Curtain Call

In person, not only does Rav Benzion Zilber look like his father, he radiates his glow as well. There’s some luminous warmth about him — a joy that’s reflected in his frequent smile.

He’s obviously been deep in a Tosafos HaRosh until I arrive, but with no ceremony at all, he dives straight into the events of seven decades ago.

Hatched in the reptilian recesses of Stalin’s malignant brain, the Doctors’ Plot involved the arrest of the Kremlin’s top physicians, who were mostly Jewish. Accused of trying to kill the Soviet leadership, the doctors were tortured into confessions. In tandem, a ferocious state propaganda campaign painted the entire Jewish population as a threat to the Soviet Union. Just eight years after the end of the Holocaust, plans were set afoot to transport millions of Jews to the Siberian Gulag — ostensibly to protect them from the justified rage of Soviet citizenry.

Rumors circulated of trains waiting in remote stations. In Jewish homes, whispers spread that deportation — perhaps worse — was imminent.

In his autobiographical memoir, To Remain a Jew, Rav Yitzchak Zilber remembered the way that even in the remote labor camp, gentile inmates accused the Jews of seeking to kill “innocent Russian children.”

Too young at the time to remember the events himself, the story of March 1953 is one that Rav Benzion absorbed from his parents and retells annually — each time with a renewed sense of wonder.

“On Purim of 1953, my father read the Megillah at night in the labor camp. One embittered Jew who saw the little group around my father berated him for reading about an ancient miracle when the Jews of the USSR themselves stood on the brink of destruction. But my father answered: ‘Who knows if Stalin will survive the next half-hour?’

“That very night, Stalin had a stroke, and his death a few days later saved Soviet Jewry.”

Within months, a post-Stalin amnesty rippled through the “Gulag Archipelago,” as a Soviet dissident was to later term Stalin’s empire of labor camps. Among those who returned home was Rav Yitzchak Zilber.

But the reprieve wasn’t just personal — it was salvation in the most concrete sense for Soviet Jewry.

“There were two to three million Jews in the USSR after the Holocaust,” says Rav Benzion Zilber. “Imagine if they would have been shipped off — old people, children, women — to wooden barracks in minus-80 degrees temperatures? It would have been a death sentence.”

Instead of the curtain falling on Soviet Jewry, it fell on the dictator himself.

Lethal Echo

How exactly Stalin died has never been conclusively established. But what is clear is that there was a strong element of poetic — and Divine — justice in what happened. The murderous Stalin died in agony, with the Jewish Kremlin doctors that he’d himself imprisoned too crippled by torture to come to his rescue.

Traditionally, there have been two theories as to what triggered Stalin’s death. One is that he suffered a stroke, and the second is that he was poisoned — likely by Lavrenti Beria, the KGB boss who feared for his own life as Stalin spiraled into a pattern of murderous paranoia.

I share with Rav Benzion one astounding report that suggests that — in true Purim-esque style — Stalin’s stroke was triggered by his own blazing enmity for Jews.

As the Doctors’ Plot reached fever pitch inside the USSR in March 1953, Stalin went on the warpath against Jews among the Soviet elite. Many of the men in Stalin’s inner circle were married to Jewish women, and the rabidly antisemitic Stalin pressured the officials to divorce their wives.

According to Louis Rapaport, a former news editor of the Jerusalem Post and author of Stalin’s War Against the Jews, one man refused to toe the line.

Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a prominent Soviet general, was the only man ever to have stood up to Stalin.

He had done so once before, in 1941, when the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany. As the Red Army reeled before the German onslaught, a furious Stalin denounced his top army brass, who cowered before the man who could kill them at will.

Only Voroshilov had the suicidal courage to stand up to the Soviet dictator. “It was you who purged all of our top generals!” he railed back at Stalin.

For some unknown reason, Stalin let Voroshilov live, and 12 years later the marshal was to bring down the strongman with one more act of courage.

On what was actually Purim eve, the dictator and his inner circle sat down at a late-night banquet where Stalin confronted Voroshilov with his demand to divorce his wife, Catherine.

As the other Soviet leaders cowered, Voroshilov courageously refused to throw his Jewish wife to the wolves. All present knew that the soldier was risking his very life, but he refused to back down. Infuriated by Voroshilov’s temerity, Stalin began screaming at the senior officer, who still stood his ground.

“Stalin became so enraged that his eyes rolled and he finally collapsed on the floor — he suffered the fatal stroke then and there,” writes Rapaport, in a report based on leaks that came from Stalin’s successor, Nikita Kruschchev.

If that’s the case, then the Purim dimension to Stalin’s death is magnified. Like Haman, whose attempt to hang Mordechai rebounded, Stalin’s Jew hatred may well have killed him.

It’s an account that’s new to Rav Benzion Zilber, who focuses on the essence.

“Whether that’s true or not, whatever the circumstances,” he says, “the timing of Stalin’s death was miraculous. It deserves to be treated no differently than other miraculous salvations throughout Jewish history. We need to thank Hashem for what happened.”

Homeschooled

Too young to be aware of the terror surrounding these events, young Benzion was raised in a home that was an island of Jewish warmth amid the cold sea of Soviet life.

His father Rav Yitzchak married Gita Zeidman, who came from a family of Aleksander chassidim, after the war. Together they raised four children — Sarah, Benzion, Chava, and Fruma Malka — in conditions that were anything but normal. In a regime that sought to sever Jewish continuity, their apartment was a different world.

Rav Yitzchak was born in 1917 in Kazan, where his father, Rav Benzion Chaim Zilber, was the city’s rabbi. Rav Yitzchak’s father was a talmid of Slabodka before the First World War, where he was about five years older than Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky. On his mother’s side, Rav Yitzchak descended from Rav Moshe Michel Shmuel Shapira of Rogova, author of Tevuos Shemesh.

Kazan’s rabbi refused to send his son to anti-religious Soviet schools and instead taught him privately at home.

By the age of 15, Rav Yitzchak was already teaching Torah secretly to other Jews in Kazan, despite the Soviet prohibition forbidding it.

Denied a yeshivah education by the Communist Revolution, the home that Rav Yitzchak was raised in was steeped in the yeshivah world’s values. He inhaled the fragrance of the yeshivah world through those who had known it.

“My father collected all sorts of impressions about gedolim from people that he met,” says Rav Benzion. “For example, back in Russia, my father once met a resident of Brisk who told him that Reb Chaim Brisker was as great as his father the Beis Halevi.”

Cut off behind the Iron Curtain, the family was later to be reunited with the legacy of the yeshivah world through Rav Benzion’s own marriage to the daughter of Slabodka rosh yeshivah Rav Boruch Rosenberg — a granddaughter of the Slabodka mashgiach Rav Avrohom Grodzensky, who was murdered in the Holocaust.

Given the fact that Rav Benzion was the second generation raised in the Soviet Union, his emergence as a talmid chacham under those conditions is nothing short of miraculous.

“It’s all due to my father and mother,” he explains. “My father was my main rebbi. Despite working as a teacher of mathematics, he made sure to learn with me for two hours a day. And together with my own chazarah, and the additional teachers that my father arranged, I was able to learn for hours each day.”

Breathing Space

When Benzion was ten years old, the family moved from Kazan, which lies 500 miles east of Moscow, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The move deep into Central Asia took the family to a place where Jewish life flourished almost openly, far from the long arm of Soviet power.

“Tashkent was a unique place in the Soviet Union. A Torah-observant life was possible because it was far from the main centers of Soviet power,” says Rav Benzion. “Someone once told my father that Tashkent was like Chazal’s statement about the sons of Korach who didn’t die, rather ‘A place was fortified for them in Gehinnom.’ Inside the Soviet Gehinnom, this was a unique place of refuge for Jews.”

Tashkent was no paradise. It was part of the same Soviet machine. But geography mattered. During the war years, thousands of Jews — including religious refugees — had been evacuated eastward, and a longstanding Bukharan Jewish community provided a fragile but real infrastructure of synagogues, shochtim, and communal cohesion. Far from Moscow’s ideological glare, Torah life could survive in quiet pockets. Inside the Soviet Gehinnom, Tashkent offered breathing space.

“I don’t recall anyone being arrested for practicing Yiddishkeit in Tashkent, says Rav Benzion. “In general, it wasn’t forbidden to study Torah in the USSR — just to teach it and influence others.”

There were a number of other young men in Tashkent who emerged as Torah scholars despite the circumstances. They included Chabad bochurim such as Rav Benzion’s chavrusa, Reb Berel Vilenkin.

In the time that remained between learning with his father and schoolwork, there were shiurim with the town’s two rabbanim: Rav Zalman Pevsner and Rav Shmaryahu Maryanovski.

“There were no stores, but we had seforim from old Jews who passed away — my father got an entire Shas like that,” says Rav Benzion. “We had the seforim of the Chofetz Chaim and a Russian translation of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, for example.”

Beginning in 1956, the family applied repeatedly for permission to leave the Soviet Union, and were refused for years before finally receiving permission to emigrate in 1972.

But although they were desperate to escape from the USSR, those were happy years, Rav Benzion recalls — with his trademark smile on his face. “The weddings in Tashkent were joyous occasions, and my parents ensured that we were happy.”

Tears of Meaning

The Zilbers’ supreme dedication to learning and transmitting Torah would not leave others unmoved. When they finally made it to Yerushalayim and were housed in an absorption center in the capital’s Talpiot neighborhood, the Zilbers looked for a place where Benzion could learn. A meeting on the way to the Kosel with Rav Nachman Levovitz of the Mir brought Benzion to the famed yeshivah.

It was 1972 and the USSR was at the height of its power. Very few Jews were allowed to leave the Communist bloc, and father and son were easily identifiable as foreigners from their heavy Russian Yiddish when they arrived in the Mir for Benzion to be tested.

Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz asked the 20-year-old Benzion what he’d managed to learn: “Bava Kamma, Bava Metzia, Bava Basra — part of Chullin and part of Orach Chayim,” he answered, while his father Rav Yitzchak added that whatever his son had learned, he knew perfectly.

Hearing this list Rav Chaim began to cry — tears that the newcomers misunderstood, thinking that the rosh yeshivah was bewailing the paucity of the bochur’s knowledge.

But Rav Chaim was crying for another reason. “If it’s possible to learn so much in secret,” he exclaimed, “how much more is expected of us who live in freedom?”

Endless Quest

Fifty-four years after that encounter, Rav Benzion is still consumed by the seforim to which he dedicated his life back in the Soviet Union.

In 2000, his father Rav Yitzchak founded Toldos Yeshurun, an organization that strengthens Jewish life among immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Today, Rav Benzion serves as the organization’s head — infusing Russian-speaking Jews with the same warmth and passion for Yiddishkeit that sustained his family throughout the years of Communism.

Like his own father, he learns and gives shiurim around the clock, with a combination of towering scholarship and warmth.

After a half-hour conversation, Rav Benzion dons his kapoteh and — with utter Russian simplicity — urges me to stay in his apartment while he leaves on an errand.

“Stay,” he urges, “and we can speak more about what happened in Russia.”

When he returns — moving quickly as he always does, as if he’s on an unceasing, urgent quest — I’ll be gone.

He’ll give one glance around his apartment with those glowing, intense eyes.

Then he’ll turn back towards the seforim. The ones that accompanied his father in a Siberian labor camp, where he witnessed a modern Purim miracle.

The ones that sustained his family in Kazan, then Tashkent. The ones that even Stalin couldn’t wrest away.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1101)