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know there was a branch of the Mossad since the 1950s that was
focused on Soviet Jewry; it wasn’t publicized. Ben-Gurion blew
him off – “Aryeh, I thought you were a smart guy. Do you think
we’re so crazy to start up with the Communists?” – and sent him
away. Two weeks later, Aryeh gets a call at 11:00pm from Shaul
Avigur, a legendary figure in the early Mossad who led the Mossad
Le’Aliyah Bet operations to smuggle Jews into Israel during the
British Mandate. “Aryeh, it seems you have a good friend in Sde
Boker [Ben-Gurion’s kibbutz]. I want to see you.” From that point
on, Aryeh worked for the Mossad.

Aryeh told us to meet him at a government building that was very
hard to find; later I understood that he did this purposely to see
if we could find an address. In Communist Russia you couldn’t
get a map in English; there were no tourist maps in English. And
wherever you went, there were numbers on the houses, but never
names; there was never a name on the mailbox.
Then we had six months of preparation. I have to give all the
credit to the State of Israel – they invested millions of dollars The proud Hebrew teachers of Leningrad, 1981
in this operation. Aryeh realized that we had dual citizenship
and that I could present myself as an American. I didn’t want to
tell the Soviets that I was a Rebbe, so I said that I was a banker.
I even had stationery printed! Why did I choose banking as my
fake profession? I did my research; people who had spent time in
Russia told me that the KGB knew nothing about banking because
the Communist system was so different from the US system. If
they challenged me, I could double-talk and deflect the questions
without too much trouble.
I was prepared well. The Mossad told me that I should start
by meeting with a group of no more than five people in the
apartment of Rabbi Aryeh Katzin’s apartment [a Jewish activist
in Moscow during the years 1977–1981], to see if the KGB would
tolerate it. We worked under the premise that we were not
opposed to Communism; we just wanted ‘repatriation’. The
Soviets allowed Germans to be repatriated to Germany after the
war, and so Jews should also have the right to be repatriated to
their family members in their homeland, in Israel. This is what
we always stressed. Finishing the bottle of vodka in proper Russian fashion at the conclusion of the
session with the scientists, 1985
There was a whole underground in Russia; because of the Six
Day War, Jews were waking up. Do you know what it meant to
smuggle in a book called Exodus, the impact it made on the Jews
in Russia? Now, it’s one thing to smuggle in a book, but how do
you get that book all over the country? Xerox machines were
government controlled, but the government couldn’t control
photography. If you could smuggle in a good camera and get it
to the right person, they could photograph an entire book and
make hundreds of copies.
How did Israel finance all of this? On our third trip to the Soviet
Union, we went to Vilna. We were given a picture of a baby, and
told that when we got to Vilna we should show this picture to a
certain man in a hospital there who will take us into a side room
and give us 50,000 Rubles. Then it was our job to visit a list of
people who could be trusted. We were told to give these people
the money and tell them that in six months time, someone will
follow up with them to see how the money was utilized.
What was going on here? It turns out this doctor in the hospital
had children who had come on Aliyah, and these children wanted Teaching in the Vilna synagogue, 1989

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