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JTA — As a newly arrived American trade instructor at a Moscow public college in 1974, David Harris was discreetly handed a small piece of paper by a younger woman passing him within the hallway.
“I clenched it in my fist, and opened it in a stall within the toilet,” recalled the highest government of the American Jewish Committee, who closed out a 32-year tenure as CEO on the finish of final month. “The notice was in English, and stated one thing like ‘David Harris, I really feel that you just’re Jewish. My household is refuseniks, would you meet with us?’”
Till that transient, wordless encounter, Harris, who was 25 on the time, had little involvement with the budding Soviet Jewry motion. Rising up in Manhattan as a toddler of Holocaust survivors in a secular Jewish dwelling, he had attended a number of rallies for Soviet Jews out of curiosity. But it surely was solely after being chosen as considered one of six Individuals to show in Russia, by way of an American Subject Service-sponsored program at a second of detente, that he got here to know the depth of the plight of Jews unable to specific their Judaism or go away the USSR — and start to grapple along with his personal Jewish id.
Harris was in a novel place to assist. The one American educating at Moscow’s Public Faculty 45, he was fluent in Russian. Although he understood that contact with refuseniks was harmful, he felt (wrongly, it turned out) that his American passport supplied safety.
He confirmed up one night time on the woman’s dwelling, met her mother and father and heard how an software to to migrate to Israel resulted in misplaced jobs or a reassignment to menial duties for them and their refusenik associates. “They have been caught and turned to an American as a lifeline,” Harris stated, including that the assembly led to extra college students reaching out to him and extra nights assembly extra refuseniks. “I used to be off to the races.”
Harris’s encounter with Soviet Jewish refuseniks motivated him to embark on what he not too long ago described as “my lifelong mission — to help Jews at risk worldwide, assist Israel’s quest for peace and safety, fight antisemitism, and defend democratic values in opposition to the unconventional proper and the totalitarian left.”
As he ready to step down after 32 years, Harris not too long ago spoke to JTA in regards to the seminal expertise that formed him and different Jewish leaders of his era — the Soviet Jewry motion — and the way the widespread function it represented could now not be accessible for a polarized Jewish group.
Harris additionally spoke candidly about how the refusenik period formed his personal Jewish id, and what he got here to study himself.
“I used to be robbed, or robbed myself, of my Jewish heritage,” he stated. “I started to find that we’re the heirs and guardians of maybe essentially the most extraordinary civilization in human historical past. Why would I stroll away? So I embraced it.”
Shimon Peres (left) shakes palms with AJC Govt Director David Harris throughout a gathering in Israel on this undated picture. (Olivier Fitoussi/AJC)
Rep. Ted Deutch, the seven-term Democratic congressman from Florida who will succeed Harris, is inheriting an AJC whose mission and repute have been fortified and expanded throughout the three-decade tenure of a frontrunner whose title has in some ways change into synonymous with the group.
At a tribute to Harris held in New York in June at the newest annual AJC International Discussion board, a number of dignitaries cited Shimon Peres’s description of Harris as “the overseas minister of the Jewish individuals.” Below Harris, the AJC established robust relations with governments in Europe, South America and Asia as an trustworthy dealer, and pioneered quiet engagement within the Arab world lengthy earlier than the Abraham Accords.
Six years in the past, the group expanded its interfaith work by partnering with the Islamic Society of North America to create the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, which promotes coalitions countering antisemitic and anti-Muslim fundamentalism. As well as, amongst Jewish organizations, the AJC prides itself, as Harris has written, as “actually centrist and unbiased,” regardless of criticism from each the correct and the left for not taking sides.
“Possibly it’s as a result of I’ve seen so many coverage points crying out for nuance, solely to find that the very phrase itself is seen as anathema by many,” Harris wrote in the identical essay, written shortly after the November 2016 presidential election.
David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee (in gentle blue tie), and Muslim World League Secretary Common Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa (with white head-covering) lead a joint go to of Muslims and Jews to Auschwitz, January 23, 2020. (Courtesy American Jewish Committee/ JTA)
A lot of his personal discuss on the tribute centered on how his expertise in Moscow stirred him to take up the reason for Soviet Jewry.
The Jews he was assembly there needed to supply him data “about an uncle or cousin or buddy” within the free world who may be capable to assist them go away. They wanted blue denims to promote on the black market, Hebrew language books to review, a Star of David or any Jewish merchandise to put on or show. Most of all, “they needed the world to know they exist.”
In an interview, Harris vividly recalled the scene he witnessed that fall on Simchat Torah at Moscow’s Nice Choral Synagogue. 1000’s of individuals, a lot of them younger, crammed the road. They have been celebrating a vacation they knew little about aside from that it was a connection to Israel and to a historical past and heritage they longed to be part of. Defying arrest, some held indicators saying “Let Us Go House, To Israel.”
Harris had by no means celebrated Simchat Torah, however he was deeply moved. “Once I noticed their pleasure,” he stated, “I sensed that the Kremlin had didn’t quell their Jewish spirit. And I cried. My life modified that day. I grew to become a witness.”
Ladies refuseniks and their kids, Moscow, Ovrazhki, 1979. (Courtesy of Keep in mind & Save)
He was turning into a dedicated activist, too. In December 1974, three months after his arrival in Russia, Harris was detained by authorities one Shabbat. After being held for a number of days in detention, he was placed on a airplane and despatched to Helsinki. Alone in a chilly, unfamiliar setting, Harris grappled along with his previous, thought-about his current and future, and got here away impressed to vary the course of his life.
“I hadn’t gone to Moscow to be an infiltrator or Jewish undercover agent,” he defined, noting that he had been on an academic path that might result in his doctorate from the London Faculty of Economics. He had deliberate a profession in diplomacy, imagining himself sometime as US ambassador to Moscow. “However I used to be on fireplace. I spotted I used to be one of many few residing witnesses to an unfolding cultural genocide of the Jewish individuals in my lifetime. I requested myself what was it that I wanted to study from these courageous refuseniks I had met?”
After a brief keep in Helsinki, Harris sought and was given a job at HIAS, the Jewish immigration company. Along with his Russian language experience, he labored for a number of years in Rome and Vienna with Soviet Jewish emigrants, greeting just about each group upon their arrival. In 1979, again in America, Harris joined AJC. He says he was drawn to the legacy establishment, based in 1906, for its dedication “to guard Jews in every single place and to guard democratic values for all.”
Over the following 11 years, apart from a three-year stint with the Nationwide Convention on Soviet Jewry (1981-84), he labored at AJC headquarters in New York and in its Washington workplace, which he headed from 1987 to 1990. The spotlight of that interval got here in 1987, when he labored with Natan Sharansky, the hero and image of the Soviet Jewry motion. Freed in 1986 after greater than 9 years in a Soviet gulag, essentially the most well-known refusenik got here to the USA and goaded a reluctant American Jewish institution to carry a serious Soviet Jewry rally in Washington, DC, on the eve of Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev’s scheduled White Home assembly with President Ronald Reagan in December 1987.
Members within the Soviet Jewry rally maintain indicators excessive as they march by way of a Washington avenue Sunday, December 6, 1987. (AP Picture/Ira Schwarz)
Sharansky ignored issues that holding a serious outside rally within the winter in DC could be futile and embarrassing to the trigger. Harris, tasked as nationwide coordinator of the mammoth endeavor, stated the previous refusenik was its “driving drive and inspiration. Nobody might say no to him.”
Ultimately, an estimated 250,000 protesters gathered close to the US Capitol on December 6, a freezing Sunday, for what’s believed to be the biggest Jewish rally ever held in the USA. Coupled with bipartisan political stress from Washington, the rally — a highpoint after years of grassroots advocacy — was a key issue within the Kremlin’s widening the door of Jewish emigration. Over the following a number of years, one million Jews and their households left the Soviet Union. Most immigrated to Israel; many got here to America.
Harris was joyful along with his job in Washington, however a disaster in management on the helm of AJC quickly rocketed his profession.
On the eve of Mikhail Gorbachev’s first go to to the US in 1987, 250,000 activists marched on Washington DC to demand freedom for Soviet Jewry. (Courtesy of the Nationwide Convention on Soviet Jewry)
In the summertime of 1990, Ira Silverman, the extremely revered 45-year-old government vice chairman of AJC, was pressured to step down, battling an sickness that might take his life a yr later. In an interview with The New York Instances on leaving his prime put up after solely two years, Silverman stated AJC was “struggling for its well being and I’m… struggling for mine. That partnership isn’t as robust as what’s wanted.”
He was referring to a sequence of main monetary and restructuring issues at AJC, triggered partially by six adjustments on the group’s helm within the previous decade.
Desperate to discover a successor for Silverman who might restore AJC’s repute as a frontrunner in its discipline, the board reached out to Harris. Mockingly, one of many causes Harris joined AJC within the first place was as a result of he was so impressed with Silverman, whom he had first met whereas working at HIAS in Europe. “I needed to be him,” Harris stated.
Although flattered by the New York provide, Harris frightened he didn’t have the required abilities in high-level inside administration, fundraising and budgeting.
“I didn’t imagine in myself” for the highest AJC job, Harris stated.
Steven Bayme, who labored intently with Harris for greater than 30 years as director of up to date Jewish life, recalled that at the moment the company was floundering financially — 60 of its 176 positions had been eradicated that yr. And with the extremely succesful Silverman too unwell to steer, morale was low.
From left: AJC CEO David Harris, Samantha Energy, Danny Danon, Ban Ki-moon, John Kerry, Isaac Herzog and Mike Herzog on the UN on November 11, 2015. (Courtesy Leo Sorrel)
When Harris lastly was satisfied by lay leaders to take the helm within the fall of 1990, he got down to make AJC the Jewish international establishment it has change into, establishing workplaces on each continent besides Antarctica. He additionally made pro-Israel advocacy a major aim. Based by largely German-Jewish grandees involved about pogroms concentrating on Jews in Japanese Europe, the AJC was, actually, a latecomer to the Zionist trigger, not in favor of a Jewish state till quickly after it grew to become a actuality.
“He took us out of the woods,” Bayme stated, “from essentially the most assimilationist of Jewish companies to at least one that represents all the Jewish individuals.”
Wanting again, Harris notes that American Jewry is in a really totally different place than it was in 1990. The group was “sturdier, extra linked” then, Harris stated, referring to the rallying impression of the Soviet Jewry motion and stronger and wider assist for Israel and consensus round US-Israel relations.
“There isn’t a overarching, unifying difficulty at this time,” he stated. Israel has change into a divisive subject, and with rising assimilation, there may be “a disturbingly giant variety of American Jews who really feel disconnected from their Jewish id,” as he wrote in a 2021 essay.
And whereas there may be shared concern about rising antisemitism in the USA, the political polarization between left and proper retains Jews from agreeing on who’s accountable and the right way to reply, he stated.
Nonetheless, Harris is optimistic in regards to the future, suggesting {that a} rebirth is happening for these Jews who select to interact. He stated that extra younger Jews determine with Israel than is usually thought – about 75% of millennials, in response to a latest examine sponsored by the AJC.
“Sadly, they usually will not be outspoken about their assist for Israel, frightened of criticism on campus or on social media,” he stated.
On the June tribute, Harris expressed gratitude to his household, his predecessors, workers and lay leaders — and the younger Israelis within the Israel Protection Forces.
Then he returned, as soon as once more, to the Soviet Jews he met nearly a half-century in the past.
“They, not like me rising up in New York, paid a heavy value for eager to be Jewish,” Harris stated.
In a second of reflection throughout considered one of our conversations, Harris revisited the non-public disaster he endured as a younger man, alone in Helsinki, within the days after he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Because the son of two Holocaust survivors, “I had all the time requested myself what I’d do if I used to be in Europe in World Conflict II,” he stated. “And I believed, ‘Okay, David, your check is what do you do now in 1974.’”
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