From
Slavery to Freedom,
directed by Arkady Kogan, a new documentary about Soviet Jewish refuseniks,
especially Natan Sharansky, is premiering this week at the Berlin Film
Festival. The film tells a fascinating
story of Jewish dissidents who stood up to the Soviet political machine and succeeded
in winning their freedom from the shackles of Soviet oppression.
Here
we learn about those Jewish dissidents who, in the early 1970s, fed up with the
institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Former Soviet Union, decided to apply
for permission to leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to Israel. Due to the fact that their requests were
refused, these Jews became known as refuseniks.
The film tells their stories, including interviews with well-known refuseniks
such as Josef Mendelevich (who was a participant in the attempted hijacking
affair), Zeev Dashevsky, Vladimir Slepak and Dina Beylina.
Perhaps
the best known of all of the Soviet refuseniks was Natan Sharansky, who began
his long fight for permission to leave for Israel in 1973. He was three years a refusenik and human
rights activist. Then in 1977, he was
arrested and became a Prisoner of Zion, held in terrible conditions, until his
release in February 1986. During these
years, his wife, Avital, was traveling around the world trying to raise
interest and awareness of his plight, and that of others held against their
will in the Soviet Union. The film also
includes interviews with American Jewish activists in the “Let My People Go”
movement who worked tirelessly to obtain freedom for these refuseniks.
Sharansky
talks about how the Six Day War had a profound affect on his Jewish
identity. Up until that time, refuseniks,
like himself, had grown up disconnected from their Jewish roots and slowly they
began to learn about Jewish history, traditions and about the State of
Israel. This was the beginning of the
movement that eventually opened the doors and lead to more than one million
people leaving the Former Soviet Union for Israel.
Although
the film does not go on to talk about what happened to these people after they
left the Soviet Union, it is important to mention – Natan Sharansky became a
major public personality in Israel, including head of the Jewish Agency for
many years. And the aliyah of the more
than one million people from the Soviet Union, so many of them educated and
skilled, has dramatically changed the face of Israel in fields such as music,
medicine, engineering, and more.
From
Slavery to Freedom (documentary,
84 minutes) is available from Go2Films.www.go2films.com The film tells an important story of
heroism in the modern period.
