Published: 5 January 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
FIFTY YEARS AGO, on Christmas Day 1970, a handful of British Jews gathered in the bitter cold outside the Soviet Embassy in Bayswater. The news had reached London the night before that two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, had been sentenced to death.
The announcement on Christmas Eve of these draconian sentences had been deliberate. The KGB had counted on festive indifference and a silent night in the media.
The other defendants were given long terms in strict regime prison camps. All had been involved in an attempt to take a 12-seater aircraft at Leningrad’s Smolney airport, fly it to Priozersk near the Finnish border, pick up another four passengers — and hop over the border to Sweden.
All had wished to leave for Israel, been repeatedly denied visas and could bear the waiting no longer.
Bizarre schemes of escape had proliferated — a hot air balloon, seizing a submarine, swimming to Turkey. The idea of flying to freedom was not new. In 1945, Jews boarded small planes from Lithuania en route for the Promised Land — or so they thought.
The pilot took off and then returned to the airport. The police eagerly awaited the passengers before dispatching them to the Gulag. This ruse was carried out six times.
After the Six-Day war, a growing number of Jews wanted to leave for Israel. They had grown tired of the hollow slogans of the Kremlin and gradually reclaimed their Jewishness from the official policy of assimilation.
FULL STORY How the KGB laid the ground for the great Soviet exodus (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Rabbis at a Union of Councils for Soviet Jews sit-in. (Courtesy of American Jewish Historical Society)
