Fred Klein Interviewed by Israel Rubin and Carol Zuckert February 23, 1999 Place of Interview: Fred Klein's Office, Episcopal Community Services PAGE 2 The Soviet Union and its successors have never recognized the Jews as refugees to this day. At the time the vehicle was that they were granted permission to leave in order to join relatives in Israel, if they had relatives in Israel. They would depart from Moscow to Vienna. The intent was that in Vienna they would then board an El Al flight to Israel. But a substantial number of Jewish refugees, when they arrived in Vienna, said "We want to go to the United States or Canada or something like that. " In which case they were sent to refugee camps in Italy. Some of Lou Pozez's that he had met ended up in refugee camps in Italy. Lou, at about the same time, became interested in helping them come to Tucson. Q: What year was that? A: It would have been about 1990. And about the same time, a local Jewish physician, Dr. Charles Gannon, his wife and daughter, Karen and Alysson, became very interested in Jews in the Soviet Union. The daughter had traveled back and met some Jews in Ukraine and wanted to help them come to here. So as a result and one other circumstance, a man by the name of Henry Morganstern, who had come to the United States as a refugee after the Second World War and whose family had come from the former Soviet Union, made contact with relatives of his in what is now Moldova. Henry also wanted to assist relatives. We had, therefore, a group of people who had an interest in seeing people come to Tucson. We were able to get a resettlement program off the ground. At Jewish Family and Children's Service they decided, I think wisely, that it would be helpful to have staff who were specialized in working with refugees. They hired a former refugee, Roza Sinikhovich, to direct refugee resettlement and hired their first case manager, a young man Fred Klein by the name of Sergei Drobarn, who was not Jewish but spoke Russian. Q: We are still in 1990? A: Yes. At that point I was co?chair of the resettlement oversight committee. Q: As a volunteer? A: Yes, as a volunteer. Q: Were you still working at Catholic Social Services? A: I was no longer working with Catholic Social Services. I was simply working as a volunteer in refugee resettlement and interested in helping refugees, especially interested in Jewish refugees. From my point of view, this was a really historic opportunity. In 1976, 1 had taken a trip with my younger brother to Europe. One of the things we had wanted to do was to go to the town we understood that Simon Klein had come from in Germany. A little hamlet called Kurtzenheim. In Kurtzenheim, if that was in fact where he had come from, the obituaries at the time of his death and family lores had said that's where he had come from. Kurtzenheim was a very difficult place to get to because it was very out of the way, a very tiny village. When we finally arrived, there was obviously no Jewish presence there. It was a rural farming community. There was one house of worship and it was at that time a church. It was of a very peculiar construction. It was not a normal cross type construction of a Christian church but rather constructed in either a round or a pentagon shape so that it could conceivable at one time been a synagogue. There was no evidence of Jewish presence there. Of course in much of Germany, all that you could find of the Jewish presence is the names of streets. It was very apparent, something that really hadn't struck me the same way as from a historical standpoint until I was in there. We were in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands. It was very apparent that the "final solution" had been very successful and that for all intents and purposes the Jewish presence in Europe had been wiped out. The only real substantial remnant of European Jewry was that which was remaining in the Soviet Union. So here were two interesting coincidences. One was an opportunity to help the last surviving remnants of European Jewry. One of the reasons I had become involved in assisting refugees apart from the family history, it was in the late 1970s, there were a number of incidents involving, not Jewish refugees but Southeast Asian refugees. There were a few incidents of refugees escaping by boat from Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia and others forcibly driven off to death by starvation, etc. There was also an incident in Thailand where there were 40,000 Cambodian refugees who fled after the Vietnamese had invaded and pushed Pol Pot forces to the Thai/Cambodian border. Many people fled all the way across the border. The Thai Government, much the like the Governments of Europe and the Americans in the 1930s, did not want the refugees to be dumped on their shores. So they did something reminiscent of what happened in the 1930s. They had at gunpoint 40,000 Cambodian refugees and bussed them to a point on the border which was actually a cliff and forced to walk to the cliff through a mine field and back into Cambodia. The incident was reported by the media. It didn't attract a lot of public consciousness. My sense at the time was that there was nothing I could do about the holocaust because I was born in 1936. But to see this mentality repeated over there and after all the talk about "never again." It was so reminiscent of the St. Louis ship and all the other incidents that occurred to me from the 1930s and 1940s. I told my wife that I didn't think that I could live with myself if I didn't in some small way participate in alleviating some of these situations. She, for her own reasons, wanted to help the refugees. She is not Jewish, but Catholic. So when it also became an issue, at Jewish Family and Children's Services there was that emotional connection as well. Nobody at the time in the Jewish community had been very much involved locally in Jewish resettlement so I was a source of technical expertise. Q: Was it the Sare family that was the first family from the former Soviet Union? A: Actually, the first individual group that came was before there was a resettlement department set up and before there was an "Operation Exodus. " There was a single refugee from the Ukraine who was an acquaintance of the Gannon family that I had mentioned. Then, in the beginning of 1990, the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, HIAS, and the Council of Jewish Federations had almost all the refugees from what was then the Soviet Union, come into New York City. New York was getting swamped. The Council of Jewish Federations prepared a national "Operation Exodus" and asked communities throughout the country to either contribute financially or to contribute in the sense of Fred Klein resettlement or both. It was only after this appeal from the Council of Jewish Federations that the local Jewish Federations decided to become involved and inaugurated an "Operation Exodus." I developed a fund raising campaign. Out of the fund raising campaign, I would normally send a substantial amount of money to the Council of Jewish Federations for national resettlement in Israel. I collected well over a million dollars in that particular campaign. Q: This also was in 1990? A: Yes. They were also able to segregate a certain amount to fund a settlement to designate Jewish Family and Children's Service to act as the social service agency for that resettlement activity. Thereafter, I believe the first families to come were out of Italy through the contacts that Lou Pozez had made. Q: Who debated the issue of the Jews going to Israel? A: I think rather than saying it had been debated, is that the plea from the Council of Jewish Federations took precedence. There was and still is considered, you know, the term that the Israelis use or the Hebrew term that they use for refugees who resettle outside of Israel. It is not a very complimentary term. I am trying to remember what is the word. There still are people in the community, some very impartial people, who feel that Jews from the former Soviet Union should have been and should be resettled in Israel, whether or not they have relatives in Israel. There are also a number of people in the Jewish community, locally, who believe then and still believe that the Jewish refugees coming from the former Soviet Union are not really Jewish. There are those who feel as much as a substantial population of Americans generally do that we shouldn't be allowing more immigrants in. We should tend to our own problems before we deal with those of people from outside the United States. And there are some who have had bad feelings toward and stereotypical as we are Jews from the former Soviet Union. So you have a whole range of feelings. I can't say that it abated but there was a significant influential group within the local community spearheaded by Lou and Shel Pozez and their wives, who made it possible for the settlements to take place in Tucson. Q: How much Judaism was retained by the refugees? A: I would say at varying levels and degrees. We had particularly good retention among older members of the Jewish community. Q: By older what do you mean? A: Those born prior to World War 11. Sometimes their children spoke Yiddish. You understand that it for a portion of the time in the Soviet Union it was against the law to teach Yiddish. The Yiddish institution at one point was banned. Even retaining anything Yiddish, that is something. In some families you have artifacts. For example, we had one family arrive and the family had retained a menorah. They did not know what it was for but they knew that it had something to do with their Jewish background. They always identified themselves as Jewish and were very upset when they came here and local residents said, "Oh you are Russian. " They had never been identified as Russian in the Soviet Union and, in fact, had been treated as a Jewish nationality. In some cases we had, I would say among the Ashkenazi Jews, those who were best educated and had of course accepted atheism as the state religion. Some of them had tried and at various points, had joined the Communist party in order to obtain good positions. Virtually all of them, even if they didn't join the Communist Party, had been members of Komsomol, the young communist league otherwise they couldn't have gotten into institutions of higher education. There was a universal draft for males and those who went into the army universally underwent hazing of one kind or another because they were identified as Jews. I remember one refugee whose back had been carved up with knives by Soviet soldiers as part of his initiation into the army because he was a Jew. Obviously some Jews didn't survive these hazings. Some members of the Ashkenazi community became interested after "Glasnost" and particularly when Chasidim went over and set up Jewish institutions. Jewish organizations were set up in the Soviet Union and some of them became involved and groups were publishing information about Jewish culture which often was more acceptable to talk about than Jewish religion. Some became involved in synagogues that were set up. Often they would send their children to schools to learn about Judaism and learn Hebrew. There generally was a great deal of curiosity about their Jewish roots because access to the information has been suppressed for so long. Q: Were they from a particular part of the former USSR, the Ashkenazi's? A: The Ashkenazi were spread out throughout the Soviet Union because, although originally they were settled mostly in the Pale in the western portion of the Soviet Union during the World War II many of them fled the Nazi occupation and they often were resettled in the far east. Q: Like Uzbekistan? A: Yes. Then, of course, after World War II, Stalin had a policy of settling Russian speakers in areas where the majority population did not speak Russian. It's part of the Russian imperialist technique that was used to maintain control. Of course in the Baltic countries most of the Jewish population was exterminated so a lot of Jews who entered the Baltic countries were Jews who had originally been from Ukraine or Belorus and other areas. They had moved out to the far east during World War 11 and then moved back. This, of course, is not counting the many Jews who were in the Soviet army or among the partisans. The casualty percentages and the rate of enlistment among Jews in the Soviet army was much higher than any other ethnic group. Of course, that information was suppressed. The war mongering anti?semites' propaganda line was that Jews would never enlist in the army. You often find that older Jewish refugees when they come here and get off the plane wear their military medals. They are very proud. One of the things that the Jewish war veterans in America did was to allow these Soviet veterans, if they wished, to become members of the Jewish War Veterans here. They really appreciated tremendously because they couldn't understand why they weren't entitled to Veterans' pensions in the United States. The Soviet Union had always told them that if it hadn't been for the Soviet army, the whole western civilization would have fallen. They couldn't understand why the U.S. Government didn't recognize their participation in the army. Q: Tell us more please. A: Well, let me also mention that there are, you know, the Ashkenazi. The further away you got from Moscow, the more leniency there was in terms of religious practice. Among other Jewish ethnic groups, we found that often there was a retention of Jewishness, Jewish customs and religion, and that people at their peril had retained and continued to wear yarmulkas. They knew Jewish ceremonies but the Ashkenazi didn't regard them as Jews. These people, for example, the mountain Jews, the Bukhara Jews of central Asia who were of Persian origin who had settled in the area beginning in the third century. They had long roots in the Jewish community but the Ashkenazi believed that if somebody didn't speak Yiddish then they weren't Jewish. Q: Do we have any non?Ashkenazi Jews in Tucson. A: We do. Some of them spoke a dialect of Hebrew and Farsi, they regarded as much a Jewish language as the Ashkenazi regard Yiddish. Q: Did we have 1,000 Jews here in Tucson? A: About 1,000 individuals. Among the 1,000, obviously there are some people who never identified themselves as Jews but had intermarried with people who were identified as Jewish nationals. Q: Any idea of numbers? A: Of those who were intermarried? I would guess, it's not a majority, certainly, it's maybe 20 percent. It's hard to say. Q: And the Ashkenazi, any idea of the numbers? A: The majority of those who have come are Ashkenazi. They had more money generally and better education. The people who retained the religious practice were never allowed to enter the institutions of higher learning. So those are the people who tend to be coming out now and one of the ironies is that among the Ashkenazi refugees here, you will sometimes hear them say, "Oh, all the real Jews have come out. The people who are coming out now are not real Jews. " But the people at the bottom of the totem pole may well be those who retained the most in terms of religious practice. To the extent that scholarships are available to them, most of the families who identify themselves as Jews would like to send their children to the Jewish day school for two reasons. Whether they identify with Jewish religion or not, they identify with the value of education which is one of the values they retained from their Jewish background. They are aware that the quality of education available at the Tucson Hebrew Academy tends to be better than the general level of education at Tucson Unified District 1. Moreover, they understand that in a capitalist society if you pay for something it's likely to be more valuable than it you don't pay for it. Some of them are interested because they want their children to learn about Judaism and to learn Hebrew. Some of them had started their children in Jewish day schools in the former Soviet Union and wanted them to continue that education. CONCLUSION Return to the New Americans Oral Histories homepage