Time of our Freedom

Throughout my childhood my family were very active in the campaign for Soviet Jewry. I thought everyone had an uncle with a pen that could write in invisible ink who travelled to the Soviet Union smuggling Hebrew books and vital medications for Jewish dissidents captive behind the Iron Curtain.

Every Pesah we had a place setting and an empty chair waiting for our Soviet sisters and brothers to be free to join us.

And then one year the Soviet Union fell and the Iron Gates were flung open. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flooded in to Israel. Our prayers were realised.
The true coda to the story though happened many years later. Pesah 2003 we went to relatives near Jerusalem for seder. My cousin was working as an ICU nurse, she had a shift starting after seder and walked her down to wait for her transport to the hospital.

All of a sudden someone else out for a late post-seder walk rushed over and grabbed my uncle in a bear hug. It was one of the Soviet Jewish dissidents he had visited decades earlier in Moscow. A man he had brought the vital medications for, Hebrew books for.

And here he was, dressed as an openly religious Jew embracing my uncle on seder night in the heart of Israel. And he recognised my uncle whom he hadn't seen since that meeting in Moscow under the watchful eye of the KGB "tail" conspicuously following them.

The coda has another coda because for a couple of years ago my uncle decided to treat himself to Pesah in a kibbutz guesthouse. He arrived erev yom tov to find that he had been assigned a room in a little two room kibbutz chalet. Sitting out in a deck chair outside his room he heard someone calling out to him. Sure enough his neighbours in the nextdoor room where this former refusenik and his wife and they shared seder night together.

I know not every story has such a happy ending. We don't know who of the hostages whom today are held captive in tunnels instead of behind an Iron Curtain are still alive to be reunited with their loved ones. We don't know if the empty chairs that so many will be leaving by their seder will be filled.

But in the 1970s and early 1980s the idea of the Soviet Union falling and the Jews going free seemed fantastically remote. We dreamt of one day sharing the seder with the families my uncle visited in Moscow but I don't know if we truly believed we would see the day when we would all merit to stroll the streets of Israel together.

Seder isn't a celebration of the "happy ending" though. It takes us through the pain and the hardship of our ancestors, their desperation and despair.

Each person must see themselves as though they themselves were brought out of Egypt, to put themselves in the position of those who suffered slavery and persecution to remember also that hope and redemption can come in the darkest hour even when it seems all is lost.

May all those who are missing be found, may all our hostages return home, our thousands of wounded be healed and the souls of all find comfort.