Under discussion was a incident involving matzah in the mails, and the US Postal Service’s deliberate destruction of this delivery

Title: Let My Matzah Go

Location: Washington, D.C.

Document: Jewish News of Northern California

Time: April 1972

Today, we will take testimony on an incident involving the mailing of unleavened bread during the Passover season to the Russian Embassy for Jews in the Soviet Union, who are not allowed to produce their own matzah for the holy season. These mailings were the result of a campaign by interested American citizens to dramatize the plight of Jews behind the Iron Curtain. The Embassy refused to accept these mailings.… Matzah has a religious and historical significance to the Jewish people. Its destruction, during the Passover season, has created a serious and vital question as to whether or not the Postal Service should have disposed of this food to organizations ready to supply it to the needy in the face of requests from such organizations.

—Hon. Robert Nix (D-PA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Postal Facilities and Mail

At 10:30 a.m. on April 12, 1972, the House Subcommittee on Postal Facilities and Mail convened in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., for one of the most peculiar hearings in congressional history. Under discussion was a incident involving matzah in the mails, and the US Postal Service’s deliberate destruction of this delivery.

With utter seriousness, congressmen gathered to hear testimony regarding the impetus for the matzah mailing, the plight of Soviet Jewry, the callousness of the Soviet government, and the controversial decision ultimately implemented by the Postal Service to incinerate several tons of matzah.

The beginnings of the saga were described in the testimony submitted to the committee by Robert Koehler, New Jersey regional director of the Anti-Defamation League:

We all know of the mistreatment, oppression, disenfranchisement, imprisonment and denial of their right to emigrate from the Soviet Union, which is the lot of our coreligionists there. Since the president of the United States will be visiting the Soviet Union, and since the Russian program of anti-Semitism has been accelerated, we knew that freedom-loving Americans wanted an opportunity to express their concern in a responsible and dramatic fashion to our president, to the Russian government, and to the suffering Jews of the Soviet Union.

It is difficult to explain how deep the feelings of the American Jewish community are in regard to securing freedom of migration for the Russian Jews. No matter how young we are, most of us have lived through or have been touched by the failure of ourselves and of governments of the free world to take meaningful action in regard to securing the freedom of immigration for millions of other Jews one generation ago. We selected a mailing date of March 17, a week before the holiday of Passover, which celebrates the historic freedom of the Jews from ancient Egypt’s enslavement, and asked participants to mail a one-pound box of matzah to Ambassador Dobrynin.…

On March 27 the 8,000 pounds of matzah was destroyed [by the US Postal Service]. What is also of concern to us is that it appears that the decision was not reached on moral grounds but on legal technicalities, which served to avoid “further embarrassment” to the Soviet Government. Should this be a consideration for the US Postal Service?

The official response from the Postal Service claimed that matzah parcels constituted a health risk and were destroyed due to their perishability, and standard Postal Service protocol regarding perishable goods was followed. Congressman Joshua Eilberg (D-PA) disputed those claims with a live lab test. This might be the only time in the history of the US Congress that matzah was presented and examined for freshness:

Mr. Chairman, I can personally attest to the fact that matzah is edible months after it has been bought. I have with me a package that has been open now for over a week, and the matzah is still crisp and fresh. And I hope you will forgive me while I strike a piece of matzah from the box, which has been opened, and crumble it presently, and I assure you it’s quite edible.

However, we must rely on expert opinion to prove our points, so I quote from Gerald F. Meyer, Director of the Office of Legislative Services of the Food and Drug Administration. “The perishability of matzahs is a relative matter. As compared to dairy products, matzahs would be a rather stable item. They have a much longer keeping quality than most bakery products. Because matzahs contain no shortening, they are not as perishable as most crackers on the market.

“We have not made any shelf-life studies of matzahs but can only provide an educated estimate that, under ideal conditions, they should hold up for at least 6 months.”

At this point, I will agree that Post Office warehouses do not provide ideal conditions, but the matzah certainly would not have gone bad in a few days, or even a couple of weeks.

Representative Bertram Podell (D-NY) elaborated:

A matzah is unleavened bread made of flour and water under the strictest of controlled conditions. The machines that make the matzah are cleaned every 18 minutes. The process is well supervised by rabbinical and quality control personnel. Then they are sealed in at least two wrappings. The Aaron Streits Co., manufacturer and distributor of millions of pounds of matzah, wraps them in a vegetable parchment and in a fiberboard outer box. The company’s sales manager reports that the incidents of broken boxes are practically nil. The Manischewitz Co. pointed out that since matzah must be whole to be used in rituals, they are tightly and carefully packed.

The expert opinion that we have amassed in speaking with the various companies advised us that the matzahs could not have attracted rodents, even in the dampest conditions, in their aborted stay in the Post Office warehouse. It was stated that matzah can be kept safely indefinitely, although it might become stale in about 9 months to a year.

I wrote to Postmaster General Klassen about the matzah, asking under what authority the matzah was disposed of. He replied: “Packages containing perishable articles must be destroyed as soon as they are known to be undeliverable.”

However, matzah is not perishable. New York City, which has one of the strictest laws governing the dating of all perishables, specifically exempts matzah as a perishable item. In conclusion, the disposal of these matzah was in complete violation of the professed intention of the people who sent the matzah, and, most important of all, in flagrant insensitivity to the religious significance of the items.

Beyond the grievance with the Postal Authority’s decision to destroy the matzah, the discussion focused on the plight of Soviet Jewry, and the hope that the matzah campaign would raise public awareness as to their fate under Soviet discriminatory rule.

Regional director of the ADL Sam Gaber explained:

While Jews in the Soviet Union are not victims of physical genocide, they are being subjected to spiritual genocide, which is no less horrible and must be condemned. It is clear to us that there is no alternative for Jews in the Soviet Union but for the Soviets to “let our people go!” and projects such as the matzah-mailing effort of our fellow Americans will go on until our people are free….

The persecution of our brethren in the Soviet Union runs in much the same way the Jews have always been persecuted by tyrannical regimes, going back to the days when our forefathers were enslaved in Egypt more than 3,200 years ago. Since that first flight to freedom by the Jews from the land of Egypt, and the celebration of Passover since then, it has been burned deeply into the consciousness of the Jew. So that its lessons would never be forgotten by succeeding generations, it was ordained that each year the flight should be commemorated in the retelling and symbolic relieving of the events in the Passover story, and that for the days of Passover, only matzah would be eaten.

Providing some historical context, Mr. Gaber drew parallels to the recent martyrdom during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which also took place during Pesach:

We wanted matzah, the symbol of freedom, to be the key, which, in [the form of] a mountain of matzah packages, would spring the door imprisoning our fellow Jews in the Soviet Union. Passover unites the Jewish generation today with their heroic ancestors from Moses to those who fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

It is significant that this coming Sunday, we will be commemorating the martyrdom of 6 million Jews and the heroic epic of the Warsaw ghetto. We Jews need no additional martyrs, nor does any other people. Our protest is against spiritual and physical genocide, and the example of Soviet treatment of our fellow Jews must serve as a warning and a call to action to all freedom-loving people to aid in the cause of humanity.

Postal authorities testified as well, and attempted to justify their wanton destruction of the huge quantity of matzah on health grounds. Under questioning from committee members, the Postal Authority’s defense proved to be unsubstantiated.

Though the committee adjourned inconclusively at 11:50 a.m., the Postal Service’s actions were condemned by the congressional committee, and the plight of Soviet Jewry and their US brethren’s attempts to express their solidarity was duly recorded and brought to the forefront of American consciousness.

Though this hour-and-twenty-minute-long hearing left no major impact on American or Jewish history, it remains both a curious as well as amusing footnote on the role of matzah in Cold War politics.

Madison Avenue Matzah Marketing?

An April 1972 editorial in the Jewish Observer dismissed the campaign as “an advertising gimmick.” It argued that organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee and Agudath Israel in London and Switzerland were the ones genuinely making a difference by focusing on the less glamorous but essential task of actually ensuring that matzos reached the hands of Jews in the Soviet Union. The piece concluded: “The act that gets the most attention or makes the best story is not necessarily the one that bears the most fruitful results.”

Iron Curtain Unleavened

In late 1929, a fundraising campaign mounted by the Chofetz Chaim, Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski, and the Rebbe Rayatz of Chabad helped raise nearly $100,000 to send matzah to Jews behind the Iron Curtain. With the assistance of the JDC and Rabbi Dr. Meir Hildesheimer in Berlin, 28 train carloads of matzah and 5,689 packages of matzah flour crossed into the Soviet Union for Pesach.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 956)