Lerner, on behalf of himself
and the other fourteen ex-refuseniks present, presented Bob Hawke (the intended
hero of the occasion, who had endeared himself to the refuseniks by visiting
Russia in 1979 to intercede for them) with a specially commissioned silver
sculpture and told him:
“Through your strength, you have
saved the Jewish community of Russia from a loss of dignity and from
death. Your name will be remembered
forever…”
As the book recalls in some detail,
however, that occasion was unexpectedly marred by inappropriate remarks by
Hawke, who had been veering away from his celebrated championship of Israel
into a more even-handed approach and who – too cocksure of the affection in
which the Australian Jewish community held him – ten minutes into an otherwise
splendid on-topic speech gratuitously referred to the Intifada that had broken
out six months earlier and proceeded to drew an analogy between the Palestinians
and the refuseniks, giving dismay and offence in consequence, not least to Isi
Leibler, who had a humdinger of a row with Hawke afterwards. Lipski wrote at the time, in his editorial in
the Australian Jewish News, “The
special relationship [between Hawke and Australian Jewry] will never quite be
the same again”. Nor, indeed, has it
been.