New Book!

Posted on April 2, 2014 Updated on April 2, 2014

I’m very excited to announce a new book I had the privilege to put together.

This book highlights the spiritual activism which took place both inside and outside the Soviet Union between 1975 and 1992. Although a movement to help Soviet Jewry began in the United States and elsewhere in the 1960s, its focus was essentially political, not religious. Its goal was to get the Soviet authorities to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel, not necessarily teach them what it meant to live a Jewish life. For the most part, many of the intellectuals and scientists who became activists in the sixties and the seventies never embraced an observant life. They saw their return to Jewish identity in mostly secular terms. There were a handful of old Jews who miraculously held onto their beliefs and observance even from Lenin’s time, but by Soviet design they had no influence on the younger generations. From a Torah perspective, the Soviet Union was a vast spiritual wasteland.

Then a spark was lit – albeit among a handful of young Jews who were alone, scattered, persecuted, under constant surveillance by the KGB and without books or teachers. Fanning their spark into the fire of a spiritual revolution required Jews from outside the Soviet Union to get involved. And, indeed, a few such Jews stepped into the breach.

One of them was was couple: R’ Mordechai Neustadt and his wife. From husband-and-wife travel agents trying to make a small difference there eventually grew this vast network called Vaad Lehatzolas Nidchei Yisrael (Organization to Rescue Dispersed Jews) that dispatched hundreds of shlichim (emissaries) to the Soviet Union to teach and encourage members of a budding baal teshuvah movement. Moreover, as the Soviet Union began collapsing and started letting its Jewish population emigrate, the Vaad helped already-freed Soviet Jews make the transition to life in Eretz Yisrael and America. It would set up yeshivas, kollels and educational institutions geared specifically for them. In short, the Vaad turned a trickle into a torrent. It changed the course of history.

The Vaad’s shlichim were particularly noteworthy in that many of them were prominent roshei yeshiva, venerated mechanchim and acclaimed talmidei chachamim. This cadre of distinguished emissaries placed themselves in the line of fire, risking arrest, detention and hostile interrogations from the KGB just to teach Torah to a lost generation. They were frontline participants and living witnesses to one of the greatest miracles in recent history – the resurrection of Torah-true Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. Their testimonies not only tell the story but tell it with an especially high dosage of Torah perspective.

The hope is that this book becomes the source for young and old, novice and maven, who want an in-depth firsthand account of what happened to Jews in the Soviet Union, the miracle of how Torah sprouted from behind the Iron Curtain, and why, for all its tragedy, the story of Soviet Jewry turned into an incredibly inspiring chapter in the unparalleled ongoing story of the Jewish people.