Refuseniks…

 The story of the refuseniks and soviet jewry goes often untold and was hoping to share the experiences of my family…

“My family were wanderers. The horrors of the Shoah sent my family to evacuee camps in Almaty, Dushanbe, Samarkand, and Tashkent. Some members of my family married into affluent Tatar and Central Asian families, able to live a modest lifestyle. The others returned to Western Ukraine. Under impression they were to live a safe and secularized lifestyle in soviet Ukraine, my family became unrelenting patriots, discarding their Jewish identity as living irreligious was the way to best encapsulate the false hopefulness the Soviet Union propagated. My dad remembers the time he was first called a “zhyd” (slur for Jew). He was young, a wildly inappropriate time to be called such. The first few times didn’t hit as hard, but the name-calling, the “go to Birobidzhan” (Jewish autonomous oblast), and the “zionist pig” became ever more frequent. For a place that declared itself so secularized and so opposed to religion, it sure liked to make it front and center, essentially the essence of your entire being. At school, in the workplace, the name-calling was so frequent that my father conditioned himself into thinking it was actually normal. My father got off lucky most of the time as he was perceived as any other Russian, but Jews with noticeable Jewish features (whatever it meant in the eyes of Soviet society) would be targets of serious discrimination and physical assaults. Administers and employers denied my grandmother into entry into any schooling or workplace. Her looks they frowned upon. The racialization and demonization of Jews and their supposed “placing” in soviet society played integral roles into what positions they could uphold. For my family, there was unfortunately no opportunity to why turning to emigration was the best bet. My family was set to leave in the 70’s, as I said, they were wanderers so as hard as it was leaving home, they’d prepare for the next step in their lives. But last minute, Soviet agents cancelled all of their exit visas which extended their unwelcomed stay in the Soviet Union. The brutality continued, and as the movement of the refuseniks (Soviet Jews who were denied emigration) heightened, my family did whatever they could to avoid the false imprisonments, accusations of being involved in zionist activity, harassments into whatever entity they were allowed in, and to be demonized for who they were or how they looked. In the late 80’s they were able to emigrate, and the unfortunate effects the Soviet Union created within it’s Jewish community, is everlasting. My family is still under the impression whatever they were facing was oddly normal. They still have passionate patriotism to a place they weren’t accepted in. Their Jewishness continuing to be completely sidelined by a fake Soviet identity created to rid Jews of any part of their heritage (which the Soviet Union still made front and center). Grappling with the effects of diaspora and being part of a new generation of unified Jewish life, the cuts the Soviet Union has left are deep, and talking about in Soviet Jewish families is very taboo.”

Soviet Jews are a newer immigrant population and many Jewish spaces do not know much about Soviet Jewry so I believe this blog is a good place to share and uplift such stories.

-Anonymous