Soviet Jewish underground

Clandestine Jewish religious, educational and emigration networks in the Soviet Union (1920s–1980s), including the Chabad-Lubavitch network and its links with Israel's Nativ

Soviet Jewish underground
Type	Clandestine religious, educational and emigration networks
Start date	1920
End date	1991
Location	Soviet Union, especially Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Kharkiv, Samarkand, Tashkent and Lviv
Participants	Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim; Breslov Hasidim; Chamah; Nativ envoys; refuseniks
Organisers	Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn; Menachem Mendel Schneerson; Lishkas Ezras Achim
Outcome	Religious networks survived to the Soviet collapse; about a thousand Chabad Hasidim left illegally in 1946–47; mass emigration from the 1970s

The Soviet Jewish underground was the set of clandestine networks through which Jews in the Soviet Union kept up religious practice, education and contact with Jews abroad, and in some periods organised illegal emigration. The best documented of these networks was run by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim. Under the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, they sent graduates of the Tomchei Temimim yeshiva across the country as ritual slaughterers and teachers, and set up "a network of schools for the teaching of Torah and ChaBaD Hasidism". His successor, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, kept up a clandestine network of emissaries inside the Soviet Union until the end of Soviet rule.

From the early 1950s Chabad's network worked alongside, and partly through, Nativ (Lishkat Hakesher), the Israeli government agency set up to keep contact with Jews behind the Iron Curtain. Chabad-side and Nativ-side sources both describe Israeli envoys in Moscow passing Chabad literature from New York to Chabad groups in the Soviet Union. From 1969 the Lubavitcher Rebbe opposed the public protest campaign for Soviet Jewry backed by Israel and Nativ, arguing for "quiet diplomacy".

This page concentrates on Chabad's documented actions. Other groups, such as the Breslov Hasidim, also kept up clandestine religious life (see below).

The Chabad network, 1920–1927

After 1917 the Jewish sections of the Bolshevik party, the Yevsektsiya, campaigned against religion and traditional Jewish communal life. Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman write that the Yevsektsiya was led for most of its existence by Semion Dimanstein, "a former student at the Lubavitch yeshiva". Unlike most Orthodox leaders, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn stayed in Soviet Russia. He sent graduates of Tomchei Temimim to Jewish centres, "Often they came in the role of shokhtim, ritual slaughterers", which gave them an income, and they set up schools. According to Heilman and Friedman, this "made their rebbe not only a leader but a man who controlled an important network within the new Soviet Union".

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) chose him to distribute relief to Soviet Jews. Heilman and Friedman write that this "made him even more powerful, but it also made him a potential target for the communist authorities". The historian Irina Osipova, whose 2002 history of the Chabad underground draws on OGPU–NKVD–MGB case files collected by the Memorial society and was published with Chabad support, quotes the Moscow Yevsektsiya leader Moishe Litvakov complaining that the Rebbe had "организовал всех служителей культа — раввинов, шойхетов, меламедов — во всех концах страны" ("organised all the servants of the cult – rabbis, ritual slaughterers, teachers – in every corner of the country").

In 1927 the OGPU arrested Schneersohn. Osipova, citing his case file, records that he was charged with "контрреволюционной деятельности" ("counter-revolutionary activity"), including running a network of chadarim and yeshivas and receiving foreign funds for religion. He was released into exile and left the Soviet Union later that year. His arrest, sentence and release are covered on Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn.

Samarkand

Among those Schneersohn sent east was Simcha Gorodetzky, whom he directed in 1926 to Samarkand to work among Bukharan Jews. Samarkand later became a centre of the Chabad underground and, during the Second World War, the base of the relocated underground Tomchei Temimim yeshiva.

The 1946–47 exodus through Lviv

At the end of the Second World War the Soviet and Polish governments agreed to repatriate Polish citizens, and registration ran through the winter of 1945–46. According to Irina Osipova, after Passover in April 1946 a secret meeting of Chabad leaders in Samarkand, including Nisson Nemanov, head of the Chabad yeshiva, decided at first not to try to leave. Some rabbis disagreed, and approved fictitious "Polish" marriages and the departure of children with "Polish" families. After the arrest and expulsion of a rabbi from Samarkand, many Hasidim began to look for Polish papers.

Osipova writes that in July 1946 Nemanov received a coded telegram from Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn: "Дедушка очень хочет повидаться с детьми. Выезжайте к тете Поле. Там все хорошо" ("Grandfather very much wants to see the children. Go to Aunt Polya. All is well there"). His helpers took it as an instruction to organise the illegal passage of Hasidim to Poland under cover of the repatriation. In Poland emissaries of the Rebbe took them to a reception point in Łódź, and from there to Prague, where Rabbi Jacobson arranged American or Israeli visas.

In Lviv a secret committee was formed in late summer 1946 to buy Polish documents and organise departures. Its members included the rabbis Moshe-Chaim Dubrovsky, Yona Kogan, Leib Mochkin, Shmaryahu Sossonkin and Zalman Serebryansky, with Mendel Futerfas as one of the most active helpers. Osipova writes that the committee lasted only about half a year, but saved "сотни хасидских семей" ("hundreds of Hasidic families") for traditional religious life. Families were made up to match the documents that could be bought, and priority went to yeshiva students and families with children. She gives the total who left, in a quoted phrase, as "около тысячи хасидов" ("about a thousand Hasidim").

Arrests and sentences

On 24 January 1947 a group travelling on a fictitious evacuation list was taken off the train at the border station of Medyka and arrested by MGB military counter-intelligence. Further arrests followed in Lviv in February. According to the case files quoted by Irina Osipova:

• ten defendants, described as "active participants in an anti-Soviet organisation of Hasidim", were charged with "intention to betray the Motherland" and sentenced on 23 August 1947 to ten years in the camps. One of them, Rabbi Shmuel Notik, died in the camp a year later;
• three others were sentenced to seven and four years on the same charge;
• four were sentenced for "aiding" them, to five or eight years.

Futerfas later told the prosecutor that he had signed his interrogation record of 17 February under beatings by counter-intelligence officers. Chabad.org says that he was released in the late 1950s, after nine years in the Gulag, and left the Soviet Union in 1964.

Editor's note: the sentences above were imposed by Soviet courts for attempted illegal emigration and helping it. Osipova's account rests on the defendants' case files; she notes that some confessions were obtained under beatings.

Chamah

Around 1954 a group of young Chabad Hasidim in Samarkand, led by Moshe Nissilevitch, founded a secret organisation that later took the name Chamah (Chaburas Mezakei Ha'Rabim). According to the memoir of Hillel Zaltzman, one of its members, its aims were "the preservation and promotion of Judaism, and providing economic assistance for Jews in Samarkand". The founders swore on a copy of the Tanya hidden inside an edition of Pravda. Members raised money in secret, distributed food to "hundreds of Jewish families" before the festivals and obtained coal illegally for Jews in need. Chamah later became an international organisation working with Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Nativ and Israeli envoys

Nativ was set up in the early 1950s to keep contact with Jews in the Soviet bloc. Chabad.org (Chabad-side) states that the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, "worked closely with Lishkat Hekesher, known more widely as Nativ", coordinating with its leaders Shaul Avigur and Nehemiah Levanon and with Israel's embassy in Moscow, "all while retaining his own separate network".

Envoys' accounts

Yosef Yitzchak Kaminetzky's Chabad-side book The Rebbe and the Mossad (1998) relays memoirs by two Israeli envoys, Nehemiah Levanon and Yehoshua Pratt. Levanon, in Moscow in 1953–55, says the envoys set up "underground cells" in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Riga and Tashkent, which distributed religious material. Pratt, in Moscow in 1959–62, says he brought Chabad books to the Chabad centres in Leningrad, Riga and Tashkent. Kaminetzky quotes Yaakov Sharett, the nephew of Shaul Avigur, as saying that the Israelis "came to realise that the Chabad underground was spread throughout Russia and that it was the only underground that was 'clean' of informers and traitors". The same book records that, in Tashkent, local Chabad Hasidim warned Bukharan worshippers away from the Israelis because they "looked suspicious".

The Moscow "parcels"

A 2024 history of Nativ on the website of Israel's cultural centres in the former Soviet Union (Nativ-side) states that Nativ "активно сотрудничал и с религиозным движением Хабад" ("also actively co-operated with the Chabad religious movement"), and that the Rebbe "часто переправлял в СССР литературу" ("often sent literature into the USSR") through it. Quoting David Shechter's book Soldiers at the Crossing, it describes how Israeli embassy staff left "parcels" sent by the Rebbe's New York office in an agreed place at the Moscow Choral Synagogue, where Moshe (Meishke) Katzenelenbogen collected them. The contents, usually new discourses (maamarim) by the Rebbe, were copied and sent to underground Chabad groups in "Leningrad, Riga, Samarkand, Gorky, Chernivtsi and other cities". This continued until the Soviet Union broke off relations with Israel in 1967.

After 1967 Chabad.org says that Nativ, without an embassy, "became even more reliant on Chabad's existing network".

Quiet diplomacy and the protest movement

After 1967 Nativ helped to organise public protests in the West, which grew into the Soviet Jewry movement. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, publicly opposed these protests. In February 1969 he asked Nehemiah Levanon and the Israeli diplomat Yoram Dinstein to persuade Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to suspend Israeli-backed protests. According to Chabad.org, he "claimed to have certain knowledge" that, if nothing untoward happened, thousands of Jews would be allowed to leave for Israel. Eshkol died within ten days, and the protests continued.

On 31 December 1970 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Chabad opposed public demonstrations for Soviet Jews as counterproductive. It quoted the Rebbe's spokesman, Rabbi Yudel Krinsky: "If you want a favor from someone, you don't step on his toes", and "Russia does not respond to demonstrations."

Chabad.org (Chabad-side) states that in 1969 the Rebbe asked Shlomo Riskin, chairman of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, to set up underground yeshivas in four Soviet cities, and that Levanon then asked Riskin to open four Hebrew classes as well. It also says the Rebbe opposed the 1974 Jackson–Vanik amendment, appealed to the US President in 1983 to act without "noise and propaganda", and in 1988 persuaded Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to have the "Solidarity Sunday" rally cancelled, which "caused great controversy in the American Jewish community".

The author Joseph Telushkin, who wrote a biography of the Rebbe, said in 2014 that protests for Soviet Jewry were "one of the areas in which I disagreed with the Rebbe". He added that when the Rebbe could not stop a demonstration, he told its organiser to "make sure it's on Page 1 of The New York Times".

Editor's note: the claims that the Rebbe's interventions affected Soviet emigration figures, the 1983 US–Soviet human rights deal or the cancellation of the 1988 rally rest on Chabad-side sources. No independent source was found that confirms a causal role. An academic history of Nativ in the United States (Pauline Peretz, Bulletin du Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem) could not be fetched.

Lishkas Ezras Achim

Chabad.org (Chabad-side) states that in the mid-1960s, after his arrival in New York, Mendel Futerfas urged Chabad Hasidim who had escaped the Soviet Union to send parcels to Jews there, and that with the Rebbe's blessing they founded Lishkas Ezras Achim ("Aid to Our Brothers"). It sent parcels of goods to be sold on the black market, using return addresses chosen to look like family senders, and smuggled religious items such as prayer books, tefillin and mezuzot. Its Brooklyn warehouse filled "false-bottomed suitcases" for visitors to the Soviet Union. Chabad.org describes visitors in the 1980s, such as Professor Ron Rubin of the City University of New York, travelling for the organisation with suitcases of religious books, ritual slaughter knives and burial shrouds.

Refuseniks and the late Soviet period

Heilman and Friedman write that, "near the end of the Soviet regime's rule and the opening of the era of glasnost", the Rebbe sent emissaries "in 'the guise of tourists and business travelers'", with matzah, prayer books and tefillin. They add that many refuseniks "were supported and sustained by Lubavitchers, including some of the most prominent among them". They also note that Lubavitchers came to see "their Rebbe's intervention in the communist world as responsible for the slow but steady crumbling of the Soviet empire", citing the physicist Herman Branover, a former Soviet Jew who became the Rebbe's disciple. Of the Rebbe's predictions to Branover they write that "What the Rebbe actually did say at the time is unclear". After the fall of the Soviet Union Chabad built a large presence in Russia and the other successor states (see Chabad Lubavitch of Russia, Chabad Lubavitch of Ukraine and Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS).

Other movements

The Breslov Hasidim kept up a secret Rosh Hashanah gathering at the grave of Nachman of Breslov in Uman. The Breslov leader Yechiel Michel Dorfman wrote that after 1928 "our Rosh Hashanah gathering went underground. Yet we held a secret minyan in Uman every single year until I left Russia in 1971", and that he had spent "six years and seven months in Siberia for Jewish observance".

See also

• Nativ
• Yevsektsiya
• Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
• Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Hillel Zaltzman
• Chabad Lubavitch of Russia
• Chabad Lubavitch of Uzbekistan
• Nachman of Breslov