Many years ago in Moscow, when we were ordinary loyal Soviet Jews – which meant we were deprived of our freedom and our identity and were powerless and helpless – we discovered there was a state of Israel, a state that fights for its right to exist and also for our dignity, a state that was waiting for us.
Then we learned there was a great history, which started with the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and continues, and that we ourselves were a chapter in that history and were part of a great people whose struggle would always be with us.
That is when we began to fight for our freedom.
That is why I told the judge, when he asked me some minutes before my sentencing whether I had any last words to tell the court, “I have nothing to say to the court, but to my people and to my wife I am saying “l’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim – next year in Jerusalem.”
I said it because I knew this is what connected me with the generations of Jews before me and with those Jews who had been fighting for me all those years.
Let me take you for a second to the prison thousands of miles from Jerusalem and from Moscow – to Ural, on the border of Siberia. There I was in solitary confinement and near me in the other cell was another Prisoner of Zion, Yosef Mendelevitch, also in solitary confinement. We couldn’t talk to one another, but we could signal in Morse code.
We could not see one another on what we believed was Independence Day in Israel, at what we believed was 11 o’clock in Jerusalem, the time the siren goes off. We stood still and looked in the direction of Jerusalem. We heard the siren and we saw the people of Jerusalem standing in the streets. We heard Menachem Begin promise never to give up the fight until our release. We knew the Jewish world was united in the struggle. And we knew the day would come when an airplane would take us from that prison to Israel.
That day came for me five years later. Then, one after the other, all the Prisoners of Zion were released – until, finally, as a result of twenty-five years of struggle, millions of Jews were able to leave the Soviet Union. That was the power of this connection with Israel, with Jerusalem, with the Jewish people.
Today we live in a world where there are no walls or prisons standing between us. We can talk to friends anywhere in real time and even see them.
Why, then, are we so lonely? Why are we so weak in facing external threats? We are not in solitary confinement. We live in big communities in Israel and the Diaspora. But these communities look like they are running in different directions. Is there a way to change the world? Is there an organization that can do it?
Great ideas inspire people and mobilize their commitment, their energy, their talents. And if an organization can then unite those people and their talents, history will be changed. This is what happened more than a hundred years ago when Theodor Herzl came up with a simple idea. He said the time had come to translate our prayers, dreams and desires into political activism in order to build the State of Israel.
But it became clear that it was not enough to have a small group of people who wanted to come to Palestine to build the State of Israel. You had to unite the forces of the entire Jewish world, and so the Jewish Agency was created. And of course before and after Israel became an independent state, the Jewish Agency was responsible for bringing over millions of Jews in many different waves.
Today we live in a different time with different challenges. For many people in the free world, any connection to their religion, their people, their roots or their history goes against their idea of freedom. In this world of post-identity, we Jews are especially in danger because of assimilation and the weakening of the connection to our roots and to our tradition.