Post-War Antisemitism: "Rootless Cosmopolitans" and the Doctors' Plot
Victory in the Second World War brought Jews no safety. In the final years of Stalin's rule, antisemitism became state policy.
The JAC was created during the war. In 1948 its leadership was arrested. 13 members were executed on 12 August 1952 — the "Night of the Murdered Poets." Among the victims were outstanding figures of Jewish Soviet culture.
Under the guise of fighting "Western influence," Jews were dismissed from academic, cultural, and government institutions. Criminal cases were opened from lists.
TASS announced the arrest of a group of doctor-"murderers" allegedly poisoning Soviet leaders. The majority were Jews. Mass deportation of Jews to Siberia was being prepared. It was halted only by Stalin's death in March 1953.
After Stalin's death, the arrested doctors were freed. But state antisemitism had not gone away — it had merely changed its form.
Mendel Futerfas: 14 Years in the Gulag for His Faith
What Futerfas Did Before His Arrest
Mendel Futerfas was one of the key organisers of the Chabad underground in post-war USSR. He coordinated:
- Underground emigration channels for Jewish families from the USSR to Poland and beyond
- Financing of underground yeshivot through illegal money transfers
- Supply of religious items to communities (tefillin, mezuzot, prayer books)
In the Labour Camp
In the Siberian camps, Futerfas did not break. He secretly observed Shabbat as best he could. He obtained kosher food. He told Chassidic stories to fellow prisoners. By his own account, it was in the camp that his faith became unshakeable.
"In the camp I learned what I could not have learned anywhere else in the world: what it means to be a Jew against all odds."— Mendel Futerfas
The Futerfas case is not an exception but a symbol — the fate of hundreds of Chassidim who passed through Soviet camps for the right to pray, study, and remain Jews.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe vs. the Soviet Machine: Fighting for Three Million Jews
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"Workers of the world,
unite!"
Menachem Mendel Schneerson
While the Soviet state systematically destroyed Jewish life, one man — sitting thousands of miles away in New York — waged a quiet, relentless war for every Soviet Jew by name.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, knew the Soviet regime not as an abstraction. His father — Rabbi Levi Yitzchak — had been arrested by the NKVD, tortured for a year, exiled to Kazakhstan, where he died. This was personal.
How the Rebbe Fought the Soviet Machine
The Rebbe possessed extraordinarily detailed knowledge of Jewish communities in the USSR — names, addresses, the needs of individual families. American officials and CIA personnel were astonished by the depth of his information. Sources: underground correspondence, secret couriers, diplomatic channels.
The Rebbe regularly met with US presidents, senators, and diplomats, insisting: raise the "Jewish question" at every negotiation with the USSR. He was especially persistent ahead of Nixon's Moscow Summit in 1972.
In 1974 the Rebbe championed this landmark legislation, which tied US–Soviet trade relations to the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate. It became the primary economic lever of pressure on the USSR — all the way until its collapse.
Every year before Passover, the Rebbe organised the shipment of matzah into the USSR through diplomatic and religious channels. Practical aid and a message in one: "We have not forgotten you."
The Rebbe financed the covert delivery of Jewish religious books into the USSR — Torah scrolls, siddurim, Hebrew textbooks — evading Soviet censorship. Thousands of copies reached communities across the Soviet Union during the Cold War years.
The Rebbe personally ran campaigns for the release of individual Jewish prisoners. He named them from public platforms and in correspondence with political leaders. The case of Anatoly Sharansky became the most prominent.
Timeline of the Struggle
"Every single Jew is precious to me as my own limb. We will not leave one Jew behind the Iron Curtain."— Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe
The Rebbe had no army and no state. He had a network, a relentless persistence, and an unshakeable conviction that history is not written by governments but by people who refuse to surrender. The Soviet regime — which had declared war on Judaism — was defeated by a man who never recognised its right to wage that war.
Refuseniks and the Continuing Struggle
After Stalin's death, the repressions became less bloody but did not stop. Chabad continued its underground work. The KGB continued its surveillance.
A 1961 law on "speculation" was applied against producers of matzah for synagogues. Jews who made matzah for their community received real prison sentences.
Dozens of Chassidim went through interrogations, arrests, "psychiatric" examinations, and camps for religious activity.
Soviet Jews began applying en masse for exit visas to Israel. Most were refused. Many were fired from their jobs, expelled from the Party, and prosecuted criminally.
Hebrew teacher and activist, arrested three times by Soviet authorities. His case attracted wide international attention.
"They refused my exit visa. Then they fired me. Then they came and searched my home. But I kept teaching Hebrew and had no intention of stopping."— From the memoirs of a Soviet refusenik, Moscow, 1979
The Collapse of the USSR: The End of an Era of Persecution
With the onset of glasnost (1985) and especially from 1988–1989, Jewish life in the USSR began to revive. Synagogues received their buildings back. Yeshivot were legalised. Public Jewish celebrations became possible.
Two centuries of systematic persecution — from the Peter & Paul Fortress to the Siberian labour camps — did not destroy Chabad, nor the Jewish people of Russia. They forged them.
The same communities that the authorities tried to erase from the face of the earth today operate openly in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and across the former empire.
We Remember
From hundreds of thousands of names — a few, so we do not forget