When the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee formed in 1941 at the urging of the Soviet government, the goal was simple. Russian Jewish leaders would reach out to Western Jews to help support the Soviet Army and defeat the Nazis.
However in 1948 when dictator Joseph Stalin no longer needed the committee, the secret police murdered the group’s leader and arrested the other members. Most were later executed. The committee died as well.
Earlier this year, Jews in Russia decided to re-establish the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. This time, the group isn’t supporting the government’s military or propaganda needs. Instead, it’s there to monitor human rights abuses, create links to American Jews and even plan for a mass emergency emigration.
“We are continuing the story of this committee,” committee vice president Alexander Lieberman said during a visit to San Francisco last week en route to a Union of Councils meeting in Washington.
Lieberman is also director of the 7-year-old Russian-American Bureau on Human Rights and Rule of Law, which is affiliated with two U.S.-based groups dedicated to aiding Jews in the former Soviet Union — the Union of Councils and the Bay Area Council for Jewish Rescue and Renewal.
In addition to monitoring anti-Semitism and establishing e-mail and fax connections to American Jews, the Moscow-based committee is trying to plan for mass evacuations in what Lieberman calls the seemingly “impossible” event of the resurrection of pogroms or border closures.
Though Lieberman doesn’t believe that the national government will turn against the Jews or that a need to evacuate Jews will ever exist, he refuses to let Jews be caught off guard in the case of another genocide like the Holocaust.
“This history must not be repeated,” said the 42-year-old former vice chief editor of the Moscow News.
For now, Lieberman said, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union is in a “latent form” that comes from the grass roots, not the highest levels of government.
He hears talk of Jewish-Masonic conspiracies. He can find anti-Semitic and Nazi rhetoric in about 200 newspapers sold on the streets of Moscow. He has witnessed public demonstrations with slogans such as “Kill the Jews.” And he said Russia’s so-called mafia particularly hates Jews because they tend to resist blackmailing more than other groups.
Though verbal and written threats against Jews aren’t uncommon, he said, few if any physical attacks have occurred. Yet.
Jewish businesspeople have been murdered — Lieberman suspects by the Russian mafia — but he said it is unclear whether they were targeted because they were Jews or because they were considered uncooperative businesspeople.
Lieberman does not see evidence of anti-Semitism among President Boris Yeltsin’s elite circle, but contends that it definitely exists in the lower levels of government.
Earlier this month, he said, a friend in the city of Yekaterinburg near Siberia was labeled a “fuhrer of Jewish nationalists” by the government there. The friend told Lieberman to contact Western groups if he disappears.
While he acknowledges the darker side of life for Jews in Russia, Lieberman also stands firmly committed to help reconstruct the Jewish communities in his native country.
This two-pronged approach is part of the Russian Jewish mentality, he explained.
“We are ready for building and we have to be ready for total evacuation.”