The Private Jewish War on Russia

THE angry Jewish youth watched the car pull away from the Soviet mission to the United Nations in New York last week. He accelerated his own auto, tailed the lone Russian into relatively secluded Central Park. At a red light, the youth got out, ran ahead of the foreigner, shouted obscenities at him and raised his fists. The Russian hurriedly locked his car doors. "I saw his face," the youth recalled later. "It was white with fear. When I saw how afraid I had made him, it made me afraid."

Dozens of similar scenes needlessly befouled relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The culprits were a tiny group of fanatics called the Jewish Defense League. Fomenting international tension is an avowed part of the league's strategy to underscore the plight of Soviet Jews (see THE WORLD). Hence the group pursued a campaign to "follow, question and harass" Soviet diplomats and to make their lives in the U.S. "miserable." Vowed one member of the radical-right religious group: "As long as the Jews can't walk securely in the Soviet Union, the Russians are not going to walk securely here."

Six-Inch Knife. Many did not. Young members of the J.D.L. tagged along as Russian women from the mission shopped in supermarkets, then heckled them at check-out counters. Others stayed on the heels of a tall diplomat, shouting in Russian: "Poshli domoi!" (Go home) and "Svoboda yevreyam!" (Freedom for Jews). The victim stared ahead, stalked into a Woolworth's and bought a soft drink. They followed, tossing out such juvenile insults as: "You can always tell a Russian by the yellow streak down his back." Some Russians tried a mild response. One told his tormentor: "This is not the way to protest." As he assailed a diplomat near the Soviet mission, J.D.L. Member Steve Lang, 19, got a lecture in return: "The Soviet Union does not persecute Jews. I fought against the fascists before you were born." When Lang and a partner trailed three Russians into a parking lot, one of them reached into a car trunk, pulled out a six-inch knife and brandished it.

The foolish, irresponsible bully-boy tactics drew justified cries of outrage from Russians. At the Soviet mission in New York, a diplomat complained that even Soviet schoolchildren were being disparaged by hecklers from a synagogue across the street. "Our Soviet people don't believe in God," he said, "but we respect religious buildings. Yet these people who say they believe in God climb on top of the synagogue and shout four-letter words at our children. The leaders of the synagogue say they don't approve, but they don't do anything. I simply do not believe that the United States authorities are unable to protect us. I saw on television how they acted at the Chicago convention--I know how the police can handle such a situation when they want to."

Rumpled Leader. A deliberate Soviet campaign to retaliate against Americans on the streets of Moscow tapered off last week as U.S. authorities at the local and federal levels began a serious --and belated--attempt to curb the J.D.L. But the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, was recalled to Moscow, seemingly to underline the Kremlin's displeasure with the U.S. Tension rose again when someone in a passing car hurled a brick through the Manhattan show window of Aeroflot, the Russian airline.

Aghast at the ease with which the J.D.L. tactics were affecting foreign relations, President Nixon expressed the "outrage of all decent and law-abiding Americans at criminal acts of violence against Soviet facilities." New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller said that the attacks could only produce retaliation against Jews in Russia rather than help them. New York Mayor John Lindsay ordered additional police assigned to Soviet installations. When a police strike curtailed available manpower, Lindsay asked for--and was promised --federal security personnel. The street at the Soviet mission was closed to all cars and unidentified pedestrians; unmarked police cars were sent to trail and protect Russian vehicles.

The league's acid-tongued leader, Rabbi Meir D. Kahane, 38, was arrested for failure to appear in New York City Criminal Court on a previous riot charge. Quickly freed on bail, Kahane weathered the crisis in rumpled clothes and carried a canvas overnight bag because "I never know where I will be sleeping at night." Treasury Department agents arrested two of the league's activists who had been indicted by a federal grand jury for using false names to buy rifles. A state grand jury is also considering indictments of J.D.L. members for past disorders, including a pipe-bomb explosion at the same Aeroflot office last November.

The Real Crime. The possibility of imprisonment did not seem to intimidate Kahane, who insisted: "If they think we are the kind of people who will be scared off by jail threats, then they don't know the psyche of the modern militant Jew." Plenty of other Jewish leaders have become more acquainted with Kahane's psyche than they like; he has been the object of continual criticism by major organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, ever since he started the league in 1968. The American Jewish Congress charged that Kahane's tactics "play into the hands of Soviet propaganda by diverting attention from the real crime--the repression of Jewish life in the U.S.S.R." His use of "contemptible violence only wins sympathy for the Kremlin."

Apart from his anti-Soviet campaign, Kahane is more basically obsessed by his fear of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. Kahane insists that his group is fighting for "Jewish survival." The threat, as he sees it, comes from the new black militancy and from those white liberals eager to help blacks at the expense of Jews. For this he has been called a racist and polemicist whose tactics can only promote, rather than check antiSemitism.

Jewish Panthers. Kahane dismisses most of his critics as "Scarsdale Jews" --suburban fat cats who do not know what it means to endure the "nightmare of chaos and crime and violence" in today's big cities. His constituency consists of less affluent Jews, many with close personal ties to refugees from Nazi persecution. A taut man who blinks rapidly as he talks -- but talks well -- Kahane holds a law degree. He no longer ministers to a congregation but still considers himself a "grassroots Jew." Almost echoing the Black Panthers, whom his league avidly opposes, Kahane says that his group cares most "about Jewish pride. Jews have the image of patsies. J.D.L. tries to instill a feeling that Jews can fight. It is an image we like to project, because every Jew will be safer for it. We may lose points with Jews, but we gain points with anti-Semites."

The league began in Brooklyn by escorting Jewish teachers to work as angry blacks milled about them during the New York ghetto-school disputes of 1968. Wearing berets and armed with baseball bats, the league later protected Jewish shopkeepers and elderly pedestrians against robbers. Many members have undergone rifle training at the organization's summer camp. The group has denied responsibility for any bombings of Soviet facilities in New York and Washington, but has not condemned them.

Useful Maniacs. Officials of the J.D.L. seem to juggle their membership claims almost daily, from a low of 8,000 to a high of 15,000. More reliable estimates put the number of dues payers ($18 a year) at closer to 1,000. Still fewer are the regular activists, and they are concentrated in New York. A Boston branch has been able to muster up to 30 members at a time to patrol high-crime areas in the Dorchester-Mattapan neighborhood, where elderly Jews have often been assaulted.

Despite the outcry from the long-established Jewish organizations, the Defense League probably stirs more covert sympathy among individual Jews than many leaders care to admit. "Kahane appeals to any individual who at any time in his life has had to quietly absorb an anti-Semitic insult," concedes one of the league's foes, Harvey Schechter, a West Coast official of the Anti-Defamation League. "These persons vicariously fight back through the bravado of the J.D.L." The idea is put more pointedly by Milton Zolatow, a Los Angeles advertising designer, who argues that "having a handful of maniacs like the J.D.L. gives the Jews a power they never had before."

Arthur Jacobs, general manager of Manhattan's Day-Jewish Journal, contends that a surprising number of young Orthodox and lower-middle-class Jews support the J.D.L. There is also a certain grudging admiration on the part of some affluent Jews, notes the Anti-Defamation League's Nat Belth, who points out: "They say things like 'I wouldn't do it myself, but I'm glad there are some hooligans around.' " But a more typical Jewish reaction is that of Author Elie Wiesel, who senses a new awakening and militancy on the part of Jews but also declares: "I can't see harassing an old lady in a supermarket or an old man in the street, no matter what the motives."

Kahane and his followers deal in emotions, attempting to stir fear as well as militancy. Their motto "Never again" refers to the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Kahane denies that his philosophy is an eye for an eye. It is "two eyes for one," he says, and slogans in his headquarters declare: "Two Russians for every Jew." Soon he will test his appeal on a far broader scale. He plans to move to Israel and organize an international Jewish Defense League.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.