Wherever There Is Jewish Pain

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bwith. The growing anger and almost paranoid attention bgiven us by the Soviets and their lackeys was clear proof that b“garbage,” harassment, and much more violent means were bindeed imperiling détente and forcing the Soviets to change btheir policy. If The New York Times could report (April 4, b1971) that Polish secret agent Andrzej Czechowicz had btaken time from his usual attacks on the United States and bWest Germany to devote three “intelligence reports” b(printed in the official Polish Communist paper Trybuna bLudu on the “anti-Soviet and anti-Communist campaign of bZionist organizations aimed at forcing the USSR to permit bemigration to Israel,” and if he could spend his time invent- bing such comical stories as the one that “Rabbi Meir Kahane bhad received $400,000 from the CIA for a secret terrorist bfighting squad called Haganah [sic],” then we knew that the bRussians were hurting.

bAnd indeed, the wire services on April 12 carried a story bthat read: “More Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel during bMarch than in all of 1970, to bring the total number of bdepartures for the first quarter of this year to nearly 1,400. bIf the rate for the first ninety days of 1971 continues for the bremainder of the year, Israel will receive about 5,000 Soviet bJews by 1972.” It was destined to be far higher than that, an bunbelievable 15,000, easily more than ten to fifteen times bmore than the yearly average until then, with the daily baverage “skyrocketing,” according to the press, to thirty- bfour per day. The JDL knew exactly why this was happen- bing, and Jewish militants escalated their activities.

bAs Passover approached, a group of young Jews from bJDL and its front organization, the Student Activists for bSoviet Jewry, entered the offices of Aeroflot and Amtorg bon April 13, and proceeded to, as they later said, “visit bplagues on the Soviets, the first of them that will inflict upon bthe modern Pharaohs.” The New York Times described both bincidents:

b“The first in the form of about fifty frogs was visited upon b[Aeroflot] at about 1 PM. This was followed by the release of ban equal number of white mice about thirty minutes later in bthe offices of Amtorg. The first incident was described by a b