Read When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry for Free Online

that they could do something—that by showing a young person a map of Israel, teaching him some Hebrew songs, and exposing him to Jabotinsky's essays, they could alter his sense of himself—the small freedom granted by the thaw became insufficient. It only made them hungry for more.
    In this way, Riga became the epicenter of a new type of Soviet Jewish activism. It started in the living rooms of people like Boris and Lydia Slovin. Coming back to her small Latvian town after the war, Lydia found that her home had been destroyed, as had the Jewish high school where her father had been a teacher. Her family moved to Riga, where she went to school and received a law degree in 1952. Like many in these early Zionist groups, Lydia was affected by the news in the fall of 1956 that Israel, in an operation conducted with Britain and France, had conquered the Sinai Peninsula. The anti-Israel rhetoric that followed inspired a few families to go pray in the synagogue for the safety of the Jewish State. One of the first pieces of samizdat distributed by Slovin's small group in the late fifties was Ben-Gurion's speeches on the Sinai campaign. Zionists met with friends for whispered discussions even though they lived in cooperative apartments where all that separated one family from the next was a thin sheet. The artist Yosef Kuzkovsky, who had become a famous painter in the socialist realist style, produced portraits of Lenin and Stalin for official consumption but kept hidden in his house a giant canvas he had been working on for years,
The Last Way
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Babi Yar;
it depicted a group of Jews being marched to their deaths under a cloudy sky. It was a photograph of this painting that was later framed and hung on the obelisk memorial at Rumbuli.
    Crucial in turning these individual acts into a movement were those former prisoners who had done time in labor camps as punishment for Zionist activity—it hadn't taken much for them to be arrested, usually a letter written to Israel or possession of any type of Zionist paraphernalia. The bonds formed in the prison camps became an important factor in establishing connections between the various centers of Zionist activity. Addresses were exchanged, codes for communication were established. Once they returned to their cities, these ex-inmates were not only the most fearless activists—they had already experienced the state at its worst—they were also hubs of information and material. In Riga, Yosef Schneider was one of the people who filled this role. In 1955, an uncle of Schneider who lived in Israel sent him a package containing a few photographs of Zionist leaders. Displaying a brazenness that would have meant death just a few years before, Schneider took one of the portraits—Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel—and put it in the window of his photography studio on the main boulevard of Riga. Even more audacious, the Chaim Weizmann picture replaced a photograph of Lenin that had occupied the spot (there was indeed a vague resemblance between the two bald and goateed leaders). This was clearly asking for trouble. In 1955, Schneider was one of the earliest to apply for a visa to leave the country. He was turned down then and six more times over the next two years. A former officer in the Red Army, he trained a group of Jewish men in marksmanship in an attempt to form a Jewish self-defense group. When the KGB finally came to arrest him, in 1957, it was for taking notes while listening to Kol Israel broadcasts and for allegedly slandering the Soviet Union in letters to his uncle. What they found searching his house didn't help him: along with his rifle, pistol, and bullets were Yiddish newspapers, a map of Israel, and the words to the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah," written on a scrap of paper.
    In the early 1960s, when Schneider was released, he became an important contact with Moscow, where some of his fellow former inmates were trying to teach Hebrew and disseminate