The gates of November by Chaim Potok Page A

Volodya caught the word zhid directed at him by certain students, and ignored it. The first time he had heard the word, he asked his father what it meant, and his father explained that it was a bad word used by ignorant and misguided persons as a nasty and crude description of the Jews, an ancient and honorable Mediterranean people who had been persecuted all through history and to whom their family belonged, and, his father went on, when the dream of a perfect Communist state came true, that persecution would end and all the peoples of the Soviet Union would live in harmony as one great nation and as a sign to the entire world that Comrade Stalin and the Communist Party had finally put an end to religious hatred and bigotry.
    Volodya was about eight or nine at the time. A Jew! He was a Jew! Apparently he had forgotten the Purim celebration he had attended in Mukden years before. Then again, perhaps there was nothing especially Jewish about that event; it may have been merely another party, unremarkable save for the costumes and the clamor.
    There was no organized Jewish community in Moscow when Volodya discovered that he was a Jew.
    Lenin had detested anti-Semitism. He thought it contrary to the socialist ideal of equality and believed, with Karl Marx, that the Jews would have assimilated and disappeared long since had it not been for the persecutions to which they were endlessly subjected. Indeed, he had approved the decree of the July 1918 Council of People’s Commissars condemning anti-Semitism as “fatal to the interests of the workers’ and the peasants’ revolution” and instructing all Soviet deputies “to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”
    But Jewish Communists had other notions about the future of Judaism in revolutionary Russia. At the June 1918 Second Conference of the Jewish Communist Sections, the Evsektsia, in Moscow, they resolved that the “Zionist Party plays a counterrevolutionary role” by hindering the penetration of Communist ideas among the toiling Jewish masses. They urged “the promulgation of a decree suspending all activities of the Zionist Party” and concluded that the “communal organs, which are the mainstay of all reactionary forces within the Jewish people, must be suppressed.”
    Lenin’s government immediately adopted the resolution. Two leaders of the Jewish Commissariat, Simon Dimanstein and Samuel Agursky—the former a onetime yeshiva student, rabbi, and Lubavitcher Hasid—were appointed to the task of tearing down the Jewish community.
    In June 1919 the government issued a decree closing all Jewish establishments. The decree carried the signatures of Samuel Agursky and Joseph Stalin. Most synagogues were padlocked or turned into Communist clubs, schools, dining halls; their possessions became the property of the Soviet state. There is a photograph of a pile of Torah scrolls from desecrated Russian synagogues, and it is difficult not to wonder if somewhere in that heap there might be the scroll whose completion was once celebrated with music and recorded in the photograph of Dubrovno Jews assembled before the Ark in their synagogue. Youngsters under the age of eighteen were forbidden to receive religious education outside their homes and required to attend classes in which communism would be taught. The Zionist movement, which had once numbered about three hundred thousand Jews, was banned. Religious officials—now regarded as “declassed members of society,” individuals without civil rights—found it difficult to secure housing, jobs, food rations, and the admission of their children to schools. Circumcision—illegal. Marriage and divorce laws—repealed. The Hebrew language—suppressed. Jews were even warned against kissing the Torah; it was unhygienic. A secular Yiddish culture was what the Jewish Communists wanted for the Jews of Soviet Russia. Yiddish elementary schools; Yiddish newspapers and journals; Yiddish to