In the latter stages of the first half of the 20th century, the Jewish cultural community in the Soviet Union had a love-hate relationship with the Communist regime. In many respects it was a life and death relationship, too.
According to Wayne resident Hesh Jacobs, a retired CPA and longtime member of the Sholom Aleichem Club — a Philadelphia area-based secular Jewish cultural and social organization — the Soviets wanted nothing to do with their large Jewish populous until fascism threatened the nation in World War II.
Then after Nazi Germany was beaten back and the threat defeated, Soviet Jews went back to being second-class citizens in the eyes of their nation’s leaders. Many Jewish artists and writers, including those well-known in the Western world, died in Soviet prisons during this period, Jacobs said.
Jacobs is a bit of a scholar on the subject. He studied it so he could lead Sholom Aleichem members in a Passover observance of a 50-year old massacre of 13 Jewish writers, poets and social activists in the Soviet Union known as “The Night of the Murdered Poets.”
The observance, on Sunday, was part of the 47-year-old club’s annual seder at the Oxford Circle Jewish Community Center.
To the members of the club whose desire to preserve Jewish culture for future generations is matched only by their disdain for social injustice, the Aug. 12, 1952, killings were unconscionable on both fronts.
Five of the 13 people recognized by the club as martyrs were veteran Yiddish authors and poets — David Bergelson, 68; Itzik Fefer, 52; David Hofshteyn, 55; Leyb Kvitko, 62; and Peretz Markish, 57.
“There’s a terrific body of work, novels and poems by these writers,” Jacobs told the Northeast Times last week.
According to the club member, the many writings of those five men played an integral part in an enduring struggle “to identify and sustain a Jewish culture in the Soviet Union,” which formed in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
The suppression of Jewish culture by the Soviets relaxed, however, with Hitler’s army pillaging its way across Eastern Europe in the late 1930s and early 40s.
“Suddenly, the Russians wanted the Jews in this effort,” Jacobs explained. “And they encouraged them to write, to have a newspaper and do things.”
Writers and social activists such as those named were permitted to travel to other nations, including the United States, in an effort to drum up support for the Soviet war effort.
“Most had left the country for a while and were well established. But they returned to the Soviet Union because that’s where they were from,” Jacobs said.
“Then, when the tide of war changed — when Russia overcame Germany and they didn’t need these Jews as much — they said, ‘Wait a minute. You’re getting too uppity, too unified,’ and they cracked down on them.”
The 13 martyrs were among 15 arrested and imprisoned in 1948. After a trial in spring and summer 1952, the 13 were put to death in the Lubyanka prison.
Jacobs detailed those events in a supplement to the club’s award winning Haggadah (a text traditionally read during the Passover seder).
To Jacobs and other Sholom Aleichem members, key parallels can be drawn between the persecution of Soviet Jews and the traditional Passover story, detailing the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt.
“(The Haggadah) is basically telling the story of the exodus from Egypt and all the surrounding customs associated with that,” Jacobs said. “(The supplement) recalls the Jews in the Soviet Union and their struggle for freedom.”
Jacobs and other Sholom Aleichem Club members hasten to point out that their Passover observances minimize the religious approach to the holiday in favor of a historical and cultural approach, in keeping with their secular role.
Some club members may also participate in religious observances with their synagogues and families. But those aspects are restricted in the Sholom Aleichem seder.
“We are not synagogue members (as a group),” said Sharon Hofferman of Burholme, a member of the club for 45 years, “but we are very aware of the holidays, culture and what being Jewish means. We were brought up as Jews.”
Through the years, the club has recognized in its annual seder many significant events in ancient and modern Jewish history. In 1992, for instance, the club recognized the 500th anniversary of the exodus of Jews from Spain as a result of the Inquisition. Other supplements to the Haggadah have been dedicated to anniversaries of the creation of the state of Israel and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
According to Jacobs, the historical accounts “support and remind us of the underpinnings of where we’re from.”
The club even honored the end of apartheid in South Africa in one seder, although that cultural struggle did not necessarily involve Jews. As a member organization of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organization and of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews, however, the club enthusiastically supports humanistic causes outside of the scope of Judaism.
“Community outreach is very important to us,” Hofferman said.
That, say Hofferman and fellow club officer Sol Glassberg, is one of the tenets upon which the club was founded, along with cultural preservation.
“Fundamentally, it was formed by people who wanted their children educated in Jewish history and values,” said Glassberg, of Elkins Park. “They wanted children to have a real sense of their roots, their Jewishness.”
Hofferman explains that young people are a rare sight at the organization’s regular meetings. Simply put, the vast majority of the club’s approximately 125 members are of advanced age. Some have disabling health concerns.
Yet, many of the children and grandchildren of members are involved in other secular organizations. And when the holidays arrive, everyone seems to come together.
“They don’t come a lot, but when there’s something important, they help out,” Hofferman said of the young people. “They inherit the things that we’re doing, keep up the practices that we initiate.”