Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un po' di ripasso

cosa significa refusenicks
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1192380711401&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Right of refusal
SAM SER , THE JERUSALEM POST 	Nov. 1, 2007
They worked in secret, late at night, in dimly-lit basements. With
little more than typewriters to work with, the underground scribes
toiled to translate the manifestos of their struggle - words so potent
that they could destroy one of the most dominant empires in history.
Such was the power of Exodus, Leon Uris's fictional account of
Israel's birth, to a small group of Jews in the Soviet Union. They
passed chapters of the book to trusted comrades, along with samizdat -
self-published, covertly distributed essays - that fed each other's
hunger for Israel and anything Jewish.
Much of the literature that the Communist Party considered dangerous
and worthy of lengthy prison sentences - Hebrew lessons, Purim plays,
translations of "Hatikva" and "Jerusalem of Gold" and petitions to
allow free immigration to Israel - sits in the archives of Beth
Hatefutsoth (the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora), on the
campus of Tel Aviv University. Until now they have lain dormant,
yellowing in silence as Israel busied itself with quelling intifadas
and launching hi-tech companies.
This week, though, 40 years after Israel's victory in the Six Day War
gave Soviet Jewish protesters the momentum they needed to open the
gates of freedom, the museum opened an exhibit on the movement that
toppled the communist regime and energized Zion.
THE STOREROOMS of the museum are filled with mementos of that era. A
cigarette lighter, emblazoned with the flag of Israel, which plays the
national anthem. The Hebrew ulpan recordings of Yaakov Suslensky,
considered revolutionary material, stored in cardboard boxes
handcrafted by Moldovan KGB agents. The coat that Natan Sharansky wore
on his famous walk to freedom across East Germany's Glienicke Bridge
after more than a decade of Siberian exile. A postcard written by an
inspiring ulpan student: "Dear Saraleh, Here is a souvenir for you. It
is a photo of my first prison in Leningrad."
Together, these items begin to tell the story of thousands of Jews who
risked their freedom for the right to live in the Jewish state, who
threatened the Kremlin not with guns but with placards reading, "Let
my people go!" They begin to tell the story, that is, but they cannot
provide the fullness of such a tale.
Take, for example, Yosef Begun's Hanukka in a Moscow prison in 1971.
It was the first time Begun would be locked up, but not his last: By
the time he was allowed to leave for Israel in 1988, Begun would have
spent 10 years in Soviet jails. In this case, his "crime" was helping
some 20 Jewish intellectuals organize a public hunger strike to
protest the government's restrictions on aliya.
Begun and his fellow inmates, nearly two dozen other Jewish
"criminals," rallied each other through the bitter conditions with the
reminder that the holiday of Hanukka was upon them. With the more
learned among them regaling the others with stories of the Maccabees'
triumph over their far stronger, more numerous enemy - and with a
clever ruse from one of the group allowing them to improvise a set of
candles to light - the men celebrated as if they were joined by all
their brethren at a fancy holiday feast.
In a way, they were. A deep sense of connection to the Jewish people,
as well as an abiding spirit, helped the persecuted heroes of the
movement through such hard times.
"Even while we were in Soviet prisons," Begun told The Jerusalem Post
this week, "we felt like Israeli citizens."
THERE WOULD be numerous injustices against men like Boris
Kochubiyevsky, who was sentenced to three years in jail for,
essentially, having the audacity to proclaim in open court that "Jews
are oppressed here." So, too, there would be outrageous acts such as
the plan by a group of refuseniks to hijack a small plane to draw
attention to their plight. But most of those who participated in the
struggle against Soviet anti-Semitism were people, like Aba Taratuta,
who simply wanted to pack up and leave.
"In Riga," Taratuta recalled, "all the Jews talked about was aliya.
They would see each other in the street and say, '9-2.' Anywhere else,
you'd assume they were talking about soccer scores. With them,
however, it was the number of aliya refusals versus authorizations
doled out by the authorities."
In those days - when, after the Soviet Union severed ties with Israel
following the Six Day War, the government led a campaign of anti-
Zionist propaganda - few of the country's 3 million Jews had an
accurate picture of what life in Israel was like. But, Taratuta said,
they didn't need one.
"It wasn't so important what we knew about Israel. The bottom line
was, we realized that Russia was not our country."
When that realization sank in for Taratuta, in 1973, he had just
received his Ph.D. in astronomy after working 15 years in a sensitive
munitions factory. Simply for filing an immigration request with OVIR,
the ministry that threw obstacle after obstacle in the way of Jews
intent on aliya, Taratuta had to leave his job. He would become a
truck driver, then an elevator mechanic and, finally, part of a crew
of refuseniks who maintained the heating system at a public bath.
While Taratuta and his family waited 15 years for an exit visa,
Americans came to offer support. KGB agents would come and confiscate
the guest books they signed, but the blue jeans the Americans brought
made Taratuta's son one of the most popular kids in school.
THE ROLE played by foreigners, especially Americans and Israelis, in
making the refusenik issue an international story, was significant. In
the United States, Jewish organizations lobbied for pressure on the
Kremlin, with the smuggled samizdat of the persecuted bearing witness
to the cruelty of the Soviets. Congress passed a law enacting trade
sanctions on countries that restrict emigration rights. A massive
rally in Washington in 1987, as Ronald Reagan was meeting with Mikhail
Gorbachev, embarrassed the Soviet regime into allowing more Jews to
leave.
Israel was active, of course, demanding that Jews be given the freedom
to settle in the Holy Land, working with Jewish groups abroad and
sending delegations to the Soviet Union to help inculcate Zionism and
Jewish culture.
"The Soviets always suspected that Israel was behind the refuseniks,"
said Zvi Magen, a former colonel in IDF Intelligence who served as
ambassador to Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s. Magen
also served as head of the Liaison Bureau, codenamed Nativ, which
encouraged Soviet Jews to develop their Jewish identities and to
continue their pro-aliya activism. Currently he serves as director of
the Institute for Eurasian Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center in
Herzliya.
On more than one occasion, the Kremlin has accused Nativ of being a
thinly-veiled Israeli spy ring. That's not exactly accurate, Magen
said.
"The members of Nativ are like soldiers, in the sense that they serve
their country abroad. What they do is not spying, but what is called
'influence building.' Everyone does it," Magen said.
"It's like the Alliance Francaise or the Goethe Institute... If you
ask them who they are, who they work for, you won't get a straight
answer. What do they do? Encourage French or German culture..."
In most cases, "encouraging culture" is innocuous. In other cases,
though... "[Vladimir] Putin once said something to me," Magen said,
"about his time in Dresden" - a murky period in the Russian
president's KGB career in which he was in charge of a Russian cultural
outpost in Germany - "to the effect that this sort of thing is worse
than spying."
In the case of Soviet Jews challenging a government singularly
dedicated to crushing independence, the "cultural" work of the
refusenik movement took on immense importance, and ultimately became a
factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"No one, not even the famous dissidents, was purely interested in
human rights," admitted Begun. "Overturning the regime was part of our
desire - but people who openly worked for such a thing were executed.
So we focused on aliya, and on the right to practice Jewish culture."
"Natan Sharansky believes in human rights much more than I do," said
Magen. "From a certain perspective, 'human rights' is a weapon."
It is possible to understand, then, why the authorities could view
"Hatikva" as a threat.
"The Soviets always saw their Jews as agents of the Zionists, and
Israel as an agent of Soviet Jews," Magen explained. "To them, no
matter how assimilated a Jew may be, he was like a 'sleeper agent'
capable of turning against the regime."
TENS OF thousands of Jews poured out of the Soviet Union in the 1970s
and '80s, with more than 1 million of them reaching Israel. Arrival
here was not always a fairy-tale ending for the refuseniks and
Prisoners of Zion, however. For every success story like that of
Eduard Kuznetsov, one of the hijacking plotters who established
Israel's largest Russian-language newspaper, or Yuli Edelstein, who
went on to a career in the Knesset, there were others who never truly
found their "Jerusalem of Gold." Some left long ago for the US or
Canada, Taratuta noted, while some even went back to Russia.
"The ones who were idealistic, who thought that Russia was entirely
bad and that Israel was entirely good," he said, "they were pretty
disappointed."
Not long after he arrived here in 1988, Taratuta found work at the
Technion in Haifa - not as a truck driver, nor as a mechanic, but as a
scientist. He would teach there, at the space research institute,
until his retirement a few years ago.
In 2001, fearing that the stories of the Jewish dissidents would soon
become lost, he helped found Save and Remember. The archive of
interviews and other material was the starting place for the Diaspora
Museum exhibit.
Taratuta still has friends in Russia with whom he is in regular
contact. Aliya, however, is not part of their discussions.
"I don't try to convince Jews in Russia to make aliya," said the
straightforward Taratuta. "If they have spent their entire lives in
Russia and still don't understand where they are... well, I'm not
going to be the one to tell them."
There are also huge numbers of Jews living in Israel today who are
here, in large part, because of the sacrifices and suffering of people
like Begun. He's not sore, however, about the lack of recognition he
feels from this community.
"I understand," he said, "that people were afraid of getting into
trouble, of losing their jobs, if they supported us. Also, there was a
lot of assimilation. A lot of Russian Jews weren't very interested in
Israel... Some didn't know much about Israel, some just didn't care to
know much about Israel."
Now, said Begun, who recently completed a one-hour-long movie about
his life and the dissident movement, he is happy those assimilated
Jews were able to come to Israel.
"That's what we were fighting for in the first place - the Jews who
were so assimilated that they didn't know why to care about their
homeland. When I was arrested and sent to exile," Begun noted, "it was
because I was exposed, because I was distributing my materials, not to
refuseniks, but to the rest of the Jews. Because I tried to reach
out."
Now well into his 70s, Begun is still reaching out. Since making aliya
he has worked in Jewish education, both here and on trips to Russia,
trying to interest Jewish youths in their culture and heritage. He has
a granddaughter, currently serving in the IDF, who used to bring him
to her school so that her classmates could hear his story.
That, Taratuta complained, was an all-too-rare occurrence.
Taratuta's son, whose childhood was marred by the hardships of
refusenik life, has little interest in discussing that period of his
life. Taratuta's grandchildren, though, do want to learn about that
chapter in Jewish history - and Taratuta fears that they, along with
the rest of Israeli children, will not have that opportunity.
"Why is there no program to teach schoolchildren about our struggle?"
he asked. "Why are our children not introduced to the people behind
the story? Where's the public's interest in us and our fight, when
everyone is complaining about the death of Zionism?!"
Indeed, the Diaspora Museum exhibit is meant to provide a remedy for
this and other problems. Part of the motivation for the exhibit is not
just to bring the struggle of the Prisoners of Zion and the refuseniks
to the attention of veteran Israelis, for many of whom the thrill of
rescuing Soviet Jewry has faded into an outright disdain for Russian
immigrants, but to inform the children of those immigrants as well.
"There's a young Russian woman who works here at the museum," said
Rachel Schnold, the exhibit curator, "who didn't know any of this
history. She's not alone, of course. And a lot of what Russian olim do
know of the struggle is only the version that the Soviets propagated.
We have to change that."
As Begun lamented: "At the time, our names were in the news all over
the world. We were written about every day. Today, though, you'd be
hard pressed to find someone in the street who could name a Prisoner
of Zion, other than Sharansky. People don't know the whole story -
which is a shame, because it's a very important story."

 cosa significa ANCHE refusenicks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_to_serve_in_the_Israeli_military

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gente poco originale

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Sinceramente, non mi riesce di capire perché gente che dovrebbbe appartenere 
alla sinistra magari idiota, ma moderna e dincantanta, stia ancora a leccare le 
palle delle statue Breznev (per non parlare di quelle ormai consunte di MMAX).
Tb
-- 
Libertà per i comunisti siriani in carcere: Fateh Jamus, 'Isam Dimashqi,
Basel Hurani, 'Abd al-Halim Rumieh, Ratib Sha'bu, and Doha 'Ashur
al-'Askari 
http://snipurl.com/1oqtm