8 | OCTOBER 21 • 2021
analysis
Ida Nudel: An Inspiration
for Future Generations
T
he heroes of our generation are
slipping away. And unless you
were among the fortunate few to
have gone to meet them in the former
Soviet Union during the decades from
1970s to the 1990s, you probably don’t
know about those Jewish
heroes and heroines whose
actions defined moral
courage and stamina
in the face of relentless
government persecution.
But for those Americans
who did travel to the
USSR, meeting with Jewish
refuseniks, who were refused
the right to emigrate, had a profound
impact on them. Just ask anyone who ever
met Ida Nudel.
With her death in Jerusalem just before
Yom Kippur at age 90, another mega-
symbol of the Soviet Jewish emigration
movement has left us.
Instead of allowing Ida’s life to lapse
into forgetfulness, we must learn from her
because what she did in Moscow serves as
a model for generations.
Ida was a tiny woman who stood tall
against the Kremlin and the fearsome
KGB security apparatus empowered to
persecute and intimidate by any means
Jews intent on leaving the USSR.
What she did during her struggle for
a visa to emigrate makes her a symbol of
resistance for the ages.
While fighting for her own visa, she
championed the desperate situation of
refuseniks who had been arrested and
sentenced to prison and forced labor
camps for their emigration activity.
A ‘GUARDIAN ANGEL’
For the prisoners of Zion, she was their
“Guardian Angel,” their “Mama.”
Her efforts for them were often at
personal risk. She went on a hunger strike
to protest an arrest. She collected goods
for parcels she sent to prisoners filled with
goods we sent with Western tourists.
The packages she sent passed
inspection of prison guards and included
items like children’s gummy vitamins
(which appeared to be candy), white
chocolate, warm underwear and the 3-D
postcards the guards favored. She wrote
to them and their families, advocated
on their behalf to Soviet officials and
American congressmen who came to
Moscow to meet with refuseniks and
dissidents. Never did she let those
prisoners of Zion feel they were alone.
Finally, eight long years after she first
applied to emigrate, in 1978, still denied
the right to leave, she hung a sign in her
apartment reading “KGB, give me my
visa to Israel.” She was dragged away and,
like some of the Jewish prisoners she
was defending, sentenced to four years
of exile in the brutal reaches of Siberia.
The only woman in the barracks, she was
condemned to reside with the crudest,
roughest of Russian lowlife convicts,
sleeping with a knife under her pillow.
Never did we at the Union of Councils
for Soviet Jews let Ida Nudel think she
was alone.
We enlisted women’s groups and
congressional wives in her struggle.
We took her cause to the White House,
U.S. State Department and Congress.
We designated International Woman’s
Day as Ida Nudel Day and sent her
flowers by way of protest to the Soviet
embassy. When a refusenik who visited
her in Siberia brought back the report
that she was suffering in the Siberian
winter, I sent a tourist to Moscow with
my new sheepskin coat in his suitcase.
It went from Chicago to Moscow, and
from Moscow, it traveled thousands of
kilometers to Ida in the frozen steppes of
Siberia.
After 16 years of struggle, Ida Nudel
was finally given permission to leave
in 1987. She was one of the celebrity
refuseniks that Mikhail Gorbachev gave
as a gesture before his upcoming summit
with Ronald Reagan. Undersecretary
of State for Human Rights and
Humanitarian Affairs Ambassador
Richard Schifter’s eyes filled with tears
when she called from Jerusalem to tell
him, “I’m home.”
A refusenik pariah under relentless
KGB surveillance and intimidation, this
tiny woman exerted her moral freedom by
taking responsibility for doing good in a
country governed by evil. In doing so, she
earned the love and respect of the Soviet
Jewish Prisoners of Zion, as well as high-
powered names such as U.S. Secretary of
State George Shultz, actress Jane Fonda,
billionaire Armand Hammer and, of
course, those of us in the West and Israel
who met her and worked on her behalf.
May the courageous moral freedom
to exert responsibility even when
surrounded by evil be the legacy that
Ida Nudel bequeaths to all of us and our
children.
Pamela Braun Cohen was the national president of
the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ). She is
the author of “Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of
Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union.”
Pamela
Braun
Cohen
JNS
PURELY COMMENTARY
Ida Nudel
arriving in
Israel in
1987.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/ISRAEL GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE/JTA