10 | MAY 4 • 2023 

PURELY COMMENTARY

W

hen I read about the arrest 
of American Jewish Wall 
Street Journal reporter Evan 
Gershkovich in Russia on March 29, my 
mind went back to the 1980s. 
In July 1985, I went to visit Abe Stolar. 
Abe was well into his 70s. We bonded 
immediately, two American Jews, me 
listening to his stories 
intently, in his native 
Chicago accent. The strange 
thing is that I was not 
visiting Abe and his wife, 
Gita, in Chicago, the place of 
his birth, or in New Jersey, 
the place of my birth. I was 
visiting Abe in Moscow, the 
Soviet Union. 
Like many Russian Jews, Abe’s parents 
fled Czarist Russia. They arrived in 
Chicago a year before Abe was born. In 
1931, with the U.S. still suffering from 
the Depression, exacerbating a degree of 
communist revolutionary fervor, Abe’s 
parents decided to go back to the USSR. 
Within five years, Abe’s father was taken 
from their home by Stalin’s police (NKVD) 
during the infamous purges in which 
many Jews became victims. Abe’s father 
was never seen again. Despite being an 
American citizen, Abe saw no way back 
to Chicago. So much for the Beatles’ 1968 
sympathetic portrayal of the USSR.
In 1975, Abe, Gita and their son applied 
for exit visas. They received permission 
to leave, selling all their belongings. On 
July 19, their permission was revoked. The 
Stolars were detained just before boarding 
the plane, forced to return to their empty 
Moscow apartment, hopeless. 
I met Abe a decade later, almost to the 
day. He was clearly frustrated and desperate 
to leave, but he was jovial, friendly and 
welcoming. Two years later, I went back 
to Moscow and visited Abe again. He was 
more hopeful as he saw signs that things in 
the USSR were changing, but he was still 
an American citizen forcefully detained in 
Moscow. 

As soon as I heard of Evan Gershkovich’s 
arrest, I thought of Abe. Evan was arrested 
on charges of espionage by Russia’s Federal 
Security Bureau (FSB), the successor to the 
KGB and Stalin’s NKVD. It’s the first time 
Russia has accused a foreign journalist of 
espionage since the Cold War.
There are many parallels between Abe 
Stolar and Evan Gershkovich. Both are 
American Jews, both detained in Russia, 
both children of Russian-born Jews who 
emigrated to the U.S., and both went back 
to Russia as young men, albeit Evan went 
of his own accord in a professional capacity. 
He probably didn’t know about Abe Stolar 
and that there was a precedent for Russia 
detaining American-born Jews. 

REMINDER AT THIS YEAR’S SEDERS
Shortly after Evan’s arrest, Jews around the 
world were asked to set an extra seat for 
him symbolically at their Passover seder 
table. It’s interesting that leaving seats 
empty at the seder table was something 
done in the height of the movement to free 
Jews of the Soviet Union, the time when 
Abe Stolar first tried to leave and when 
Gershkovich’s parents actually left the 
USSR. 
Setting empty seats at a seder table 
is meaningful because Passover is the 
holiday during which we celebrate our 
freedom. Jews being detained, arrested, 
imprisoned as Jews (on trumped up 
charges) is evocative of the enslavement of 
Jews in Egypt. This creates awareness and 
is meaningful especially when the person 
for whom that seat is set is a Jew being 
forcefully detained. It builds solidarity but 
is unlikely to do anything on its own to 
effect a change in Russian policies or free 
someone who has been arrested. 
It’s clear that Russia is using Evan to 
retaliate or as leverage against the U.S, or 
both. Evan’s arrest will intimidate other 
Western journalists still reporting in Russia, 
making a black hole of already limited 
information coming out of Russia even 
deeper and darker. Perhaps Evan was not 
targeted as a Jew, but it’s now no longer 
unusual for Jews in Russia to be in the 
Kremlin’s crosshairs. 
Abe Stolar’s case became very personal 
to me. Especially after my adopted Soviet 
Jewish family was permitted to leave in 
1987, I stepped up my activism on his 
behalf, one of many doing so. When I 
read about Evan Gershkovich, something 
additional and personal struck and engaged 
me. Albeit some years after I graduated, 
Evan also graduated from Princeton 
High School, in the suburban New Jersey 
community in which I grew up and where 
my Soviet Jewry activities began. 
Not that I am a journalist as Evan is, 
but in my advocacy to free Jews from 

Jonathan 
Feldstein

essay

Russia is Not Healthy for Jews 
and Other Living Things

continued on page 12

Evan Gershkovich

From North to South —
The Bishops Have You Covered!

SERVING THE JEWISH COMMUNITY FOR OVER 30 YEARS!

