“Everybody played the same game, called ‘Going to Israel.’”
As a teenager, Yosef worked as a carpenter’s apprentice in a factory by day. At night, he went to School 25, a high school where, amazingly, most of the students were Jewish.
“Can you imagine how a child, a teenager of 16, can feel working with the Russian goyim who were saying, ‘You are a man? Sit with us, drink vodka!’ At my factory job, they wanted to corrupt me, make me like them. I hate drinking vodka, even now. On Purim, I don’t drink anything. It was a blessing.”
At the high school, a friend of Yosef’s announced: “Friends, we don’t study today. Today is a holiday – a new year. We are going out!” Yosef asked him, “What new year? It’s September now. The new year is in December.”
“He told me it was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, that the Jews have different holidays than others. Then he said, ‘We are going to the synagogue!’
“I had nothing to do with religion, but I couldn’t stay alone, so I followed them. When I came to the synagogue, we met friends. I enjoyed it, this beautiful holiday. They told me in ten days, there would be another one. I thought, ‘Every ten days, we have another holiday? What a beautiful religion!’”
The boy and his father were close. “My father would say: ‘It’s true that people here don’t like us. But, there is another country where everybody likes Jews. Why? Everybody’s Jewish!’ And he would say, ‘In that country the sky is blue and the sun is shining. What country is this? Israel.’”
Moshe Mendelevich was not alone in speaking to his son that way. In those years, Jewish families in Riga secretly played Israeli music records, listened to Kol Israel radio broadcasts, tried to teach themselves Hebrew, and read any Jewish material they could find. Leon Uris’s book, Exodus, over 600 pages long, was secretly translated and handed out by the Jewish underground, a best-seller under the radar.
“And everybody played the same game,” says Yosef, “called ‘Going to Israel.’”
But Soviet citizens, Jew and non-Jew alike, were locked behind an Iron Curtain. Those who sought to leave had to apply to the OVIR office for permission, something rarely granted. Such an application was not made light-heartedly; it led to being fired from one’s job and being watched by the KGB for anti-Soviet actions, such as – in the case of Jews – learning Hebrew and studying Torah, offenses which led to imprisonment.
“The moment I put my first handful of sand in the trench, I became the enemy of the Soviet authorities.”
In the early 1960s, defying Soviet law, Yosef and other young Jews made frequent trips to the Rumbuli forest outside Riga, the site of a 1941 massacre of at least 25,000 Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. There, the Jews had been forced to undress, lie down in five narrow ditches, and wait to be shot, one by one, in the head. Twenty-plus years later, there were still bones sticking out of the ground.
Seeing it for the first time, a big trench covered with sand that had receded, he understood “this was the biggest mitzvah, to help make a Jewish grave.”
Strangely, there was no memorial to mark the spot. Yosef asked himself, “What would be the reason that the Russians themselves wouldn’t establish a memorial to make people remember? And then I understood. If they would erect a memorial, people would come and say Kaddish – and remember. They would have liked us to assimilate and forget that we are Jewish. So the moment I put my first handful of sand in the trench, I became the enemy of the Soviet authorities – because they would like me to forget and I would like to remember.”
