Connie Smukler, Ed Snider and Their Movement to Save Soviet Jews
May. 06, 2016
When Flyers owner, Ayn Rand-quoting entrepreneur, and philanthropist Ed Snider passed away April 11, it touched off weeks of tributes. Snider was a Philadelphia original, a self-fabricated man, tough as hidebound leather, someone who didn't suffer fools. Withal in all the accolades upon his death, scant mention was made of what was arguably his most selflessly principled moment: His public support of two local do-gooders who in the 1970s helped to smuggle some one.5 million "Refuseniks" out of the Soviet Marriage.
Today Connie Smukler is a stunning, 70-something Rittenhouse Square doyenne. But back in the early '70s, she was a Main Line mom and housewife who, with her husband Joe, risked their lives and livelihoods, all for the man rights of strangers clear across the earth. Information technology's a forgotten slice of Philadelphia history. The Smuklers led what would become a national motion to save Jews from oppression in the quondam Soviet Union. Their work helped shepherd "Refuseniks"—they'd been refused visas to emigrate—to freedom in Israel and the The states, many right here in Philly, particularly in the Northeast.
It was a story with loftier drama. Smukler found herself face to face with stone-faced KGB agents at the Saint Petersburg airport, threatened with existence "disappeared" to Siberia. There were cloak-and-dagger, coded communications on desolate Russian streets, and a clever marshaling of congressional wives back in u.s. to assistance turn disparate protests into a full-fledged motility.
They were a canaille team of dissidents, making a lot of noise, if not much progress. Until, that is, a certain sports squad possessor helped turn them into something real. "Ed was our angel," Smukler says. Information technology was validation: If Ed Snider believed this was God'due south work, information technology must be.
Smukler hosted a group of other moms in her Villanova living room—it was a coed movement, simply "the husbands all had jobs," she says now—and they were literally plotting how to change the course of international affairs. Talk about chutzpah; they didn't know what they didn't know. Afterwards, she and Joe would build a abode in Center City with a round living room—shaped precisely and then she and her comrades could sit and collaborate in the round most nights, into the wee hours of the morning.
They started with public protests, like picketing exterior the Academy of Music with signs that read "Free Soviet Jewry" when the Bolshoi Ballet came to town—much to the chagrin of the American Jewish establishment, which, still reeling from the Holocaust, didn't want to call attention to itself. They were a canaille team of dissidents, making a lot of racket, if not much progress.
Until, that is, a certain sports team owner helped plough them into something real.
"Ed was our angel," Smukler says.
In the summer of 1973, with their three children off to sleepaway camp, the Smuklers vacationed in Israel. (Total disclosure: their son, Ken, is a local political consultant whose commentaries on national black radio take been posted on The Citizen.) Neither had been particularly religious; Connie had grown up in Narberth, then a predominantly Irish-Cosmic working-course enclave of the Principal Line. Her male parent, a prominent attorney whose philanthropy would go on to fund, amid other works, Penn State's Louis and Mildred Lasch Football Building, was, like many Jews of his generation, focused on assimilation.
One 24-hour interval that summer, the young couple found themselves in a Jerusalem restaurant. "Would you similar to meet a couple that only came in on the plane from Russia last night?" the eating house owner offered.
A chat over lox, eggs and onions led to other meals, and more than talk, over two days. The couple didn't speak English, but Joe knew Yiddish—somehow, they pieced plenty words together between Russian, Yiddish and English to empathize 1 another. "We barbarous in dearest with them," Connie recalls of Sima, the charming Leningrad scientist and his beautiful wife, who had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the dead of dark.
When information technology was time for the Smuklers to caput back to usa, Sima grasped Joe's shoulders. "You accept to get my brother out," he pleaded. "I tin can't alive without my brother."
They learned that Irma Chernyak had practical for an exit visa and been denied. But the request had toll him his job as an aeronautical scientist. He had been operating elevators to attempt and make ends meet when, fed up, he'd gone on a hunger strike equally a form of protest. Suddenly, for the Smuklers, the plight of Soviet Jewry had a face, and they realized their calling. "I was totally apolitical," Smukler says. "I didn't know who our senators were. But we knew we had to exercise something and nosotros knew we had to make their stories existent considering otherwise it would become a faceless movement, like the Holocaust."
The Smuklers joined a smattering of activists—well-nigh of them in New York—and quickly rose to the leadership ranks of the burgeoning motility. The next summer found the Smuklers in the Soviet Union, meeting with Chernyak and other Refuseniks. They found apartments by memorizing addresses and past filling upward notebooks with notes written in elaborate lawmaking. Knowing that Refusenik's apartments were bugged past the KGB, they communicated through Etch-a-Sketch's, the child'due south toy with a plastic sheet that, upon lifting, automatically erases the written word.
The USSR had signed onto the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guaranteed the right to get out a country for another homeland. The Smuklers and other activists decided to hold them to it. What followed was a crash course in Soviet oppression. Russian Jews who practical for visas were oft stripped of their jobs—and information technology was illegal to be jobless in the Soviet Union. The Smuklers and their co-conspirators adult contacts in Russian federation to learn of the neediest cases, and started smuggling in coin for them. They began loading their suitcases with American goods for Soviet Jews to merchandise on a swiftly developing black market. "We'd bring in jeans, tape recorders, batteries," Smukler says. "Anything they could sell."
When the Smuklers couldn't get visas to travel to the USSR, they constitute others who could. When Jews were arrested, the Smuklers were certain to bring enough goodies to ransom prison guards. "They liked porn," Connie remembers. "Nosotros'd requite them these little postcards that you flipped dorsum and forth and you'd run into naked women in different positions."
With each protest, Smukler and her band of housewives—all in their late thirties—discovered their voices speaking out for the rights of those they'd never met, strangers who would be sent to Siberia for pedagogy Hebrew or for owning a copy of Exodus, author Leon Uris' novel about the founding of State of israel. It was the early '70s; "Women'due south Lib" was in full bloom. Smukler and her compatriots had discovered their purpose.
"We were at a indicate where nosotros were somebody'due south mother and somebody's wife, and of a sudden, we were something else," she says today. "Suddenly, people cared nigh what nosotros said. People listened! It was very exciting stuff."
It was in early 1975 that Ed Snider first came to the rescue. The year earlier, famed Leningrad ballet dancers Valery and Galina Panov, after years of Soviet harassment and imprisonment, had finally been permitted to emigrate to Israel, thanks to international denunciations of the Soviet authorities. Now they were on a global tour and coming to perform at, of all places, Snider'southward South Philly arena, The Spectrum.
During a recent trip to France, where anti-semitism has reached epidemic levels, Smukler constitute herself in the home of Oliver Kramer, patriarch of i of the wealthiest families in Paris, from where 8,000 Jews left last year in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack. "Don't forget u.s.a.," he pleaded.
Prior to the performance, Snider called Joe Smukler. "I want to requite you lot a piece of the action," he said. "Let's split the proceeds."
"We had no money, no staff, no part," Connie recalls. "Ed just called up out of the bluish and said, 'I believe in what you're doing. Permit'southward split the gate.' We fabricated $17,594 that night."
It was seed money to hire a professional person director and get an part. Until so, the cause had been a financial drain on a small band of true believers. Snider's gift jumpstarted a fundraising campaign. Most importantly, it was validation: If Ed Snider believed this was God's work, it must be.
The next year, Snider'due south Flyers hosted the Soviet Army team in a nationally-televised exhibition. As recounted often during the recent Snider tributes, the crude style of Philadelphia'south play caused the Soviet team to petulantly stalk off the ice. In a symbolic victory for capitalism, they but agreed to return once Snider told them they wouldn't get paid. What isn't as well known is that, again thanks to Snider, the game served to advance the cause of Soviet Jewry.
In the days leading up to the showdown, Snider had called Joe Smukler. He knew Connie and Joe'due south regular army would exist protesting outside the building—and he had an idea.
"I don't want you guys exterior," he said. "You should be inside, so your banners and posters get all effectually the rink. This game will exist televised worldwide."
And and so information technology was that, come up game time, signs reading "Costless Soviet Jewry" and "Get Soviet Jews Out Of The Penalization Box" were held aloft throughout the stands. The Soviet squad took one look around and demanded the signs come up down.
Snider sought out Joe Smukler. "What practice y'all desire me to exercise?" he asked. "I'll do whatever you lot want."
Joe and Connie huddled together with their team. "Permit'due south leave the posters upward until we're sure the media has filmed them, so they meet them back in Russia," Joe told Snider. "Then we'll take them all downwardly."
Snider agreed and, back in the USSR, Refuseniks for the showtime time saw tangible proof that there really was an international movement fighting for them. It was confirmation they weren't alone.
As the movement gained momentum, Connie plant herself schmoozing politicians like Pennsylvania U.S. Senator John Heinz and Washington state U.Due south. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Merely their wives proved even more of import to the cause. Just as this result had enabled Connie to detect her phonation, she intuited that the wives of our political leaders might similarly be moved. After all, families were beingness separate up and destroyed past a government intent on keeping a population down. What wife and mother couldn't relate?
Theresa Heinz and Joanne Kemp, wife of Congressman Jack, started an organisation called Congressional Wives for Soviet Jewry and began calling on the USSR to let its people go. The move took off. Other activists, in other cities, joined the crusade, including Joel and Adele Sandberg in Miami. (Their daughter, Sheryl, would go on to become that Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and writer of the bestselling Lean In.)
The Smuklers knew a tipping betoken had been reached when, ane twenty-four hours in early on 1976, their phone rang at iv a.k. An official from the Israeli Diplomatic mission in Vienna, wanted them to know that the Refusenik whose story had activated all their efforts, Irma Chernyak, had finally made information technology out of the Soviet Union.
The St. petersburg airport was a greyness, depressing place. That made it all the more surreal on that day in 1981, when Connie and a traveling companion from the movement were taken into custody while awaiting their render flight to the States. "Nosotros were taken down a flight of steps in the airdrome," she recalls. "I was expecting a niggling dungeon, with ane light seedling hanging from the ceiling. Only it was one of the most cute lath rooms, with a long mahogany table, that I'd ever been in. I've asked many people through the years if they'd ever seen those steps or that room and nobody has. It'southward like information technology never happened, or something."
When searched, Russian authorities establish in her possession a listing of Russians who had expressed interest in emigrating. "How stupid," she says now, even so haunted. "These were just people who were curious. I knew better than to write annihilation down. For years, I worried virtually those people, because they were known now."
She demanded to call the American consulate. "Nyet," she was told. As the day wore on, her interrogators defendant her of existence an Israeli spy. "When they said 'espionage,' that was scary," Smukler says. "No one knew where I was. Joe would be waiting for me at the aerodrome and I wasn't going to get off that plane. I could merely as easily be sent to Siberia and not be heard from again."
Finally, after almost 24 hours of questioning, a stack of papers were placed before her—all in Russian. "Sign! Sign!" her interlocutors screamed. "To this day, I don't know what I signed," she says. But in short order she was ushered to a plane heading back to the states.
As the Reagan administration dawned, the move picked upwards steam. Secretary of State George Schultz slid a letter of the alphabet bearing the names of thousands of Refuseniks to his Soviet counterpart, asking for their release. Past 1987, when 200,000 Americans gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to protestation the treatment of Soviet Jews during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's first visit to America, change was in the air. Inside a yr, Gorbachev would announce that the Soviet "problem of exit and entry is being resolved in a humane spirit" and that "the problem of the and then-chosen 'Refuseniks' is being removed."
The crisis was over. The Smuklers had won. Connie Smukler had spent almost 20 years fighting for a crusade. Now what? "I never was able to replace that passion," she says. She and Joe had a smashing life together, with 3 kids and nine grandkids. But, still, something would forever be missing. "I'd get up every forenoon in those days and think, 'Okay, what's going to happen today?' A lot of it was bad—I might learn that somebody went to prison. Only every day something was happening. I was effecting change every day. All suddenly, for a lot of u.s.a., we were never able to replace that adrenaline."
When I caught up with Connie recently at her Rittenhouse Foursquare condo, I realized how easy information technology is to forget what she'd done. The walls of her home are lined with photos of her and Joe with presidents, senators and foreign heads of state, not to mention storied freedom fighters like Natan Sharansky, a Refusenik leader who spent ix years in Siberia. Just most of the photos were taken after the movement that she helped to midwife had succeeded. Big social movements tend to exist inevitable simply in hindsight.
In Petrograd, her interrogators accused her of existence an Israeli spy. "When they said 'espionage,' that was scary," Smukler says. "No ane knew where I was. Joe would exist waiting for me at the airport and I wasn't going to get off that plane. I could simply every bit hands be sent to Siberia and not be heard from once more."
Lately, though, the old feelings have resurfaced. The adrenaline was there 2 years ago, when Connie led a group of area Jewish women in their thirties and forties—her age at the dawn of the move—on a trip to Russian federation, so dark and desolate back and so, now seemingly painted over in technicolor. She walked Gorky Street and pointed out where Sharansky had been arrested and the apartments where she strategized with the leaders of the resistance.
And then there was the National Jewish Federation trip to Berlin, where Connie arranged for the group to encounter upwardly with Sharansky, now chairman of the Jewish Agency for State of israel; together they reenacted his 1986 walk to liberty after his release across the Glienicke Span—the Bridge of Spies that connects East and Westward Berlin. At luncheon before the walk, Sharansky shared with the grouping his secret to surviving nine years of alone confinement: "I kept playing chess over and over in my head," he said. As they walked on a cold, overcast day, Connie choked up thinking of Joe, who had died in 2012, and their shared visceral indignation some 40 years earlier when they kickoff learned of the plight of Soviet Jews. For both of them, the religion of Judaism was secondary; their shared passion, discovered together, was the struggle for homo rights.
And so there was a contempo emotional trip to France, where anti-semitism has reached epidemic levels. Smukler plant herself in the domicile of Oliver Kramer, patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in Paris. The Kramers deal in 18th century antique article of furniture and are leaders of the French Jewish customs. Even they felt their days were numbered in Paris. Kramer had simply purchased a home in State of israel, in example his family needed to flee, like the 8,000 Parisian Jews who left last year in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo assault. When Smukler met with the French Jewish leadership, her host grasped both her hands. "Don't forget usa," he pleaded.
Don't forget us. The same three words the Refuseniks used to say to her every time she took their leave.
Around the time the Iron Pall came down, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a groundbreaking essay titled "The End of History?" In it, he argued that the ideological battles between due east and westward were finally over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed.
Connie Smukler wishes it were then. Just, seated in her airy living room atop Rittenhouse Square, she shakes her head slowly. Fukuyama may have been right in a mode he didn't intend; today, few know of 20th century liberation movements similar the one Smukler helmed. In a very literal sense, history has get passé.
But she likewise knows that, broadly, Fukuyama was wrong; no verdict had been reached. There will always be abuses of human rights. You put out injustice over here and up volition pop oppression over there. And so I ask her: Subsequently all you've been through … isn't that depressing?
And with that, Connie Smukler breaks out into a tight-lipped grin, morphing instantly from regal grandmother into the badass gangsta she really is. "The struggle continues," she says, simply.
Header photograph: Courtesy of Connie Smukler.
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/connie-smukler-dont-forget-about-us/
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