Reverse Diaspora

For Soviet Jews who emigrate to Israel, Vienna is the journey's most important way station. There they eagerly leave the crowded trains and planes that took them out of Russia, receive a quick briefing on their future by the Jewish Agency and board an El Al jet for the flight to the Promised Land. In the past two years, 44,446 emigrants have made that journey.

Vienna is also the way station on a reverse emigration, a considerably smaller and less-heralded diaspora of the disenchanted. Currently, 96 Soviet Jews for whom Israel did not live up to its promise are waiting there. They want to go back to the U.S.S.R., but have been told to wait for official approval of their re-entry visas. Some have been waiting in Vienna for 18 months; the most recent arrivals have been there for five. They huddle in a miserable tenement in Vienna's Malzgasse and grow increasingly desperate. Says Rachel Ostrovskaya, a dressmaker from Odessa: "We all make mistakes for sure, but now we want to go back home."

The expatriate Soviet Jews constitute a distinct and untypical minority. So far, only 132 Soviet Jews who have emigrated to Israel--less than one-third of 1 % of the total--have indicated a desire to return to their homeland. By comparison, 40% of American Jews who emigrate return to the U.S.

The wandering Jews of Vienna offer a catalogue of explanations for why they want to leave Israel. Some are simply naive; they were oversold by Israeli broadcasts or, more often, by stories passed along on the Soviet Jewish grapevine. Laments a young mother of two: "They said you didn't buy eggs in Israel. They simply lay about in the streets." Others are convinced that they had been lured to Israel as cannon fodder for its wars. "It's the fault of the American Jewish millionaires," says Tbilisi Shopkeeper Joseph Mamishva-lov. "They pay their money but want us to bear the brunt. A boil is good on somebody else's body."

More reasonable complaints include a shortage of jobs comparable to those that the Jews had in Russia, poor housing, inadequate cultural facilities and the easygoing permissiveness of life in modern secular Israel. Although most of the disenchanted emigrants are not religiously observant, they were shocked that a Jewish state would tolerate nudity in films and bikini-clad Sabra girls on beaches. They were also upset by the permissiveness of Israeli schools. Mamishvalov sums it up succinctly: "No discipline. Children shout. Teacher has skirts to here; boys in class look there. Teacher smokes. This is not education."

The emigrants' major disappointment, however, was the lack of warmth displayed by the Jewish community that they had come to embrace. "At home," said Roman Adzhubashvili, "someone would sometimes call us 'Jew' and not mean it kindly. In Israel it was always 'Russ, Russ' and a lot of teasing because we did not know the language yet." They were insulted by the ignorance of Israelis about living conditions in the Soviet Union. Remembers Misha Abramson, a lean, bent bakery worker from Riga: "Every half-hour they offered me a piece of white bread at the bakery in the Israeli town of Ashdod. 'Have a piece. Surely you didn't have white bread in Russia.' And 'Do you know what tomatoes are? Did you get butter at home?' As if we had been paupers!"

In Israel the emigrants suddenly sensed the loss of a double cocoon that had enfolded them. In the Soviet Union the inner layer was the comforting circle of their Jewish communities. The outer layer, even for Jews, was the paternalism of the Soviet state, which furnished everything from cheap concerts to free medical care. The result is that these emigrants dislike the democratic individualism of Israel. Says Joseph Elisakov, a student from Tbilisi: "Nobody who has been born and raised in the Soviet Union can ever live under capitalism."

Swindle. The returnees could have remained in Israel while waiting for their visas, but the Finnish embassy, which has handled Soviet affairs in Israel since Moscow broke off relations in 1967, promised them that the papers would be available in the Austrian capital. Soviet officials in Vienna, however, explain that the wait is long because local authorities in the U.S.S.R. first have to find housing and jobs for the returnees, and then decide if they should be accepted back. Neutral observers suspect that the long-suffering returnees are being used as ploys for propaganda purposes. Two weeks ago, for instance, the Lithuanian newspaper Sovietskaya Litva pointedly singled them out as "victims of the Zionist swindle" who "deprived themselves of all the advantages of life under socialism."

Jewish representatives in Vienna have shown as little concern for the former Israelis as the Russians have. The group's principal assistance has come from sympathetic Austrian officials, who granted them residence permits and working papers. Although several emigrants have earned enough money to move away from the shabby Malzgasse tenement, none have done so. All fear that they might lose contact with the group and not hear when the Soviet visas come through, as they inexplicably did two months ago for eleven other returnees. Thus they spend their idle hours on broken chairs and rickety boxes around half-cold stoves, wondering if they will ever leave Vienna, or whether they will eventually die in sorrowing suspension between two worlds.

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