Every generation has its own pharaoh
Alexander Smukler remembers the time in Moscow when he had to go onstage to denounce Israel
Alexander Smukler and his wife, Alla Straks, Russian Jewish emigres from the former Soviet Union who live in Montclair — and who are familiar to our readers because Mr. Smukler analyzes the war in Ukraine and the deadly game behind it for our series Global Game of Thrones — went to see the documentary “October 8” on the Saturday night before Pesach.
They were expecting to be moved by the film, which details how Hamas’s murderous rampage in Israel led to an increase in antisemitism around the world and focuses on American college campuses.
But Mr. Smukler had not expected the extra emotional wallop the film delivered to him, because unlike almost every other viewer, he knows what it feels like to be in the position in which the Jewish student leaders found themselves. And because that part of his story is long over, he can look back at its arc, and see it as a story of liberation, a variation of Pesach’s theme about the journey from oppression to freedom.
Yom HaShoah comes just days after Pesach ends — this year, Pesach ends at nightfall on Sunday, and Yom HaShoah begins on Wednesday evening — and commemorating the Holocaust reminds us that the dangers we face seem never to die. They simply go dormant, only to reemerge showing a new face to a new generation.
Mr. Smukler has many thoughts about “October 8,” which he thought was powerful but even so could have and should have been stronger, but still carries a message not only to Jews but also and more importantly to non-Jews. He was shocked that the documentary, which he saw in a huge theater complex in Clifton that was packed with people going off to see other, presumably more fun movies, attracted only two people that night — Mr. Smukler and Ms. Straks. But despite any reservations, “I am glad that ‘October 8’ shows the face of modern antisemitism, which has poisoned many of our universities across the country, and in many other countries across the world,” he said.
The film focuses on Jewish student leaders, “who were brave enough to stand up and raise their voices against antisemitism on campuses,” Mr. Smukler said. Of all of them, he was most taken by Tessa Veksler.
“She has a background like my children’s,” he said. She was born in California, to parents who had managed to leave the Soviet Union with their own parents and a young son. “She was raised in a Russian-speaking family in the United States.” As a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara — the school from which she graduated last June, with a double major in political science and communication — she was elected president of the student body.
“She inspired me, made me proud, and gave me hope,” Mr. Smukler said. “We do have younger Jewish leadership growing in the United States, and sooner or later they will lead our divided community in the right direction. They’re brave, they stand for their principles, and they are true Zionists. They love Israel.”
But he also had a more personal reaction to Ms. Veksler. “It pushed me back to my youth,” he said. We wrote about some of that last March, in a story called “How the Soviets hijacked my Jewishness.”
Here’s another part of that story.
“Watching Tessa, I remembered when I was a student in the Soviet Union,” Mr. Smukler said. “It was September 17, 1977. We were freshman at the Moscow University of Technology, and suddenly we heard an announcement that there would be a big gathering to celebrate the incoming class.
“We had a huge auditorium in the university where most of the major events took place.” That’s where the students were told to assemble. They had no idea what to expect.
“And then one of our professors, Joseph Fradkin, a professor of math, went up on the stage, and said, ‘We are so happy to be welcoming a new class! We are so glad that there’s a new class coming to our school!’
“And then he said, ‘You probably know that I am a very active member of the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee, and because there are so many Jewish students among the new students, I want to be sure that they feel comfortable with the Palestinian and other Arab students.’”
The Soviet government formed the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee at the time of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Mr. Smukler said. “It was supposed to fight Zionism inside the Soviet Union, and spread Soviet propaganda against Israel. Most of its members were Jews.”
“Our school was full of Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim students,” he continued. “The Soviet Union was playing a major role in supporting Yasser Arafat,” then the chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization, later the president of the Palestinian National Authority — “who was the best friend of Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party. So students came from Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and many from Palestine, and they went to Soviet universities and colleges across the country.”
“Professor Fradkin went on. He said, ‘Today, we would like to celebrate the brotherhood between Jewish students and students from Arab countries. We want them to recognize each other, to feel comfortable with each other, and to feel like brothers and sisters in our school.’
“That was just the beginning,” Mr. Smukler said. He continued to quote Dr. Fradkin. “‘That’s why I am going to call Jewish students to the stage right now, to denounce Zionism and Israel, to express our support for the Arab students and our condemnation of Israel, which is the enemy of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people,’” the math teacher said.
“‘We have to show our brothers and sisters that we are different. That we are Jewish — I am a Jewish professor — but we do not support the fascist state of Israel.
“‘We will always fight for and support the freedom of Palestine.’”
“Fradkin said that there are a bunch of new students at our school who have come here with outstanding achievements, and among them are many Jewish students,” Mr. Smukler reported.
Then he explained why the Moscow University of Technology was unusual.
“Most Soviet universities were closed to Jews,” he said. That was almost but not entirely true, he elaborated. “Most of the major universities, those that were like Harvard and MIT” — but not his school, although it too was a major university — “had a percentage of Jews who were allowed in. So did medical schools.”
What was that percentage? 0.67 percent. “That’s because Jews made up 0.67 percent of the population of the Soviet Union.” And fair’s fair, right?
“But Jews could be admitted to my school,” Mr. Smukler said.
Why? Well, there’s a story there. It might be apocryphal, Mr. Smukler said, but although he does not know if it’s true, he does know that it’s good, and he also doesn’t know any other explanation that makes sense of the anomaly of the large number of Jews in his university.
According to this story — which, Mr. Smukler repeats, could or could not be true —“it’s because the president of our university, Leonid Afanasiev, was a very interesting guy.”
That part is undeniably true, he emphasized. “He was a hero during the Second World War, and amazingly, he fought in the same battalion, the same military unit, as Leonid Brezhnev,” who went on to lead the massive country. “He was in the circle of friends of one of Brezhnev’s closest friends,” he said.
“When the Central Committee sent him their order demanding that he minimize the number of Jewish students, he was able to call his very close friend and fellow veteran and say to him, ‘Lenya, do you remember when I gave my oath to our friend who was dying in my arms in Berlin in 1945? The friend who saved my life during the battle of Crimea?’” That friend was Jewish.
“‘Do you remember that I swore to him that I would take care of his family, and of the Jewish people, because he died saving my life?’
“This is the legend — that Brezhnev answered him by saying: ‘You are my friend forever. Do whatever you think is right to do.’”
And then, with a serious mic drop flourish, “He hung up,” Mr. Smukler said.
“That’s why my university was open to Jews, and why it was loaded with Jews in 1977. That’s why the Communist party organized that gathering, which didn’t happen in other universities. It’s because this university was heavily populated by Jewish students, and we also had hundreds of Palestinian students.
“That’s why from the beginning they wanted us to know how to behave in front of the Palestinian community. We had to admit that we condemned Israel.”
The students called up to the stage included some “with outstanding achievements,” Mr. Smukler said. “There were several who already were very famous chess players. Some were athletes. Some were scientists. And for some reason, I also was called to the stage. It probably was because I’d been admitted to the university’s chess team, and because my grades were so high.”
None of these Jewish freshmen had any idea that they’d be called up on stage to declare their detestation of Israel. “We had no clue,” Mr. Smukler said.
“Fradkin called maybe between 17 and 20 people to the stage. The class had maybe 2,000 or so students. Probably about 10 percent of them were Jewish. That was way above the usual percentage, even for our school. Probably about 200 students, another 10 percent, were Muslim. The Soviet Union gave them a free education, and sent them back to their countries, they hoped as firm supporters.
“I don’t know where Fradkin got the list of Jewish students to call up to the stage, but probably it was from the Young Communist League.
“When we got on stage, Fradkin said, ‘You have to follow our traditions, and one is that our university stands strong against Israel and condemns this fascist state,’” Mr. Smukler said.
“I remember the fear I felt standing there,” he continued. “I remember the fear we all felt. And then Fradkin said, ‘Each of you has to come to the microphone and say a few words about how much you support Palestine, how much you condemn Israel, how much you condemn their military, which suppresses Palestine, and how much you support the PLO in its struggle for the freedom of Palestine.’
“It was one of the most difficult moments of my life. I saw that some of my friends were shaking. Each of us had to go to the microphone and say something that was deeply against what we believed. Deeply against our nature. We all felt like we were frozen. Nobody could even move.
“My friend was standing next to me — he’s now in Silicon Valley — and he was shaking. He peed in his pants. I saw it.
“That was a critical moment in my life. I could think about only one thing.
“The night before, exactly the night before, I was sitting with a friend, who was working as a night guard. He’s also in Silicon Valley now. But then, he said that he had a friend who had given him a samizdat copy of ‘Exodus.’”
That was the best-selling novel by Leon Uris, published in 1958, about the founding of the State of Israel; in 1960 it was made into a hit movie starring Paul Newman. The original paperback was 608 pages.
“My friend said to me, ‘I am giving you this book, and you have to give it back to me tomorrow morning,’” Mr. Smukler said. “So you should just go to the men’s room, lock the door, sit on the toilet seat, and read the book. If you like it, you can stay there and read it until you finish it. But you can’t walk out with it, because that is too dangerous.’
“So I sat there, on a stool in the men’s room, reading ‘Exodus.’ So the next day, when Joseph Fradkin called us on stage to condemn Israel as a fascist state, I was thinking about Ari Ben Canaan, who was my hero” — that was Newman’s gorgeous blue-eyed character in the movie. “I remember trying to disappear. I remember thinking ‘God, please, make me invisible.’ I was 17 years old.
“I remember thinking, ‘What would Ben Canaan do? Standing on stage, I was thinking, ‘My God, what would Ben Canaan do? What would I say? What should I do?’
“When my turn came, I went to the microphone, and I whispered — I couldn’t say a thing, I could just whisper — I whispered ‘Am Yisrael chai.’ Nobody understood what it meant. I couldn’t say anything else. I was shaking. My body was shaking.
“That moment changed my life. That is why I am talking about Tessa Veksler. I know what it means to stand in front of thousands of people. You want to make friends. You are open to everyone. Your heart is open. Now you have to do something that is against your nature.
“That moment changed my life. I so appreciate Joseph Fradkin, who made me a Zionist. That was the Moment when I was born as a proud Jew. When I watched ‘October 8,’ it made me remember 1977, when I was basically in the same situation as Tessa Veksler.
“That’s why I understand so well the Jewish kids who go to universities where they are absolute minorities. They see the campuses turning against them. So they have to make a choice. Are they following Moses, or are they going to become slaves?”
The next summer, Mr. Smukler went to Crimea for a vacation. That’s where he met the refusniks — a group of young people who still were older than he was — who became his mentors, and eventually his friends.
“After that event I started to look for different people,” he said. “I didn’t want to live in fear, and I needed somebody to enlighten me about the Jewish tradition and about Israel.” Once he found them, his life took the course that eventually landed him in Montclair.
“Life is unpredictable,” he said. “It’s only once you reach a certain age that you really understand that anything could happen in your life. That is why we believe in God. Otherwise we couldn’t explain why things happen to us.”
Mr. Smukler turned from theology to a bit of history that’s heavily laced with irony.
“About 40 years after that day in 1977, I was in Israel with a group from the Friends of the IDF,” he said. “We were invited to one of the military bases where they showed us how the Iron Dome,” the air-defense system that protects Israel, “works. I started to talk with one of the engineers, the chief scientist. He was a very handsome man, an amazing person. I started asking him some questions in English, and immediately realized that he answered me with a heavy Russian accent, so I switched to Russian. I asked him where he was from, and he said that originally he was from Moscow.
“I can’t share his story,” Mr. Smukler said; in fact, he can’t even use his name, because the work this engineer did was too secret. “But I can say that he is the son of Dr. Fradkin.”
Moreover, Dr. Fradkin He made aliyah when he was in his 80s, and he died in Israel.
“This tells us that God watches,” Mr. Smukler said. The Joseph Fradkin who betrayed his people, who put us 17-year-olds on the stage, shaking, scared kids, peeing in our pants, who didn’t know what to do, who didn’t want to condemn Israel for no reason — eventually God forgives him, he goes to Israel, he dies in Israel, and his son protects Israel.
“That is the story of the Passover.”
And of Yom HaShoah. Estimates say that at least 2 million Soviet Jews died during World War II; after that, Stalin and his successors made life extremely hard for them, and many died unnecessary deaths. The Soviet Union tried to humiliate them, even to death. But many escaped to Israel.
“In 2024, about 126,000 Jews went to Israel from the former Soviet Republics,” Mr. Smukler said. “It is an exodus.”
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