Soviet Fear, Jewish Light

In every Jewish family, memory is sacred. Sometimes it takes the shape of a prayer. Sometimes — silence. And sometimes, it comes as a warning passed from father to son — not to teach, but to survive.

My grandfather was not a rabbi. But in a world where truth could cost your life, his words became a kind of Torah for my father. Not the Torah of a yeshiva, but the Torah of survival — forged in the underground of fear.

He lived in Soviet Ukraine, where the KGB was not an abstraction. It was everywhere: in the streets, in the schools, in every factory, even at the family table. They watched. They listened. People learned to be silent before they learned to speak.

When Stalin died in 1953, my father was about four or five years old. He was in kindergarten. My grandfather leaned close and said:
“Don’t laugh. Even if something seems funny.”
“Why?” my father asked — a small child who didn’t understand.
“Because they’ll think we’re enemies of the people.”

Six months later, Beria — Stalin’s right hand and head of the secret police — was executed. My grandfather started burning his books in the stove.
“Why are you doing that, Papa?”
“Because now he’s an English spy. And if they find his books here, they’ll say we were with him.”

This wasn’t paranoia. It was life. In the USSR, you mmm could burn a book — but it wouldn’t take the fear with it.

When my father grew up, he worked at the Kharkiv Tractor Plant. Like every major Soviet workplace, it had what was called the First Department — an internal security unit run by the KGB, tasked with monitoring employees’ political loyalty.

One evening, at a work party, someone told a joke about the regime. My father didn’t tell the joke — he only listened. The next day, he was summoned.
“In earlier times,” they said, “people were shot for this. We know you didn’t tell the joke — you only listened. But be careful.
Next time, we won’t be so lenient.”

That phrase hung in the air like an undated sentence.

In 1975, when some of our relatives were leaving for Israel, my father went to see them off. From the train station in Odesa all the way to the border at Chop, they were followed. The surveillance was open, deliberate — a message: “We’re watching. We’re always here.”

And there was another story, from my mother’s side. Her father — my grandfather Yosef — had a small shoemaking workshop in the 1930s. One day, he was arrested, beaten, and interrogated by the NKVD. They demanded gold. It was not a state — it was a mafia cloaked in red. What saved him was the intervention of my grandmother’s brother — a Party official. Without that, he would’ve vanished, like thousands of others.

Today, as a rabbi, I reflect on what it means to be Jewish after all of that.

Ein od milvado — “There is none besides Him” (Deuteronomy 4:35). In Kabbalah, this is not just theology — it is the very structure of reality. When a state makes itself into a god, as the Soviet Union did, it is doomed to collapse. This isn’t something we know only from history. We know it from Torah.

The Soviet Union seemed eternal. Its anthem. Its ideology. Its KGB.
But everything built on fear and falsehood is already burning from within.
It didn’t simply collapse — it fell because it was built on evil.
Any regime that worships power over truth, cruelty over justice, and fear over human dignity is destined to unravel.

As the Talmud teaches: “A kingdom based on injustice cannot stand” (Avodah Zarah 4a).
And as the Zohar reveals, evil may rise quickly, but it is always unstable — because it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

They could monitor our letters, our words, our books — but not the divine spark that lives inside every Jew. As the Tanya teaches: the soul is literally “a portion of God above” (chelek Eloka mima’al mamash).

Yes, we were silent. We burned books. We hid our thoughts. But our soul was never extinguished. It was passed on — from grandfathers to fathers, from fathers to sons. Not as fear, but as light. A light that doesn’t go out, even in the thickest darkness.

As Proverbs says: “The soul of a person is the candle of God” (Proverbs 20:27). And that candle still burns.

Because our story does not end with empires.
It begins with a covenant.

And perhaps this story is not only about the past.
It is a quiet warning — to every regime that threatens the Jewish people.
To Iran, and others like it, who dream of erasing Israel:
The Soviet empire is gone.
Israel lives.
Because truth lives. Because the covenant lives.

Amen.