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bwas clear that the physical threat which would have meant bthe total collapse of détente and the rupture of American- bSoviet relations was simply not worth a bunch of Jews. It is bthis that should be remembered by all the cowards and bcritics and above all by those not-so-famous people who bshivered in the cold and relentlessly protested. When we bremember that the Soviets, during the vigil, hysterically bscreamed that “Rabin (former Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak bRabin) is the mastermind of the JDL,” let all the “troops” bsmile, but with pride. bThirteen-year-old Jonathan Orenstein who told the press b“I feel guilty about the six million who died,” the anony- bmous woman executive who said that her “elderly parents” bhad sent her so as “not to sit silently by like they did during bthe Holocaust, the member of the Weathermen who said bthat the “Jewish struggle is one long liberation movement,” b19-year-old Black Jew Yitzhak Levy who marched with his bwhite brothers, it was they and, of course, the dedicated, btireless JDL activists—too numerous to name lest we forget beven one—who saved two Jewish lives, not the fat, satisfied, bcontented Respectables. bOn the last day of the vigil I flew to Israel for a week of btalks with former Jewish underground activists. I knew that bthe commuting of the sentences had saved two lives but left bnothing else changed. The struggle had to continue for the brelease of every Soviet Jew. While I was there, the JDL seeds bbegan to bear fruit at a pace swifter than we had dared hope. bA front-page story in The New York Times of January 5th bdeclared that the Soviets, in a note to the State Department bmade public by TASS, had warned that because protection bfor Soviet citizens in the United States had not been pro- bvided, “the United States cannot expect that such conditions bwill be provided for United States premises in the Soviet bUnion.” The threat was clear and unmistakable. The Soviet bUnion was threatening to retaliate against the United States bin the USSR! bThe American response was to reject the note which bclaimed that JDL actions had been with the connivance of bthe United States Government. State Department spokes- b
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