By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — In the period following the 1967 Six-Day War, many Russian Jews applied to leave the Soviet Union. While some were allowed to leave, many were denied permission. The reason given for rejection was that at some point in their lives, these people might have been given access to information “vital to Soviet national security.” These Jews who were refused Soviet exit visas became known as “Refuseniks”.
Ida Nudel was born in 1931. Growing up in Moscow, she graduated from the Moscow Institute with a specialty in the economics of construction and gained employment as an economist. As a Jew, she was subject to the anti-Semitism fomented by Joseph Stalin. Ida decided secretly to study Hebrew and then emigrate to Israel. In November 1971, her application for a Soviet exit visa was refused for reasons of security, not that she possessed any state secrets but might have heard something. Ida Nudel was now a Refusenik.
Like most Refuseniks, Ida was fired from her employment. In order to survive she took a series of menial jobs which gave her plenty of free time, time to become an activist. Ida took special interest in the “Prisoners of Zion”, those Jews who had been imprisoned for their activity on behalf of the Jewish emigration movement. She felt obligated to ease their burden; to write them news of the outside world; to contact their families; to spread their fate to the West; to battle the penal system to improve their condition.
Ida’s only relatives were her sister Lena, Lena’s husband Leva and their son Yakov with whom she shared an apartment. Joyfully they received exit visas in March 1972 and left for Israel. Ida was now alone.
In December 1972, Ida was imprisoned for the first time; 15 days for participating in a hunger strike at Moscow’s central telegraph office to protest persecution of Refuseniks by the authorities; the charge, insulting the honor and dignity of a policeman. In the fall of 1973, on her way to a protest to demand the early release of a very ill prisoner, Ida was picked up off the street and again thrown in jail, this time for a few days after which she was released without charge.
In the first six and a half years since Ida Nudel declared her desire to emigrate to Israel, she was interrogated, harassed, stalked and baited by the KGB; her apartment broken into, bugged and her telephone removed; imprisoned under unbearable conditions with little food; and threatened with placement in a psychiatric hospital. Yet Ida relentlessly continued her stream of complaints, telegrams, letters and protests on behalf of the Prisoners of Zion, helping many of them, their guardian angel; a better diet; assignment to a hospital; the right to correspondence; removal from a punishment cell.
On June 1, 1978, Ida Nudel barricaded herself in her apartment, took a piece of wallpaper and with a small brush and ink wrote, “KGB-Give Me a Visa to Israel” stretched the wallpaper between two skis and at one minute before six dangled the handmade banner from her window. Ida was not alone. Over a period of six hours in other Moscow districts, groups of Jewish women also barricaded themselves in their apartments and displayed similar posters. Next day, the Soviet authorities arrested Ida and charged her with malicious hooliganism. After a perfunctory trial, for publicly expressing her desire to emigrate to Israel, Ida was found guilty and sentenced to 4 years in a place of internal exile, which meant Siberia.
First by train and then by steamboat, locked in a cell with other female prisoners who had committed real crimes, beaten by the other inmates and her food stolen because she was a “kike,” Ida finally arrived at her destination, a small colony outside the Siberian village of Krivosheino. In winter, the temperature hovered between five and forty below zero Fahrenheit while a thick fog covered the ground. In the brief spring and fall, it rained constantly. In the briefer summer, the mosquitoes made life miserable. There Ida would spend the next 4 years first living with others in a small one-story wooden barrack and later in a small log peasant hut, her only friend, a collie puppy she had been given as a present, which she named Pizer (Hebrew for “to disperse”). Probably the most educated person in the colony, Ida worked as a draftsman, after that a night watchman, next a seamstress and finally a sweeper in a hairdressing salon.
Periodically, Ida would receive a visit from a Moscow friend who would bring her food, books, gifts and letters. On one visit, he brought a new Japanese movie camera and they decided to make a short film about the everyday life of political exile, Ida Nudel. That film made its way abroad, publicizing Ida’s plight to the world. Ida was also able to maintain her correspondence and telephone contacts. Sometimes she would receive hundreds of letters weekly, most with foreign stamps, about twelve thousand letters in total during her exile. Near the end of her term, WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Organization, nominated Ida for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her human rights work on behalf of the Prisoners of Zion.
Exactly four years to the day after her sentence began, Ida Nudel together with her dog, Pizer stepped on a bus for the several hour ride to the Siberian town of Tomsk and from there transferred to a plane for Moscow.
Ida returned to her apartment, there greeted by her friends. However in order to remain in Moscow she required to be registered in the City and a residence permit stamped in her passport. After several weeks of unsuccessful trying, she was ordered to leave Moscow. Ida now needed to find a city or town that would take her and give her a residence permit. The authorities continued to refuse to grant her an exit visa.
First, Ida tried Riga, the capital of Latvia and was refused. She learned that no large city in the Soviet Union would accept her. Next, the town of Strunino, a two-hour train ride from Moscow, where she was also denied. Ida had the name of a Jewish family in Bendery a small city in Moldavia isolated in the South West corner of the Soviet Union thousands of miles from Moscow. She went there, received a residence permit, purchased a small apartment with help from her sister, Lena, settled in with her dog and found work in an amusement park. Ida’s life dragged on monotonously almost hermit-like, tending a garden, playing with Pizer, reading books, writing and receiving dozens of letters a week in order to maintain contact with the outside world and waiting for the exit visa that did not come.
Ida was isolated but not forgotten. Her sister with others demonstrated and participated in hunger strikes on her behalf. An Israeli organization “Israeli Women for Ida Nudel” formed to draw awareness to Ida’s quest for an exit visa and her ordeal. Demonstrations and rallies were held all over the free world. Active in bringing international attention to Ida’s plight were actresses Liv Ullmann and Jane Fonda. Fonda even met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and received permission for a highly publicized visit with Ida in Kishinev. For five years, Israeli President Chaim Herzog left an empty place at his Passover table in recognition of Ida.
On October 2, 1987, as liberalizing developments were occurring within the Soviet Union and five years after Ida had been forced into the seclusion of Bendery, she was advised that she had finally been granted her exit visa. Ten days later, her passport stamped with the visa, Ida arrived in Moscow with her dog Pizer and her possessions stuffed into a few suitcases. On October 15, Ida passed through customs, then passport control and stepped into the door of a Boeing 707, the private jet of Armand Hammer.
Armand Hammer the controversial Jewish American business tycoon with close ties to the Soviet Union, took credit for Ida’s freedom, claiming that Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, asked him to help the Soviet Union in dealing with some of its problems in Afghanistan and that he responded, “I will if you promise me one thing – give me Ida.”
Three and a half hours after leaving Moscow, sixteen years after she had first applied for an exit visa, Ida Nudel, aged 57, landed on the soil of Israel. Clutching Pizer, Ida stepped out of the aircraft to be greeted by her sister Lena, by Jane Fonda, by Israel’s leaders, by friends and by thousands of ordinary Israelis. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres escorted Ida to the terminal and presented her with her new Israeli citizenship certificate. Holding hands with her sister, tears of joy streaming down her face, Ida Nudel took to a microphone and proclaimed, “For me it is the moment. It is the moment of my life. I am at home. I am on the soil of my people. Now I am an absolutely free person among my own people.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the last of the Refuseniks were able to leave. Over one million Soviet Jews now live in Israel, among them, Rehovot resident Ida Nudel.
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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history. You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com Comments below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)