September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 26

By MICHAEL BEIZER

“I felt proud, as a Jew, to sit with them and talk to them.” —MG, The Jews of Hope

For many Russian Jews Sir Martin Gilbert remains first and foremost a champion for their right to emigrate and to join their people in Israel. In the 1970s and 1980s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, called “Refuseniks,” were denied this basic right; those who insisted and fought for it were persecuted, even imprisoned. The State of Israel and a number of Western Jewish organizations and individuals supported their struggle. Among them, Martin Gilbert was outstanding.

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He joined their cause in winter 1983, when he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad and met leaders and activists of the Soviet Jewish movement. Though Moscow airport authorities confiscated part of the materials he had gathered when he departed, Martin nevertheless wrote a moving report of his meetings, The Jews of Hope: The Plight of Soviet Jewry Today. The book had a tremendous effect: after reading it, many people in the free world joined the effort. By giving international publicity to his heroes, Martin did a lot to protect them from further persecutions.

But this was not all. Every person he met during his trip became a devoted pen-friend of Martin Gilbert. Despite the thousand and one other things he was working on, Martin kept in touch with letters and postcards, often sent registered with return receipts to confirm they had not been intercepted by the KGB. I personally received more than one hundred letters; some activists had twice as many. Out of respect to his friends Martin usually wrote in his own hand. But on 16 January 1985 his sixtieth letter to me arrived typewritten: “Dear Misha, forgive a typewritten letter, but my fingers are ‘worn to the bone’ with my Churchill writing.”

Martin never cared whose turn it was to write. He knew the value of his messages and encouragement, and he sent them on every opportunity, even while waiting for a plane or riding on a train. He always took care to add beautiful stamps and to send a postcard from every new place he visited. Before his speech for Soviet Jews at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in February 1987, he found time to send me a postcard with a Swiss landscape and UN stamps on the back.

Martin tried to respond to every Refusenik’s request, to protect them from trouble, to give them hope for freedom, a rare commodity in the Soviet Union. Towards this end he turned to politicians, including then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, public organizations, and prominent individuals.

In his fight for freedom Martin was in tune with Churchill’s belief that Zionism was a desirable alternative to Communism as an outlet for Jewish public energy. In 1983, “in friendship and hope,” he dedicated the sixth volume of his Churchill biography to two long-term activists, Yuly Kosharovsky and Aba Taratuta. In his atlases he included the names of Refuseniks in Russia and even drew special maps to portray their place in history, one map showing their home towns and the labour camps to which they were deported—all part of his effort to publicize their plight.

He wrote articles in the Jerusalem Post which were syndicated worldwide. He tirelessly fought for the imprisoned, such as Nathan Shcharansky, Iosif Begun, Evgeny Lein, Vladimir Lifshits, Alexander Kholmiansky and others. His book on the most famous prisoner, Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time, countered the charges against a man who was unjustly jailed for nine years. Martin worked with the tireless efficiency of an entire organization or institution.

My meeting Martin was fateful. With his encouragement and intensive help, I wrote my first book, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a Noble Past, while still being held behind the Iron Curtain. Foreign visitors microfilmed and smuggled chapters of my manuscript out of Russia and sent them to Martin, who put the pieces together, had them translated and then published in Philadelphia. He edited the book, wrote an introduction, and created its twelve special maps. Its publication defined my destiny to earn a Ph.D. and become a historian.

We, the former Soviet Refuseniks, were all very pleased when Martin was honored with a knighthood, a sign of recognition for his outstanding contribution to British historiography. For us he was a Jewish knight, our friend and protector.

Dr. Beizer is a historian of Russian Jewry who was formerly active in the Soviet Jewish movement. He teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.