The heart of your memoirs revolves around the secret Jewish community you belonged to in Samarkand. Can you describe this community?
As an example, we had a secret minyan on Shabbos. There was an official shul in Samarkand, but I never went to it. We weren’t allowed. If a child under 18 went, they would close it up. Bringing up children in the Jewish faith was considered religious propaganda. They would arrest you. Most of the people in that shul were KGB agents.
So we would daven secretly. We would select a house situated in a non-visible area but never the same place two weeks in a row because the amount of traffic would be suspicious. When I approached the house, if I saw a neighbor nearby, I wouldn’t enter. I’d walk around the block. If I saw another member of the minyan nearby, I also would walk around the block, or he’d walk around, and then come back two or three minutes later.
You write that you wouldn’t even tell your closest friends or relatives about some of the underground Jewish activities in Samarkand. Why?
Because you never knew who would be called to the KGB. We had a yeshiva at my brother’s house. When my father came to the house, though, they tried to hide it from him.
We had a rule growing up: What I don’t have to know, please don’t tell me. The KGB can’t get something out of me that I don’t know. People say this was heroic, but we didn’t feel heroic. This was the regular way of life we were used to from the day we were born.
You write that the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jews in the Soviet Union ultimately succumbed to the communist campaign to stamp out religion from society.
Yes, there was persecution, and there was no community structure in the Soviet Union. Parents were afraid to educate their children at home because they would tell their friends. When I was in Kiev in the 1960s and asked some older Jews where I could daven, they were shocked that someone my age davened and spoke Yiddish. It was unheard of.
You write that you visited a chassid in the 1960s who was so isolated from Jewish life that he didn’t know – in the mid-1960s – who had succeeded the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe who had passed away in 1920! Were there no Jewish newspapers? Was the persecution that total?
That was Reb Itche Garelik, who was one of the first teachers in the yeshiva in Lubavitch. He didn’t know anything going on in the Jewish world. I remember I once managed to get hold of an Agudath Israel magazine in Moscow and was stopped by a government official in Lvov. I thought it was the end of me since the magazine was published in America. It was an open miracle that he didn’t find the magazine in my suitcase.
You have a fascinating story in your book about a chassid named Reb Berke Chein who hid in your house for five years without seeing his wife and children. Can you elaborate?
He tried escaping the Soviet Union in 1946 with false papers, but was caught and fled to Samarkand. My parents told us a Jew was coming to the house who didn’t have a place to sleep and no one should know he was there. And this is the way he lived in our house for five years. My mother told him, “Berke, your wife doesn’t know you’re alive. You have to tell her.” He said, “No, never. Maybe she’ll be called by the KGB and interrogated. She doesn’t want to know, believe me.”