a trustee visit and a reunion

by Geoffrey | Dec 2, 2012 | Israel, Philanthropy

One of the core responsibilities of a PEF trustee is to travel to Israel (at our own expense) and to visit approved charities (Amutot). Such trustee visits are actually one of the biggest perks of the job! As a trustee we have an excuse to travel the country and meet with fascinating individuals who are making a difference. We get to learn first-hand about the problems and opportunities confronting the young State of Israel and get exposed to the diversity of backgrounds that make up the tapestry that is the people of the State of Israel. Whether the cause is battered women, youth at-risk, abject poverty, special needs education, immigrant absorption, care for the elderly or scholarships, a PEF trustee is treated to a classroom without walls.

On a recent trip to Israel I got a bonus. I was fortunate to learn about a unique group of Israelis and also re-unite with friends I made at the tender age of 18 as a Soviet Jewry activist visiting Leningrad.

Elsewhere I have described my family’s trip to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1974. On that trip, our first stop was Leningrad and the first refusniks that we met, the first refusniks to host us at their home, were Ida and Aba Taratuta. We had not heard from the Taratuta’s all these years until this summer, when in my capacity as President of PEF Israel Endowment Funds I received a receipt from one of the 1,000+ charities we support in Israel: Remember and Save. As I reached the bottom of the letter, my heart skipped a beat…. It was signed by Aba Taratuta who has established this amutah (charity) to archive the Jewish Aliya movement in the former USSR.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Haifa and met with Ida and Aba.

I had three other organizations in Haifa to see that day and for an 11:00 am meeting I had not expected lunch and a l’chaim with home-made vodka… PEF perks come in many forms!

Aba has established the Remember and Save organization to collect, catalog, archive and make available the records of the alya movement from the Soviet Union from 1967-1989, including:

Lists of Movement activists and refuseniks
Petitions, and appeals of Jews to the Soviet officials; and appeals to Jewish and public organizations, to the media and to Western leaders and governments
Letters of the Movement activists, prisoners of Zion, refuseniks and letters to them from Israel and from the West
Official documents on the Aliya Movement
Photo, audio and video documentation
Jewish Samizdat (underground publications) in the USSR

Aba is concerned that time is running out and that refusniks are passing away along with their memories and artifacts of the struggle.

Aba also brought me up-to-date on the efforts to support this unique group of elderly in Israel: aging refusniks. Israeli immigrants from the Former Soviet Union who were denied exit visas for over ten years are now receiving a modest monthly stipend from the government thanks to a bill pushed by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. According to Aba, a similar aid package was introduced by Natan Sharansky when he was in the government.

Under the initiative of my predecessor Ben Frankel, PEF has been quietly distributing financial support for aging refusniks in Israel twice a year; before the Jewish New Year and Passover for a number of years. In addition to Aba’s organization, PEF supports a number of Amutot involved in support for Israeli citizens from the FSU. Please feel free to do an online search at our website for “soviet”or “russia” to learn more.

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I took this video in which the Taratutas describe our family’s visit as well as the various jobs they were forced to take after being fired from their respective positions as government translator (Ida) and astrophysicist (Aba). Once they were fired a refusnik had to find other work so as not to be arrested as a parasite of the State. The Taratutas were refused exit from the Soviet Union for 15 years. After arriving to Israel, they moved to Haifa were Aba became a professor of astrophysics at the Technion. When Aba retired from the Technion for good, he became a math teacher in an Israeli High School. In retrospect, he says, teaching High School math was more taxing than being a refusnik in the Soviet Union!