One of the most prominent names in the Chabad underground in Soviet Russia was Rabbi Mandel Poterpas, who was one of the leaders of the “Great Escape” of Chabad Hasidim behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ of the Soviet Union in 1946.
He was arrested by Soviet intelligence in January 1947, and is seen here in a previously unpublished photograph. It should be noted that his cap was forcibly removed by the secret police.
On June 6, 1950, Major General Mikhail Poperka, the deputy minister of the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet secret police MGB – the Ministry of State Security – drafted an 11-page memo on the state of the ongoing investigation into the “Hasidim” case and sent it to Viktor Abkomov, Minister of State Security of the Soviet Union.
Handwritten “Top Secret,” the report summarized information gathered by the KGB. During his investigation of the “anti-Soviet Schneerson organization” through foreign agents, informants and investigations.
“An anti-Soviet center led by the ‘Tzadik Schneerson’ – short for the sixth Rabbi of Lubavitch, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, in Soviet documents – was established in New York by American intelligence under the guise of a Yeshiva, a European branch established in France, and all of this is connected to an anti-Soviet network branch within the Soviet Union. This, at least, is how the intelligence apparatus of the Soviet Union saw it,” the report states.
At the time he received this memo, Viktor Abkomov was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. A member of a younger generation of Communist Party staffs completely subordinate to Stalin.
He joined the secret police at the age of 24 in 1932 and rose through the ranks to become the top deputy of the notorious Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police and a close confidant of Stalin. In 1943, Abakumov was appointed head of the newly established SMERSH (Russian acronym for “Death to Spies”), Stalin’s particularly brutal wartime military counter-intelligence organization, and began reporting directly to Stalin. At no point would Abkomov report personal torture of his captors. After the war, in 1946, SMERSH merged with the secret police and Abakumov, until then one of Stalin’s favorites, was promoted to the head of the Ministry of State Security MGB.
In other words, the danger posed by the “followers”, a term used interchangeably with “Schnewarsons” in Soviet secret police documents, to the state security of the Soviet Union and perhaps to the fate of Lenin’s revolution itself, literally worried the highest levels of the Soviet government.
The Lavkomov report, presented below in its original form, focuses on the consequences of what is known today as the “Great Escape”, a sophisticated and dangerous operation conceived and carried out by Chabad followers to escape from the Soviet Union after World War II.
With the blessing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, beginning in the spring of 2006 and ending on Rosh Hashanah 2017, approximately 1,200 Chabad Chassidim purchased forged Polish citizenship documents and fled the Soviet Union through the Ukrainian border city of Emberg – today Lviv.
In the post-war era, the railway station of Lviv served as a gateway for the return of both real Poles (who fled to Russia from the Nazis) and fictitious ones – to Poland.
The last successful crossing took place on January 1, 1947 (9th of Tevet 5777), and then, as mentioned in the document and in more detail in the history of the “Great Escape”, the rest of the organizers of the operation were captured and arrested.
But the main focus of the MGB memo is a second, much less known attempt by Chabad to escape from the Soviet Union through Romania. The plan was attempted in December 1948, when four Hassidim – Moshe Haim Dubrovsky, Meir Younik, Yaakov Lefkebaker and Moshe Greenberg – left the city of Chernivtsi in Soviet Ukraine, less than 40 kilometers from the border, and fled to Romania.
The background: the rabbi against the communists
From the beginning of the Bolshevik war on religion, the sixth Rebbe, the Reitz of Lubavitch, led the Jewish resistance. For this work he was arrested in the summer of 1927 and initially sentenced to death. His sentence was first reduced to 10 years of hard labor, then to three years of exile, and finally, in the 13th century, to full release.
In October 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak was forced to leave the Soviet Union “but not before training many messengers whose influence was felt in the Soviet Union long after his departure.”
During the absolute hell of the 1930s, Chabad followers continued to risk their lives to maintain Torah and mitzvot life in the Soviet Union, as the Sixth Rebbe was accused. Many, including Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson – the father of the seventh Rebbe, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and until his arrest the chief rabbi of Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine – paid the price. Some were shot to death without trial, others languished in prison or labor camps in Siberia.
With the outbreak of World War II, a significant part of the Chabad community escaped the German onslaught and the fervor of the local collaborators by immigrating to Tashkent and Samarkand in Soviet Uzbekistan. There, together with tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and Poland, they restored Jewish life, opened yeshivas, built mikvahs and prayed together in the synagogue. Chabad followers not only took care of themselves but actively recruited Jewish children to study Torah, many of them for the first time in their lives. The children, who were also cared for materially, drew from the widest possible background, among them local Bukharians, Polish refugees and members of the Soviet Party.
This is how the memorandum to Abakumov describes this period: “According to Schneerson’s instructions, the Hasids increased their anti-Soviet activities and created illegal schools in the cities of Samarkand and Tashkent, where Jewish youths who fell under their influence studied. A religious and nationalist spirit.”
A group photo of some Chabad followers who fled the border from Lviv, in 2017. Photographed at the ‘Escape’ office in Krakow
The war years in Uzbekistan were by no means easy, as the secret police continued to operate, and adults and children died of starvation and disease. Nevertheless, it was a period of relative peace for the beleaguered followers of the Soviet Union.
However, with the end of World War II, it became clear that this situation would not last much longer. Then a rare opportunity to escape the Soviet Union arose for the first time.
The great escape from Lviv to Poland
Only a few months after the war, on July 6, 1945, the Soviet Union signed an agreement with the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland on population exchange. The Polish citizenship of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Lithuanians would be replaced by Soviet citizenship, while ethnic Poles and Polish Jews who now found themselves in the Soviet Union would be returned to Poland.
“A secret directive from December 1945 stated that Poles and Jews (that is, not Ukrainians and Belarusians) who lived in Polish territory until September 17, 1939, may return from the Soviet Union.”
This means that even eligible people who were formerly residents of the eastern half of Poland, which after the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was annexed to the Soviet Union (and is still part of Belarus), could unilaterally renounce their Soviet citizenship and return “home” to Poland.
Special joint Polish-Soviet committees were established to facilitate this return, and as 1946 progressed, increasing numbers of people were given permission to leave. Many traveled to Poland in separate carriages connected to regular trains.
Albert Kaganovich estimates that during 1946 about 147,000 Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union in this way. This may seem generous on Stalin’s part, but the truth was that the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, formerly known as the Lublin Committee, was a pro-Soviet puppet entity that Stalin used to bypass the Polish government-in-exile in his plan to turn post-war Poland into a communist satellite state. Whatever Stalin’s reasons for allowing Jews to leave, the fact remains that Polish repatriation represented a limited window of opportunity to leave the Soviet Union.
Hasids in Uzbekistan and other places of deportation throughout the Soviet Union lived side by side with Polish Jewish refugees during the war. Now the Polish Jews turned to Lviv to return to Poland, from where they could continue to Israel, the United States or other countries in the West.
As Soviet citizens, Chabad followers could not leave, but at the end of 1945 the idea of somehow taking advantage of this window percolated.
At the beginning of 1946, a 22-year-old yeshiva student named Label Mochkin arrived in Lviv to tour the city. With the help of his older brother, Shmuel (Mola) Mochkin, and former Latvian Jewish member of parliament Mordechai Dubin, who was in Moscow at the time, he connected with the chairman of the Jewish community in Lviv, who in turn opened doors necessary for the success of the operation.
The first trickle of followers arrived in Lviv in the spring of 1946 and slowly began to cross the border with the help of fake Polish passports. Your success encouraged others. As the months passed, more and more Hasidim came to Lviv, abandoning their jobs, their homes, their furniture, and any other possessions in favor of the opportunity to leave.
It was no longer a matter of purchasing a handful of fake passports, but hundreds, and a larger and more complex escape infrastructure had to be established. The leaders of the Hasidic underground learned to restore passports, arranged fake marriages, and of course bribed necessary officials – including those who worked at the train station and the officers of the local MGB.
Among the leaders of the Chabad underground who were arrested following the operation were Rabbi Mandel Poterpas – who was arrested on a train leaving Lviv in 1947 and released from the gulag in Siberia in 1956; Rabbi Yona Cohen, nicknamed “Pultaver” – arrested in 1948, died in the Gulag in 1949; Rabbi Mordechai Dubin – was arrested in 1948, and died in Soviet custody in 1957. He is not mentioned in this memo, but on the same train with Poterpas was Rabbi Shmuel Nutik, a beloved Hasidic teacher in the underground Chabad yeshiva throughout the Soviet Union, who perished in the Gulag at the beginning of the year 59.
The second attempt: the Chernivtsi-Romania plan
After the end of the Great Escape, a number of followers descended on the city of Chernivtsi in Soviet Ukraine, which before 1940 was part of Romania, and before that the regional capital of the Bukovina region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although it was now within the borders of the Soviet Union, Chernivtsi was still close to the border of Romania, and followers who were involved in the initial escape through Lviv – Moshe Haim Dubrovsky, Moshe Vyschatsky, Haim Zalman Kozliner, Asher Shashonkin and others – heard that it was possible to cross illegally into Romania from there.
Between February and April 1946, 22,307 Jews illegally emigrated from the Chernivtsi region to Romania, a process approved by Stalin himself and organized by the Soviet authorities.
It was Abakumov who, in October 1946, first alerted Stalin to the threat posed to Communism by “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and launched the post-war anti-Semitic campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans”, i.e. the Jews.
This dark period will lead to the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – the Jewish organization that Stalin established during the war to gather support for the Soviet cause and to raise necessary funds, whose members were arrested and shot after the war – and the prelude to the doctors’ plot, in which Jewish doctors were declared to have been part of a vast conspiracy to poison the Soviet leadership , whose development stopped only with the sudden death of Stalin in 1953.
In this period of madness, it was only natural that the MGB would once again target Chabad followers, a subversive group according to communist ideology as well as longstanding Soviet policy.
The “followers” affair was therefore an important part of the investigation of the “Jewish bourgeois nationalists” carried out by the Ukrainian MGB, who acted in accordance with the instructions they received from the divisions of the MGB of the Soviet Union in December – from 1949, and Order No. 2 /3/1692 Issued on January 7, 1950 by the Second Main Directorate of the MGB of the Soviet Union, the department in charge of domestic counter-espionage.
If Jews who walked through the fire to continue worshiping God as their ancestors did, through learning Torah and observing mitzvot, was an anti-Soviet act, then Chabad was indeed a threat to the regime.
In this sense, the Soviet security chiefs were absolutely right.