Rabbi Gary A. Glickstein

Simchat Torah, 1967 marked the beginning of the Soviet Jewry Movement. It began when tens of thousands of repressed Jews in Soviet Russia poured out into the squares of synagogues in Russia and celebrated the June 1967 victory of Israel. They danced and sang, even as KGB agents took their pictures and wrote down their names for later retribution.

That was 40 years ago. Today, over one million of those Jews and their successors live in Israel, citizens of the Jewish State. There is no Soviet Union. Jews now have greater freedom to discover their Judaism throughout the former Soviet Empire.

I wrote the following this past week for the United Jewish Communities’ special publication in honor of this important anniversary. I want to share it with you:

My Journey as a Jewish Spy in the USSR

Rabbi Gary Glickstein

Former Chairman and President of the National Rabbinic Cabinet of the UJC. Rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom, Miami Beach Florida

I was a Jewish spy sent to the Soviet Union in 1982 on a mission to bring contraband to refuseniks, to teach Torah to spiritually hungry Jews and to bring back coded information about the situation affecting the Jewish communities in the USSR. At the same time, I was serving as rabbi for Temple Sinai in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I want to be clear and precise. My spying adventure was only a one-time event; my rabbinate in Worcester was actually my full-time work.

I, along with one other colleague, was sent on this mission by the New England Region of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. I was trained for six months by members of Action for Soviet Jewry, situated in Boston, Massachusetts. I learned to read the Cyrillic alphabet, develop secret personal codes, memorize critical information, develop a false identity profile, and understand and become familiar with the individuals and families we would contact along with the historical context of the communities we were visiting. It was a heady time.

Our mission was one of many. Groups of Jews around the world were engaging in this secret outreach to our brothers and sisters suffering the oppression of Communism in the USSR. This was the 1970’s and 1980’s. The members of American Jewish communities throughout the land wrote letters, protested, marched on Washington, set up programs for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs to twin with Soviet Jewish children who were denied the opportunity to study Hebrew, read from the Torah and openly proclaim their Jewish identity.

On my “spy” journey into the January bleakness, icy cold and darkness of Soviet Russia, I spent my days and nights avoiding Soviet police who followed me. I made secret calls from public phones to my contacts, arranging surreptitious meetings with refuseniks in (what was then called) Leningrad and Moscow. I taught Torah in every setting to young and old, all grateful for my presence. I distributed medicine for the sick, and warm silk underwear, jackets and socks for the Prisoners of Zion in the Gulag. In addition, I brought new cameras, jewelry, Levi jeans and music albums for out-of-work refuseniks to sell on the black market in order to sustain their families.

I was frightened in a way that I had never been before nor have been since. For a short time I felt what it was to be watched, suspected, hunted. I knew that every act I was performing in Russia was illegal according to their system of justice. When I entered the USSR, I had been officially warned not to contact “Zionist agents.” I had been sternly told that if I disobeyed Soviet law, I would be immediately arrested.

I have never had a more liberating moment than when my plane took off from the Moscow Airport, headed toward my home and freedom. I repeated, over and over, “modeh ani l’fanecha – I am so grateful to you, the Living and Eternal Sovereign.”