They Couldn’t Extinguish the Light
| December 12, 2023Despite the frigid Soviet landscape, my Jewish spark was set aflame
As told to Riki Goldstein by Mrs. Suzzanah Fain
I
was studying in the university in Sverdlovsk in the early 1970s, and it was in the depth of a Russian winter when a fellow university student called Eduard Finkelstein asked me, “Suzzanah, do you want to know about Chanukah?”
I had no hesitations. That shiur about Chanukah became my first Jewish learning experience. Together with another ten students, I joined the local activist group for a shiur, and I saw a menorah for the first time in my life. How many menorahs were there in this distant Russian city? After that first exposure to Judaism, I knew this was what I wanted, and I attended more classes. Yet it was very dangerous.
Soon after I joined, the KGB started to summon members of the group for questioning, and one member was arrested and imprisoned. People stopped coming — only three of us newcomers were determined to stay involved despite the risks. But I didn’t care. This was my entry to another life.
My Jewish roots were strong, despite the frigid Soviet landscape of my childhood. Like my mother before me, I was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, east of the Ural Mountains. Both my mother’s parents were from Dvinsk, home to Rav Meir Simchah HaKohein, but their families were forced by the Germans to leave before World War I, and they wound up almost 3,000 km away, in Yekaterinburg.
In hindsight, the forced move saved their lives. My grandfather had a sister who wanted to return to Latvia, and she and her husband left Russia and went back to Dvinsk in the 1930s. We never saw them again.
When the Germans invaded Latvia, the community of Dvinsk was the first to be annihilated, and there were barely any survivors. In 1941, my grandfather would go to the railway station daily, because many Jews were coming, fleeing Latvia, though they were mainly Jews from Riga, who had some time to flee. His sister never came. My mother had the last picture she sent, with the news that they had grandchildren, and I have given the picture to Yad Vashem.
My grandmother told me that when they arrived in 1914 some of the locals came out to look at them and asked where their horns were. I presume that is what they had heard in church, or perhaps the lasting impression made by the Michelangelo statue had reached them, because Yekaterinburg was a city full of art and culture.
My grandparents were both around 17 when they came there, and their families were almost the first Jews to settle in Yekaterinburg. Almost, because there were a few old Jews living there, descendants of the “Cantonist” Jewish children who were forcibly abducted to serve in the Russian army during the 19th century. Some of them still knew they were Jews, despite their fathers’ abduction at age 12 and the 25 years of service. In fact, I had one Jewish friend who was from a Cantonist family.
In 1917, three years after my grandparents’ arrival, Czar Nicholas and his family, the last Romanov rulers of Russia, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg. The Communist Revolution changed the face of Russia, and the city was renamed Sverdlovsk. My grandparents married, and my mother and her siblings were born in Soviet Sverdlovsk.
While my mother was growing up in Sverdlovsk, my father, Moshe Rozhansky, was being raised in an observant family in Kishinev, which is today Moldova. That area was historically Romanian but was ceded to the Russian Empire at certain points. The Russians grabbed it back from Romania in the 1940s, during World War II. They forced all the young men to enlist, but they couldn’t trust these young capitalists to serve in the army, so they had to work behind the lines.
Papa was sent to work in the city of Chelyabinsk, just 200 km south of Sverdlovsk. The labor conscripts traveled by train from Moldova to the Ural Mountains. To get food and water, you had to get off and buy it in the stations along the way, but you could never know when the train would start moving again.
At one stop, the train was already moving when Papa came back, but he managed to jump on. He was making his way back to the front of the train, where his suitcase of clothing was, when someone called “Mussa, Mussa!” (a variation of his name) and began to speak to him. After sitting and speaking a while, he returned to his original carriage to find that bandits had boarded the train, stolen everything, and injured the passengers. So he arrived in the Urals whole, but without any clothing or possessions.
Papa was a very gifted musician, and soon, when there was a choir competition being held among the Russian labor battalions, one of his superiors, who recognized his talents, asked him to arrange a choir. Russians were very invested in choirs and music, and of course, they were very competitive.
“You must come in first place,” the commander warned Papa. They did, and he was delighted. Since he was a music lover, and he understood my father’s caliber, he suggested Papa apply to study in the music academy in Sverdlovsk.
The music students there were refugees from all kinds of places, and some were Jewish. Word was passed around that there were some Jewish families in town who would share food, and so Papa came to my grandparents’ home, where my grandmother would not mix milk and meat. Not that there was milk or meat then; it was wartime, and all that was available in Sverdlovsk was potatoes.
The refugee students didn’t even have potatoes, and Papa had sores on his face from hunger. My grandmother served soup — it was a soup she cooked with potatoes and beets and wild herbs. And there my father met my mother, then a medical student, and they married. His mother, who had been forcibly evacuated from Kishinev to central Asia, did not believe that her son could have found a Jewish girl out there in Sverdlovsk until he showed her their kesubah. I have that kesubah still, a small piece of paper, signed and witnessed as a kosher marriage.
Kept in the Dark
I was born a Soviet child. Naturally, I was a member of the Soviet Youth Pioneers group. You had to be a member. There was so much fear of Stalin and his Communist brutality against religion that I was not allowed to know that my grandfather went to the synagogue. When I was young, I knew nothing about that part of his life. Unlike some others who grew up in Russia, though, I always knew I was Jewish, thanks to my father’s stories about the vibrant Jewish life in Kishinev, and to my grandparents, who were religious.
Jews were so unpopular. I can remember my friends playing a game, when I was very young. It was a form of cops and robbers called “Let’s Catch the Jews.”
My father was a musician and my mother a doctor, and so we were people of means. We lived well and were the first family in our neighborhood to own a TV. I remember my mother allowing all the children in the building to come over and watch the children’s shows. Yet despite her generosity, the neighbors were jealous of how we lived, muttering that we were rich because we were Jewish.
Our pampered living conditions consisted of one large room, about 20 square meters. The kitchen and bathroom were shared with the other five families on the floor of our building. But that was considered middle-class living conditions in Sverdlovsk.
Although my mother worked long hours, she managed to keep house and cook for us, and she was generous to those who had less. I remember coming home from school one day with a friend. My mother had made borscht, beet soup. When I served my friend, she said she couldn’t eat it.
“Why is it red?” she asked me.
“It’s made of beets,” I replied.
“No, it’s blood.”
“What?”
“You Jews drink the blood of non-Jewish children.”
I was ten years old. When my parents came home, I told them what had happened, and they told me about blood libels, an ancient untruth that runs very deep and is still alive today.
At the beginning of each school year, our class would stand up for the teacher. She would enter and read the names from the class list, and each child would identify themselves by their nationality, standing up to say, “I am Russian,” or, “I am Ukrainian.” I had to stand up and say “Hebraica.” (I am Jewish.) I was the only Jewish child in the class, and the entire class would laugh. One girl asked me afterward, “But how is it possible to own up to being Jewish? Aren’t you embarrassed?” Somehow, I wasn’t.
Our history and literature teachers in seventh and eighth grade spoke about Israel as an aggressor, an enemy state. We were told that the Jewish nation and the Hebrew language don’t really exist, and that Jewish people in Russia needed to learn to become Russians. Our teachers made it clear that Russia was not only the largest country in the world, but the happiest. “The happiest children in the world are in Russia,” they would pronounce.
In my head, I thought, “I don’t believe that!”
“It’s not true that the Jews don’t exist,” Papa told me at home. “The Jews exist and are special, and we do have our own language! But we have to keep quiet about it, because they don’t like us.”
We kept quiet. Only much later, I found out that the Jewish language Papa spoke was Yiddish, not Hebrew.
When I searched for information about Judaism in the — Soviet censored — public library, I came up with very little. There was no Jewish encyclopedia, no how-to books on Judaism. The only books I could find that mentioned Jewish life were the translated novels of some American-Communist sympathizers — historical novels, some set in the Middle Ages, some in the 1920s — that described Jewish family life. The literature, although describing horrible times for our people, was idealized and romanticized to the point where I could see the beauty of Jewish life presented by these insightful and sensitive authors.
Pinpricks of Light
Once, when I was 16, I was at my grandparents’ home. I loved being there; my grandmother was absolutely wonderful to me. Suddenly, my grandfather said, “Suzzanah, you want to go with me to synagogue?”
My grandmother was in shock. “David! What are you saying? She is in Komsomol!” (the Communist youth group). He had let out the secret, and she was terrified I would tell my friends and endanger them.
I wanted to go. I ran after my grandfather and caught up. The synagogue was on the other side of town, a tiny wooden building opposite a big circus. We went inside, and then my grandfather left me in a small room while he went to pray. I sat leaning against something, and suddenly, I had a very strange feeling. It was as if something was falling onto me, then holding me. I felt faint, and at the same time I knew that there was a power in the synagogue, something big, something connected to me. From that time on, I was never embarrassed to be Jewish. I knew I belonged.
I told my grandfather that I wanted to go with him to synagogue again.
“Next year, I will take you again,” he promised.
But when the next Pesach came around, we heard that the shul had been burned down. Apparently, the circus needed space to expand, so the little shul of Sverdlovsk was summarily demolished to create more room.
Later we found out about the fate of the brave rabbi and his family — they were all killed by hooligans. I’ve seen their kevarim near the graves of my grandparents, there in Sverdlovsk.
When I finished school, in the early 1970s, I attended university, studying music and education. I met a handful of young Jewish friends, mostly students of math and physics, who were searching like me. One winter, someone named Eduard Finkelstein asked me, “Suzzanah, do you want to know about Chanukah?”
What I learned amazed me. Even when other people stopped coming because of KGB intimidation, I didn’t care. It was my entry to another life. We were starting to learn Ivrit! We had a country for Jews, named Israel!
The group broke up when Eduard left to Moscow, and another few people made their way to Lithuania. I also wanted to go somewhere where I’d be able to learn more about the world that was opening up for me, so although I had just been offered a prestigious teaching job at the Pedagogical Institute in Sverdlovsk, I applied to move to Riga. I was 27, and it seemed crazy to turn down such a post when in Riga I would be working as a nursery teacher, but actually, I enjoyed working with the young children.
In Riga I became active in Jewish groups. Under the stillness of the Soviet Republic’s paranoid suppression, our secret inner lives bubbled. When my friend Rina and her husband got permission to leave Russia for Israel, I went to Moscow along with her to say goodbye. We met with the refusenik group outside Moscow Choral Synagogue on Arkhipova Street. These strong, proud Jewish people were my heroes.
One of the young men in the group gathered on the street there, Benjamin Fain, showed an interest in me. We met a few times in Moscow and kept up with phone calls when I returned to Riga. In 1976, we stood under the chuppah together, with visiting rabbis from London and Denver as our witnesses.
I found myself married to a man on the KGB’s blacklist.
My new husband was a brilliant theoretical physicist, so brilliant that despite the systemic anti-Semitism in Russian academia, he had advanced to become head of the research team at the Institute of Solid State Physics in Chernogolovka. In 1972, when he became involved in organizing a seminar for refusenik scientists, he’d been ostracized, denounced, and excommunicated by his former friends and colleagues. As he refused to back down, he was called to a meeting at which every single member of the board of Chernogolovka scientists, his former friends, stood up one by one to denounce and vilify him, each one concluding his statement with the words, “In a healthy collective like ours, there is no room for a dishonest, indecent man like Fain.”
The pressure could not break Benjamin’s spirit. He told me he had come to the conclusion that we needed to encourage not only aliyah — physical release from Russia to Israel — but Jewish spiritual and cultural revival. He was part of a small group who understood that it was not enough to rally around “Let my people go!” Hashem said, “Let my people go that they may serve Me.”
From 1974, he worked with Semyon Kushnir and Eliyahu Essas to distribute materials on Judaism throughout the USSR. They wrote a journal called Tarbut, which earned them the nickname Tarbutniks. They also reached out to Jews abroad to make them aware that approximately two million Soviet Jews were completely cut off from their culture, religion, history, and language.
I joined Benjamin in demonstrating and fighting. I remember being at a sit-in strike in the reception room of the Supreme Soviet. Fifty-two people sat there for an entire day. At the end of the day, Benjamin said to me, “Shoshana, you leave, but keep an eye on what is happening — from a distance — and report to my friend Prestin.”
I stayed a short distance away with a friend, and I saw a clerk enter several times to try and clear the building. The men refused to move. Then soldiers entered, three soldiers for each protestor, and they were forced to board buses. I ran to call Benjamin’s friend Prestin.”
Benjamin was driven with a heavy escort of soldiers to a distant Moscow suburb and then, thankfully, released. He told me afterward that Anatoly Sharansky started to sing on the bus — surrounded by those soldiers — “Hinei mah tov umah na’im, shevet achim gam yachad,” and they all joined in.
Just a few days later, the protest was repeated, but Benjamin and I left early with Prestin to make a phone call. Our friends who remained were arrested that day and sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment.
Just months after we married, Benjamin had the audacity to send out invitations to rabbis and scholars in Russia and across the world to join an International Symposium on Jewish Culture in the USSR in December 1976. The Soviet authorities could not tolerate this, and they stepped up their intimidation of him and his friends with searches, interrogations, and threats.
One day, we were conversing with a friend, Larissa Vilensky, at the Revolution Square subway station. Without a word, some plainclothes policemen and one in uniform approached us. They handcuffed my husband and dragged him up the escalator. Larissa and I were arrested and taken to the police station.
For the next ten hours, I had no idea where Benjamin was. I was shown a search warrant and four KGB men searched our Moscow rental for over three hours, confiscating Jewish materials. One of the KGB agents grabbed my husband’s kippah and taunted me, “He won’t be needing this for a long time!”
At three a.m., Benjamin called me, free.
It took us time to recover emotionally from this arrest and search.
An American journalist asked Benjamin repeatedly as the day of the symposium approached, and the Soviets continued to search, arrest, and confiscate all our materials, “Benjamin, are you still willing to go through with this?
“Yes,” Benjamin said, determined.
“Happy Chanukah to you, Benjamin!” the American responded.
On the day the symposium was supposed to begin, Benjamin left the house at 9 a.m., only to be stopped by the KGB and placed under house arrest for four days, along with most of the key organizers of the event. (The guests they had invited from abroad had been refused visas, with the lame Russian excuse that the hotels were fully booked!) I was also placed under house arrest, but I was allowed to go out shopping for necessary items under KGB escort.
A letter in the New York Times commented on “the frenzied Soviet reaction to the unofficial symposium on Jewish culture this week in Moscow. It seemed… as though all the non-nuclear forces of the Kremlin had been mobilized to halt this fearsome threat to Soviet power. Policemen and secret service agents galore arrested some ‘conspirators’ and forced others to remain at home, threatening them with jail if they left their apartments.”
In Israel and London, Argentina, Mexico, and Harvard University, the academics who had been prevented from coming formed symposiums of their own, placing international pressure on the Russian government.
Dark and Light Fight
While our residence was registered in Chernogolovka, we spent most of our time near our friends in Moscow. That year in Chernogolovka and Moscow carries a whole lifetime of memories. Because Benjamin had earned well as a government scientist up until that time, we still had some money, but other refuseniks had little or no money and had to live off handouts from Jewish visitors from the US.
I remember listening to the Voice of America and Kol Yisrael radio at night, because during the day, the Communists disrupted the airwaves so you couldn’t hear a word.
In the circle of Benjamin’s friends, I met Anatoly Sharansky and Yosef Begun, who began their infamous ordeal in 1977, imprisoned by the KGB as Prisoners of Zion.
(The activists were implicated by a KGB mole who pretended to help them.) There were also dozens of other brave Jewish heroes who are not world-famous but were part of this struggle. My husband, Brailovsky, Kandel, Prestin, and dozens of others, were tailed everywhere by no less than five KGB agents each — if three of them got into a taxi, three black cars followed behind it! — and the courtyard of our building was swarming with men in black with radios.
There was a time when Benjamin was being tailed at his elbow, and the KGB thug complained, “Veniamin Moyseevich, you’re walking too fast today. It’s a strain on my heart!” And all this was despite the fact that they were careful not to write anything against the government in their materials.
I had a difficult first pregnancy that year, with a lot of pain. But the hospital would not admit me for treatment because my husband was a refusenik. The wife of an anti-Soviet troublemaker was not entitled to receive treatment in a gynecological ward in Russia. I lay at home, in agony and fear.
My mother came from Sverdlovsk to be with me, and knowing something had to be done, approached an acquaintance of hers. She persuaded this woman, who was the head of a department at a large hospital — with the help of a bribe, I’m pretty sure — to admit me into the hospital. I stayed in an available bed for a few days, and then, once I was already a patient, she arranged for me to transfer to the obstetric complications department and receive treatment. I left without pain.
Then came the day they arrested Benjamin for more serious interrogation, at the Lefortovo prison in Moscow. He was allowed to come home in the evening, but was summoned repeatedly for a few days. He used a method that an experienced dissident had advised the group — instead of answering verbally, you insist that the interrogator write down all questions and write him back your answers. As you can write much more slowly than you speak, you gain lots of time to formulate answers that don’t reveal anything. He had strength and courage from Hashem, and was not intimidated. After a while, he told the KGB he was not going to cooperate with their investigation. They screamed and cursed — but he walked free.
The Lights Shine On
After that experience, we were shocked in June 1977, when we were suddenly summoned to the visa department. Benjamin said to me, “Shoshana! It’s our aliyah permit!”
“Don’t say it!” I begged, afraid that it wasn’t.
But he was right. The next day we were told, “You have ten days to make your arrangements and leave the borders of the Soviet Union.”
“Perhaps twelve days?” I asked the director of the visa office.
“No bargaining here!”
Our dream was suddenly coming true.
A month after we arrived in Eretz Yisrael, I gave birth to our son in Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikvah, and eight days later we celebrated his bris.
We left Russia with nothing, like everyone else, but Benjamin had several job offers: From the University of Tel Aviv, the Weitzman Institute in Rechovot, and the University of Haifa. When we arrived, we were met by university representatives who brought us to an apartment in Ramat Aviv.
Something weighed heavily on my conscience; it had bothered me when we said goodbye to my family at Moscow’s airport, but a year later, my parents and siblings and aunts received permission to come to Eretz Yisrael, too. Benjamin never saw his father again, as he remained in Leningrad. In 1983, our second son was born. Our religious lives continued to evolve, and just as we had arrived at our conviction about Hashem’s existence and the uniqueness of the Jewish People, we slowly arrived at full Jewish observance.
For Benjamin, the odds stacked against this included not only the G-dless Soviet mentality, but the atheist approach of the entire Russian scientific establishment in which he was educated. Changing his mindset from viewing science as negating the existence of G-d to realizing that it is the revelation of G-d was the most profound work, the work of a lifetime. His conclusions about G-d and physics are published in his book Creation Ex Nihilo, in Russian, Hebrew, and English (Gefen Publishers).
Benjamin continued his work for Soviet Jewry from Israel, traveling to France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, and the US to campaign for their rights and freedom, especially for the release of Anatoly Sharansky and Yosef Begun. As thousands emigrated to Israel with the fall of the Iron Curtain, he was well-placed to help the Jewish Russian academics integrate and find jobs in Israel.
Our family spent two sabbatical years in Phoenix, Arizona, where we joined the community, and we were there when Benjamin learned that his father had passed away in Russia. He kept the year of mourning and said Kaddish for him in shul.
Benjamin himself passed away in 2013, leaving a legacy that displays how science and Judaism complement each other and help us understand the world we live in.
And those beautiful menorah lights that I saw in Sverdlovsk now shine on in my home and our children’s homes. The mechanisms of Soviet oppression could not dim the light of our people’s truth.
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 872)
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