Yosef Mendelevich

Yosef Mendelevich was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1947 or 1948; reference sources differ on the year.[1][2] Growing up in the Soviet Union, he developed an increasingly deep commitment to Jewish identity and faith, organizing Holocaust commemorations at Rumboli, near Riga, where Jews had been murdered by Nazis and local collaborators.[2]

In Riga, Mendelevich became a key organizer of the Jewish underground.[3] He organized underground Hebrew-language night schools in Riga and Leningrad.[4] Refuseniks — Jews denied permission to emigrate — could lose their jobs and face harassment or imprisonment.[2] Mendelevich led the Latvian contingent of what would become the Operation Wedding group.[4]

By early 1970, Mendelevich and other activists had concluded that underground education, however valuable, could reach only a limited number of people. His mentor in Riga argued that dramatic public action could draw far wider attention to the danger of assimilation and the desire of Soviet Jews to emigrate — an audience of thousands rather than the one or two thousand that clandestine education might reach.[3] The activists sought advice from Israel but were told that no government could sanction stealing an airplane; some original planners withdrew. Mendelevich nonetheless joined the operation, viewing it as a way of openly confronting the Soviet regime and generating publicity whether it succeeded or failed.[3]

On 15 June 1970, Mendelevich was among the leaders of a group of Jewish refuseniks who attempted to hijack a civilian aircraft at an airstrip outside Leningrad.[5] The operation's original plan had envisaged more than a hundred people boarding under the pretext of attending a fictitious wedding, but organizers scaled the group back sharply, fearing that a larger party would be more likely to leak the plan to the KGB.[5] To ensure that no innocent passengers would be endangered, the group bought every seat on the small aircraft.[5] The plan was to fly to Sweden and ultimately reach Israel; Mark Dymshits, a former Red Army pilot, was to fly the aircraft.[5][6]

KGB agents were waiting when the group arrived at the airfield, and the participants were arrested before they could board.[6][5] Mendelevich later recalled that surveillance had been apparent even before the attempt: officers in two black Volga cars had approached the group's campfire near the airport.[4] He described the operation's purpose plainly: "We knew we were going to be arrested by the KGB for attempting to hijack a plane... all we wanted was for the world to hear our cry."[7]

The participants were tried for high treason in what became known as the Leningrad trial of 1970.[8] The organizers Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits initially received death sentences, while other participants, including Mendelevich and Sylva Zalmanson, received lengthy prison terms.[5] Mendelevich was initially sentenced to fifteen years in Soviet prison camps.[5][9] He ultimately spent eleven years in Soviet labor and prison camps, the longest period served by any of the Jews tried in the Leningrad proceedings.[3]

The trial drew immediate international condemnation. Sustained international protest led to the commutation of the death sentences against Kuznetsov and Dymshits.[5] One account also reports that Mendelevich's sentence was reduced to twelve years on appeal.[10] The operation and trial drew attention to Soviet human-rights abuses and helped catalyze a worldwide movement to free Soviet Jewry.[5] Natan Sharansky later stated that the arrests and initial death sentences strongly influenced his own decision to try to leave the USSR.[7]

Mendelevich spent most of the period from 1970 to 1981 in Soviet prison camps. His memoir describes sleep deprivation, interrogation, restricted family visits and correspondence, confiscated reading and religious materials, forced labor, inadequate food and clothing, and sustained psychological pressure.[2]

Throughout his imprisonment, he maintained Jewish observance under conditions designed to discourage it. He wore a kippah, including one sewn from the hem of his prison uniform, observed the Sabbath, prayed during work hours, attempted to follow Jewish dietary laws, and organized holiday celebrations for other Jewish prisoners.[2][4] Guards sometimes responded to his praying instead of working by sending him to solitary confinement.[2] He undertook a fifty-six-day hunger strike to protest the denial of kosher food and the right to pray, and was force-fed.[4] Prison authorities sometimes delayed his Passover matza packages until after the holiday; he petitioned officials and threatened hunger strikes to receive them in time.[9] He was denied a final visit with his ailing father after refusing to remove his kippah.[4]

Three years of especially harsh conditions were served in a prison near Kazan because of his insistence on observing Shabbat and other Jewish religious practices.[11] He transferred between several camps and worked to establish contact with Jewish prisoners at each new location, including Natan Sharansky, with whom he studied Hebrew, discussed Jewish history, and observed holidays.[9] When the two met in a camp yard, Mendelevich greeted Sharansky in Hebrew and sang the Sabbath Kiddush loudly so Sharansky could respond. Mendelevich wrote that hearing the response made him feel that "the angels of Sabbath descend and dispel the loneliness."[2]

Mendelevich and Sharansky differed over the aims of the Soviet Jewish struggle. Mendelevich viewed it primarily as a campaign for Jews to immigrate to Israel and live a full Jewish life; Sharansky connected emigration with the broader struggle for human rights and democracy throughout the Soviet Union. These differences shaped their views on when to demonstrate, undertake hunger strikes, or halt work.[2] Letters, Mendelevich wrote, were his "only connection to home, to friends, to the Jewish people, and to the outside world."[9]

Mendelevich was freed in February 1981 after spending eleven years in prison.[2][7] A KGB judicial panel informed him that he was no longer a Soviet citizen, and he was deported shortly afterward.[12] When a bureaucrat compared his reaction to expulsion with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's sorrow at banishment, Mendelevich replied: "Solzhenitsyn you banished from his homeland. Me you're banishing to my homeland."[2]

He arrived in Israel in time for Purim in 1981 and settled in Jerusalem.[3][2] He later described Israel as the only place to which he felt a genuine emotional attachment and said that, even when visiting the former Soviet Union years later, he was waiting to return "home to Israel."[12][7]

After arriving in Jerusalem, Mendelevich studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion, then continued at Mercaz HaRav and the Harry Fischel Institute for Talmudic Research, where he received rabbinic ordination.[10] He subsequently taught at Machon Meir in Jerusalem and pursued a degree in Jewish history.[10][9]

He became a longtime educator, speaking Hebrew fluently and writing numerous Hebrew-language textbooks.[7] In the 1980s he headed the Soviet Jewry Education and Information Center, established in affiliation with the American Union of Councils. The center favored public protest, in contrast to the more moderate National Conference on Soviet Jewry and Israeli Liaison Bureau, which pursued quiet diplomacy.[13] He continued advocating for Soviet Jewish emigration, helped observant Russian immigrants settle in Israel, and participated in the religious Zionist movement.[2]

His English-language memoir, Unbroken Spirit, was published in 2012. In subsequent years he traveled internationally to tell the story of the Soviet Jewry movement, though he noted that he was rarely invited to non-Orthodox communities.[3] He also authored The Cantonists: Jewish Boys in the Russian Military, 1827–1856, originally published in Hebrew in 2010. The book examines the Russian government's motivations for conscripting Jewish boys, the effects of the cantonist system on Jewish society, and the authorities' missionizing efforts — a history Mendelevich connected to his own experience of state coercion.[9]

In later years Mendelevich returned to the former Soviet Union on several occasions to encourage Jewish emigration and participate in community gatherings. At a Limmud gathering in St. Petersburg he spoke to a packed hall and lit a Hanukkah candle at a hotel near the Winter Palace.[7] In 2015 he returned to Kazan for the first time since his release, saying that he still felt he was participating in efforts to help Soviet Jews.[11] By the time of his later visits he had built a large family in Israel, with religiously observant grandchildren.[7]

Operation Wedding's historical significance lay less in its immediate failure than in the reaction it provoked. The arrests, trial, and death sentences drew an international outcry; the death sentences were commuted, and the episode helped galvanize the worldwide campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration.[5][3] Sharansky later said that the participants' willingness to risk their lives strongly influenced his decision to seek departure from the USSR.[7]

Mendelevich's later teaching, advocacy, memoir, and historical scholarship carried that experience into Israeli and Jewish public life. He presented Jewish education and religious observance as forms of resistance to forced assimilation, both in his accounts of the Soviet camps and in his study of Jewish cantonists under the Russian Empire.[2][9]

Available accounts disagree on the size of the Operation Wedding group. The Jewish Agency refers to the deed carried out by eleven Jews arrested in Leningrad, while Mosaic describes fourteen participants.[7][6] The World Jewish Congress reports sixteen refuseniks.[5] The sources do not clarify whether these figures count different subsets of those arrested or involved in planning.

Sentence accounts also describe different stages of the legal process. The World Jewish Congress reports an initial fifteen-year sentence.[5] The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reports that it was reduced to twelve years on appeal, while JNS records eleven years actually served before Mendelevich's 1981 release.[10][3] These figures may refer to the initial sentence, the term after appeal, and time served, but the available sources do not fully reconcile them. They do not alter the core record of Mendelevich's participation in Operation Wedding, imprisonment, and subsequent life in Israel.