By Ilya Magid

Two Anecdotes

A professor of a University presented to OVIR documents for emigration to Israel. OVIR was then called to the office of the Secretary of the Party of the University. The secretary called and asked the professor, "What is your problem? You have a high salary, a big government apartment, a car and a dacha".

[Hear are two different endings]

[First ending]
"What more do you, Jew, want?"

[Second ending]
He answered, "I have 10 relatives. I am the only one who is a Jew. They requested me to go with them to Israel".

Comment:

After long discussion in Brezhnev's time (1960s) the West and the Soviet Union concluded the Helsinki agreement. The Soviet Union wanted to legalize the acquisition of land as a result of WWII. (It occupied Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Keningsberg, etc. It colonized Western Europe.) The Soviet Union also wanted to organize the best trading policy with the United States. However America did not want to cooperate. The West would agree with that only if the Soviet Union would protect human rights and allow Jews to be reunited with their relatives in Israel. (In the Soviet Union a person's nationality is stated in his passport.) Before 1989 they emigrated through Vienna, where they could change their destination. After 1989 they had to emigrate directly to Israel.

A purported close relative from Israel sent to a relative in the Soviet Union the required emigration document called a summons. That summons included a list of all relatives who could emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel. The Israelis sent the summons very often from fictional relatives in Israel.

After that the Soviet relatives had to go to OVIR. One person was designated the head of a family. That person had to be a Jew. Close relatives meant husband, wife, children, and grandchildren. The nationality of other relatives was not important. Only if OVIR saw that the family was completely Russian, did it stop the emigration.

In this situation a Jewish man could have a Russian wife, and other relatives who were related only to that Russian person could still qualify to emigrate.

The next case was real. In an apartment of our building there lived a Russian woman (divorced from a Russian husband and remarried to a Jew) and her daughter. That woman's mother and father, an anti-Semitic Russian couple, lived in the same building in another apartment. Jewish husband worked in a trade and was a very rich person, though there was no official record of his wealth. (He was also divorced, from a Jewish woman.) That marriage was a big misfortune for her anti-Semitic parents. That new couple gave birth a boy. In the end of 1980 the woman's father told my wife in secrecy, "It is necessary for us to move along". My wife asked, "Where?" He said, "Of course, to Israel." The young family emigrated before we did. One Jewish man emigrated with three non-Jewish persons (wife, wife's daughter and son.)

I heard that right now the woman's parents also live in Israel.


Editor Steven Siegel

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