Judaism: The Rabbi from Moscow

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His beard was long and white, his coat was long and black, and his flight had been long and tiring. "I am not a voyager," admitted Moscow's Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin, 74, when he arrived in New York last week. In fact, it was the first time that Levin, whose forefathers had been rabbis for 13 generations, had ever been outside Russia. It was also the first time that any ranking Soviet rabbi had visited the U.S. Judging by the reception he got, it could well be the last.

The rabbi's troubles were double. He had come at the invitation of the American Council for Judaism, a small (20,000 members), anti-Zionist organization that is bitterly resented by most other U.S. Jewish groups. His purpose was to deliver a message to American Jews that most of them found hard to take at face value: that Russian Jews, although suffering from the restrictions of "an atheistic culture," are no worse off than the members of other faiths. "Anti-Semitism," Levin maintained, "is strongly prohibited in the Soviet Union. There have been no pogroms."

Cynical Act. Whatever the merits of Levin's arguments, he was given little chance to present them. The American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, an anti-Communist organization that specializes in publicizing evidence of Russian antiSemitism, warned Jews not to be taken in by anything that the Moscow rabbi had to say. Conference officials proclaimed his visit "another cynical act on the part of the Soviet Union to hamper relationships between Soviet and American Jews." Levin's first press conference was turned into a shambles by two rival spokesmen of the crowd that had come to greet him, each of whom tried to outshout the other for the privilege of delivering the welcoming speech. To restore order, Levin finally turned his back on both of them, faced the wall and started chanting the minhah, the Jewish evensong.

Two nights later, the rabbi appeared in the assembly hall of Manhattan's Hunter College to deliver the major speech of his two-week tour. He found a picket line of Jewish university students outside the hall, had to enter through the back door. Inside, loud and strident objectors in the audience of 1,700 repeatedly interrupted his speech, which he delivered in Yiddish, with catcalls and jeers. Levin was booed when he reported that there was a kosher slaughterhouse in Moscow, booed again when he said Jews were admitted freely into Russian schools and had no trouble getting jobs. "Lies!" shouted an enraged listener after Levin said he was allowed to give religious instruction in his synagogue. "How can you as a rabbi say such things?" After 40 minutes of interruptions, Levin could take no more. Without waiting for the last segment of his speech to be translated into English, he walked off the stage and out of the hall.