Yaakov Kedmi

Born in 1947, Kedmi was known as Yasha Kazakov before adopting the Hebrew surname Kedmi.[1][3] In 1967 he was a twenty-year-old student in Moscow, where his demand to leave the Soviet Union became part of the growing public campaign by Soviet Jews seeking permission to immigrate to Israel.[3]

Two days after the Six-Day War, Kazakov wrote to the Kremlin renouncing his Soviet citizenship and declaring himself an Israeli citizen in absentia.[3] His letter stated: “I demand to be freed from the humiliation of being considered a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”[3] The letter was smuggled abroad and excerpts appeared in The Washington Post; he subsequently received permission to leave for Israel.[3]

Kazakov had no family in Israel and obtained permission to emigrate after a persistent struggle.[2] He arrived in Israel in February 1969 and soon joined other Soviet Jewish activists pressing for a worldwide campaign to secure the freedom of Soviet Jews to emigrate.[6]

After arriving in Israel, Kazakov advocated a more public and confrontational campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration than the quieter approach favored by the Israeli establishment, which sought to avoid conflict with Soviet authorities.[4] Together with other activists, he approached opposition leaders Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir and sought support from university students for protests against the government’s policy of silence.[6]

His early activism was the subject of the English-language publication The Rebirth of Yasha Kazakov: The Road from Moscow to Jerusalem, issued in 1970.[1] The twelve-page publication was a shortened version of Geulah Cohen’s interview with Kazakov, with Cohen and Kedmi listed among its contributors.[1]

Kedmi served in the Israeli military, including during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War.[2] During the Battle of the Chinese Farm, he served in a tank commanded by Ehud Barak.[7]

He subsequently joined Nativ, the Israeli liaison organization responsible for maintaining contact with Jews in the Soviet bloc.[2] The organization operated covertly behind the Iron Curtain and gathered information in Eastern Europe.[7] Kedmi joined during Menachem Begin’s premiership, began working in its operations office, and eventually became its director.[8][9]

Appointed director in 1992, Kedmi remained in the position until 1999 and played a significant part in the large immigration wave of the 1990s.[4] Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Nativ worked to strengthen connections to Israel and Judaism among Jews in the former Soviet states.[4] Kedmi later recounted that in 1992 the organization launched a secret operation that used contacts in the former Soviet Union to obtain tens of thousands of documents from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain.[9]

In February 1997, Kedmi became involved in an effort to reconstruct Pnina’s wartime childhood.[10] After Natan (Anatoly) Sheransky agreed to assist, a member of his staff contacted Kedmi, then head of the Lishkat Hakesher, an agency active in Russia.[10] Working from limited information—a name and the place Buzuluk—Kedmi and the staff member began seeking records in Russia.[10] Seven months later, documents from the Orenburg District Main Educational Authority supplied details of Pnina’s orphanage registrations and transfers during the war.[10]

Kedmi left Nativ in 1999 amid strained relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and subsequently entered private business.[8] He later became a frequent commentator on Russian television and maintained contacts in Russian government circles.[7]

Kedmi’s public career connects the campaign for Soviet Jewish freedom of emigration with the subsequent work of bringing Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel.[4][6] As a young activist, he challenged the Soviet authorities through an explicit rejection of Soviet citizenship; after reaching Israel, he pressed Israeli leaders to support a more visible international campaign.[3][6] As Nativ’s director, he participated in the large immigration wave of the 1990s and in efforts to sustain Jewish and Israeli connections across the former Soviet states.[4]

His account of Soviet attitudes toward Jews emphasized the leadership’s belief in a powerful, coordinated international Jewish network controlling Israel and major financial institutions.[9] In a later interview, he also described the KGB as regarding Nativ as a central force behind the international movement for Soviet Jewish emigration.[11] His own early experience was preserved in the 1970 interview publication, while an archival collection also includes a reference to an interview with him published on Kosharovsky’s website.[1][12]

A State Comptroller’s audit criticized Nativ’s administration under Kedmi for excessive personal authority, inadequate oversight, waste, and administrative disorder.[13] Against a 1994 budget of 59.1 million shekels—46 million from the state and the remainder from donations—the audit found that Kedmi controlled 12 million shekels through two accountants without oversight and that 5.5–5.8 million shekels were spent without approval or authorized work plans.[13] It also criticized payments of at least 697,000 shekels for a Hebrew-study program Kedmi had described as free, and $500,000 in renovations without a work plan and budget; these were audit findings, not a judicial ruling.[13]

Russian intelligence accused Kedmi of operating agents in Moscow, and he was barred from entering Russia until December 2015, when Russia’s ambassador to Israel informed him that the ban had been lifted.[7] The accusation itself was not independently substantiated in the reporting collected here.[7] A 2017 Ynetnews opinion article credited him with helping secure Russia’s recognition of west Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by raising the issue with Foreign Ministry contacts, who passed it to Sergey Lavrov and then Vladimir Putin; that account of his influence remains the article’s interpretation rather than an independently corroborated finding.[2]

In February 2023, the European Union sanctioned Kedmi in connection with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[5] The EU’s stated grounds included his regular appearances on Russian state television and pro-Kremlin programs, his defense of the war, and accusations that Ukraine’s leadership was Nazi-aligned.[4][5] Kedmi rejected the sanctions as a “cheap attempt” to silence him and said they would not prevent him from expressing what he regarded as the truth.[4][5]