35's Barbara Oberman  interview: "Operation Wedding" Dymshits–Kuznetsov aircraft hijacking affair
Channel: Anat Z.K
Date: 2019-11-10

To use any part of this footage, contact: anat.zk.email@gmail.com
(c) Anat Zalmanson Kuznetsov 2013
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"Looking back on those tumultuous times, I credit our artlessness and innocence for our success."
We became the 35s almost by chance.

It was May 1971 and we were 35-year-old suburban housewives (regrettably a mere dozen of us, not the crowd we'd wanted) hunger-striking outside the Soviet Embassy in London on behalf of a 35-year-old Soviet Jewish woman, incarcerated without trial in a Soviet torture chamber. We made BBC Radio's News at One later that day, which named us the 35s for the first time, and named me Margaret (rather than Barbara) as I gave my first on-air interview. Nonetheless, we were delighted to have media coverage - and thrilled when it bore fruit.

Within 12 hours, an Israeli Embassy staffer secretly told us that Raissa Palatnik, the librarian for whom we'd demonstrated, had been moved to a regular prison cell, from where she would stand trial. Looking back on those tumultuous times, I credit our artlessness and innocence for that first success and the many that followed. Our campaign was one of the opening salvos in the battle to free the then-unknown number of persecuted Jews inside the USSR - who were discovered to be the four million so-called Jews of Silence. It was a fight in which we took on not only the mighty Soviet Union, but also Israel's government and the Anglo-Jewish establishment. For their own separate reasons, both Israel and British Jews favored quiet diplomacy. We were appalled at their foot-dragging. All we could sense was impending doom, a catastrophic replaying of all-too-recent Jewish history.

Early in May 1971, I attended a lecture given by Yitzhak Rager, then second secretary at the Israeli Embassy and later to be mayor of Beersheba and president of State of Israel Bonds. That was where I heard about Raissa Palatnik, at 35 the same age as me, imprisoned in a torture chamber because she'd wanted to leave Russia. I was overwhelmed by Palatnik's story, and poured it out to Cecil as soon as I got home. Had my grandmother not emigrated to Britain, I could be where Raissa was now, I told him. While we couldn't bring out the numbers of demonstrators that American Jews did, I said, I wanted to gather other 35-year-old women to join me on hunger strike to gain recognition for her plight. The time for passive protests and short mentions deep inside the newspapers was over.

I must have made more than 100 phone calls that night to family, friends and mothers of children at the three Jewish schools my children attended. Almost all of them asked if I'd had an okay from the Anglo-Jewish establishment. Few were willing to put themselves on the line when they heard I hadn't. In the end, barely a dozen of us - among them, my good friends Sylvia Wallis, Zelda Harris and Zena Clayton - made our way next day to the gates of the Soviet Embassy. Against this wonderful photo-op background, we held up a giant canvas banner that Cecil and our two sons had spent the night making in our dress factory. "USSR release Raissa Palatnik" it urged, for all the world to see. The News at One interview followed, the 35s was born and we garnered our first triumph with Palatnik moved to an ordinary prison and given a trial date. The secretary of the Board of Deputies even sent us a congratulatory telegram.

While the part I played in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry was not on the scale described by Pravda (it once called the Oberman house in Golders Green "the center of Zionist activity in England"!), I look back with enormous pride. We were non-working, middle-class Jewish housewives, with the support of husbands and children, and the hours to give to what was then a unique form of public protest. Despite the emerging women's movement in the West, we saw ourselves as housewives, who had taken the highly unusual step of bucking the establishment and grabbing the spotlight solely because we saw no other way. We combined vision with a stubborn determination to put the plight of refuseniks on the world agenda, and we believed passionately that we could make a difference.

This proved a potent combination. In the end, we and others like us did indeed show the mighty Soviet Union that Jews could not be denied their human rights because they were Jews.

The Jerusalem Post, JULY 25, 2007