Nadene Goldfoot
Eran Gershkovich is a Russian Jew whose parents left Russia in 1979 for the USA. He's been working in Russia for over 6 years, then arrested for being a spy. I bumped into many of those Russians of 1980 when I made aliyah to Israel and attended classes for 10 months in order to receive my Israeli teaching certificate, being I was a 22 year teacher from the States. We were in large classes with them in Haifa, re-training to be English teachers. There were loads of Russians and very few American teachers like ourselves.
Gershkovich's parents, Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich, separately fled the Soviet Union during a period of mass emigration in the wake of rumors that Jews were about to be exiled to Siberia, ending up in the United States in 1979 and eventually New York City, where they met.
Before, Jews could not present themselves as Jews in public. They could not study Hebrew and anything about Jewish people.
I notice that most articles about Eran leave out the fact that he is Jewish. So has TV. With Russian history involved, even present day Russia, this is important. It this omission to protect him?
On March 29, 2023, Gershkovich entered a restaurant in Yekaterinburg. His phone was turned off two hours later. Lawyers for the Journal were unable to locate him.
Gershkovich was detained by Russia's Federal Security Service under charges of espionage, marking the first time an American journalist has been arrested in Russia on charges of spying since the Cold War (1985-1991). According to NPR, a court, operating in closed session, ordered Gershkovich held until the end of May while investigations were ongoing. According to Kommersant, he was scheduled to be transferred to Lefortovo prison while awaiting trial. A conviction for espionage could carry a sentence of 20 years.
A Russian court rejected his appeal against his pre-trial detention on 18 April 2023. The court rejected his legal team's offer to free him on bail of 50 million roubles ($614,000) or put him under house arrest.
In 1967, the USSR broke diplomatic relations with Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War. During this time, popular discrimination against Soviet Jewry increased, led by an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign in the state-controlled mass media. By the end of the 1960s, Jewish cultural and religious life in the Soviet Union suffered from a strict policy of discrimination. This state-sponsored atheism persecution denied Jews the ethnic-cultural rights experienced by other Soviet ethnic groups. Only the Jews were denied.
The 1970s Soviet Union aliyah was the mass immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel after the Soviet Union lifted its ban on Jewish refusenik emigration in 1971. More than 150,000 Soviet Jews immigrated during this period, motivated variously by religious or ideological aspiration, economic opportunity, and a desire to escape anti-Semitic discrimination.
Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on 20 January 1948 in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. He's now 75.
His father, Boris Shcharansky, a journalist from a Zionist background who worked for an industrial journal, died in 1980, before Natan was freed, for Natan was a refusnik in prison.
My Hebrew teacher, Sarah in Haifa in 1980-81 carried on writing letters to this Jewish dissident in prison, trying to teach him Hebrew. He was a famous dissident: Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s. Sharansky currently serves as chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization.
This wave of immigration was followed two decades later by a larger aliyah at the end of the Soviet Union.
Resource:
https://nypost.com/2023/03/30/who-is-wsj-reporter-evan-gershkovich/
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