Growing up, Simchat Torah was no big deal in my family. Though a proud and unshakeable Jew who survived the Nazi Final Solution, my mother had little Jewish education, no Hebrew literacy, and few strong attachments to prayer and ritual.
So it came as a surprise to me, not to mention to her, that in 1974 I decided to go to synagogue for the holiday. And not just any synagogue. It was the Great Choral Synagogue on Arkhipova Street – about a 20-minute walk from Red Square – in Moscow during the Cold War.
As she later commented, with barely disguised pride mixed with anxiety, “In New York, with a synagogue on practically every corner, you hardly went. In Moscow, where going to a synagogue could get you expelled or imprisoned, you decided to find religion.”
I was in Moscow on a months-long, government-to-government exchange programme, part of the Nixon-Brezhnev effort to de-escalate tensions through détente. I was assigned to School No. 45, where I spent six days a week teaching English language and American culture to pupils from the second to the tenth grades.
Prior to arriving in Moscow, I had read Elie Wiesel’s The Jews of Silence, his powerful account of a trip to the Soviet Union in 1965, when few were able to travel there, and his encounter with Jews at the very same synagogue in Moscow on Simchat Torah.
His words stayed with me. Recalling the Soviet Jews who gathered for the holiday in 1965, despite omnipresent surveillance and intimidation, Wiesel wrote: “He who has not witnessed the Rejoicing of the Law in Moscow has never in his life witnessed joy.”
And something else in that book also stuck – his choice of title. The assumption of many was that it referred to the millions of Jews behind the Iron Curtain silenced by Soviet authorities in a policy of cultural genocide. True, but there was more, he noted: “What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today.”
After all, the Jews under repression had little choice but to be silent, unless they were willing to take grave personal risks. But the Jews of the free world had a choice whether to speak up for their beleaguered brethren. Wiesel assailed their silence.
So I had two compelling reasons to go directly from my school to the synagogue that autumn day: to witness the joy and to refuse to remain silent.
Yet along the way, I remember wondering if anyone would actually show up. It was downright dangerous to affirm Jewish identity, faith, and pride in the heart of the atheistic Soviet empire, all the more so after 1967, when Moscow broke relations with Jerusalem and embarked on a virulent anti-Zionist campaign. Jobs could be lost, university places withdrawn, and outspoken Jews subjected to internal exile or imprisonment.
Exiting the metro, I walked along Khmelnitsky Street, named after the 17th-century Cossack leader from today’s Ukraine whose forces carried out some of the worst massacres in Jewish history before the 20th century. I then turned right on to Arkhipova Street.
The street sloped gently downhill, but I stood transfixed at the top. I couldn’t move. I began to sob. If ever there was a life-changing moment for me, that was it.
The street in front was filled with masses of people. They were standing in groups. They were dancing. They were defiant, knowing the KGB was also there – photographing, filming, monitoring.
Fifty-seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Jews were alive. Despite relentless efforts to extinguish the last vestiges of Jewish identity – from the Great Terror to the show trials, from demonising Zionism to imposing strict quotas on Jews, from shuttering virtually every synagogue to criminalising the teaching of Hebrew – the Jews, it appeared, could neither be defeated nor destroyed.
And for me, the child not only of two Holocaust survivors, but also of a Moscow-born mother whose family fled Stalin’s tyranny for France before the war, it all came together at the intersection of Khmelnitsky and Arkhipova streets: the terrifying past; the inspiring, if challenging, present; and the unanticipated decision whether to say Hineni – Here I am – then and there, with its potential consequences.
I did, and waded into the crowd in front of me, the beginning of more than five decades of wading into Jewish crowds wherever I could find them.
Foreigners were usually easy to recognise in Moscow. The shoes alone could be a dead giveaway: the gap in quality, style, and colour was immense. Foreigners also tended to walk with greater confidence, less fearful of standing out or being noticed, less preoccupied with who might be watching.
As an obvious outsider, I was pulled into one group after another, one dancing circle after another. And when it was discovered that I spoke Russian, the questions came from every direction. About me, my Russian, America, Israel, Simchat Torah, the Jewish world.
They were desperate for information, human connection, and a means of sending messages to family and friends abroad. No less importantly, they wanted the eavesdropping officials to know they were not alone – that there were those from abroad who cared and who would, they prayed, carry the truth back to the West.
Eventually, I made my way into the synagogue itself. This was Moscow’s main synagogue, surely kept open in large measure as a showcase for visiting diplomats, journalists, and tourists.
But inside, in contrast to the big crowds outside, only a few, mostly elderly, Jews were participating in the Simchat Torah service itself, marking the completion of the year-long reading of the Torah and the beginning of a new annual cycle. Presumably, they posed no threat to the Soviet system as “relics” of what the authorities believed was a rapidly disappearing Jewish remnant.
From that October day, I began going to the synagogue every Saturday morning. Usually, only a tiny number prayed inside, while many more gathered outside to make a statement by their presence, draw strength from one another, and perhaps meet a visiting foreigner eager to show solidarity.
During the week, I went to the homes of refuseniks, those denied permission to leave the country and often left for years in a perilous limbo.
All this turned out to be too much for my Soviet hosts, who wanted me to spend my free time at the ballet or in the concert halls, where the Soviets shone, and not with Jews considered disaffected or politically suspect. That led to my detention one Saturday afternoon near the synagogue, followed a few days later by my expulsion from the country.
But the story did not end there. More and more people in the West, Jews and non-Jews alike, chose the path of engagement, not silence. Together with brave Jews in the Soviet Union, and supported especially by the governments of Israel and the United States, the Soviet Jewry movement became one of the most successful human rights struggles in history.
And yet today, that Soviet Jewry movement receives far too little attention in Jewish communal life and education. It was a compelling saga of the few against the many, of the inextinguishable Jewish flame, and of courageous souls who put their lives on the line for their faith and identity.
It is high time to tell the story again – not least on Simchat Torah, when thousands of Jews gathered, year after year, in the capital of the Soviet Union to proclaim, against the immense power of the state, that they were still here.
David Harris, executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), was actively involved in the Soviet Jewry movement from 1974 until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991
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