During these years, offices, factories, public organizations, and even city streets were crawling with secret agents of Stalin’s security services. This was no secret to anyone. Still, Kaminsky occasionally acted carelessly, openly reading Hebrew newspapers in public transport. Investigators suspected that the calm life of a Moscow doctor was merely a cover for underground activity.

In Yosef Bentsionovich’s notebook, found during the search, the NKVD discovered names that interested them: Baazov and Kugel. Kaminsky explained that he had known them for several years but was unaware of their political beliefs. They also found a manuscript that “tendentiously” portrayed a bleak picture of the people’s condition in the Soviet Union. This document especially interested the security services. “For what purpose did you write this manuscript?” “I wrote it in a state of emotional frustration, without any specific intent.” However, the investigators had reliable sources indicating that the Moscow doctor had not written the text just for himself, but with the intention of publishing it in Palestine.

The document stated that, due to the inept economic policies of the Bolsheviks, Soviet citizens faced nothing but extinction. The mass famine that swept across the Ukrainian SSR, the Volga region, the Caucasus, Siberia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in 1932–1933 illustrated the severity of the crisis. In his manuscript, Kaminsky also addressed the flourishing antisemitism—not only at the street level but also among high-ranking officials. Another so-called “victory” of the Soviet regime, which preached internationalism while in reality pitting the different peoples of the “red empire” against one another, turned out to be an illusion. Yosef Bentsionovich also criticized the “peculiar regime” built on the dictatorship of a single party that had completely banned civic life in the country.

According to the investigation, Dr. Kaminsky had also contributed to the publication of an illegal Zionist information bulletin distributed across Soviet cities by the “Merkaz” – the central committee of the underground Zionist organization. At first, the doctor denied this as well during questioning. He claimed he had only taken the newspaper Davar for his own needs and made Russian-language summaries for friends – “After all, every Jew is interested in what’s happening in Palestine!”

By late October 1934, the secret police were still trying to extract testimony from Kaminsky. During an interrogation on October 21, 1934, Yosef Bentsionovich admitted that he considered it desirable for a Zionist organization to be established in the USSR—one that would assist Jews in emigrating to Palestine. However, he insisted that such a structure did not exist: “There is no Zionist organization in the USSR… I’ve heard that in some cities there are a handful of people with similar views, but they are not organizationally connected.”

On November 16, 1934, nerves began to fray at the NKVD’s Main Directorate of State Security, which was under pressure to deliver arrests. “Are you a member of an organization calling itself ‘Algemeyn-Zion’?” the investigator pressed. Yosef Bentsionovich held his ground: “I cannot add anything to my previous testimony. I have never been part of the Central Committee of ‘Algemeyn-Zion.’” “Were you with Boris Deksler and Sasha Baazov at the Hotel National?” The agents were remarkably well-informed about the movements of the arrested doctor. “I do not recall any such occasion of being at the Hotel National with Deksler and Baazov,” Kaminsky replied.

Detention in Butyrka prison was harsh. His glasses were confiscated, leaving him effectively blind; he suffered from severe gout and sharp heart pain—Kaminsky had a heart defect. His wife, Zinaida Georgievna, bombarded the NKVD with requests to allow her and their daughter Esther to visit him and to take into account his deteriorating health. All appeals were in vain—the secret police were after human lives.

In a statement submitted to the NKVD’s investigative division on December 16, 1934, the doctor wrote that he had been forced to sign his previous protocol at 3:30 a.m., when he was no longer thinking clearly. “I consider it my duty to state that the term ‘organization’ was wrongly used by me, as what I described was an unorganized movement… not fitting the definition of an organization.” All political prisoners knew that being accused of participation in an “organization” meant a harsher sentence.

After five months of night interrogations and various forms of abuse, Yosef Bentsionovich was forced to sign a protocol in which he confessed to participating in the Zionist movement. Kaminsky testified that no later than spring 1933, at the invitation of Hebrew writer Avraham Krivoruchko-Kariv—who had emigrated to Palestine—or perhaps another Zionist, he attended a meeting with a stranger. Kaminsky had known Krivoruchko from their time in HeHalutz. The meeting was intended to discuss serious matters—the future of the Zionist movement in the Soviet Union.

The stranger turned out to be Moisey Yekhilevich Bronshtein-Lempert, a member of the Moscow gdud (battalion) of the Hashomer Hatzair organization, who had heard of Kaminsky’s views. According to Kaminsky, Bronshtein proposed that he assist in helping exiled and imprisoned Zionists.

A man of strong convictions, deeply committed to the struggle for the future of the Jewish people, Kaminsky immediately agreed.

Moisey Bronshtein introduced Yosef Bentsionovich to another comrade—Viktor Rafailovich Kugel. Viktor Kugel was a printing press specialist and worked at one of Moscow’s printing houses. He had worked for the journal Theatre and Art, and also managed the publishing operations for the magazines Satirikon and Blue Journal. A critical task was entrusted to Viktor Kugel and Yosef Kaminsky. At a secret apartment used by the activists, they were met by Yosef Rosen, a representative of the Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) in Russia, who handed over 2,000 rubles to assist the persecuted.

Shortly afterward, another person joined the underground—“Sasha” from the Zionist Labor Party Tzeirei Zion. No one knew his real name. The group met in safe apartments, trying to establish contact with Jewish national movement activists who were still at large. During one of these meetings, the idea emerged to write and vote on a memorandum about the condition of Jews in the USSR, to inform Zionist organizations in Palestine. The memorandum was written in Hebrew by Moshe Bronshtein, and after his sudden death, Yosef Bentsionovich translated it into Russian and edited the text stylistically. That memorandum was the two-page document found in Kaminsky’s possession during the search. According to Kaminsky, one copy of the text was sent to Palestine by the little-known “Sasha,” while the drafts remained with him.

After Moisey Bronshtein’s death, underground meetings were held in the apartments of Yosef Kaminsky and Viktor Kugel. At one of the gatherings, the Zionists decided to publish a bulletin. Yosef Kaminsky proposed the name Al ha-Mishmar (“On Guard”), and “Sasha” came up with the tagline: “United Merkaz of Zionist Organizations in the USSR.” “From that moment on,” Kaminsky signed in the interrogation protocol, “we effectively took on the role of the Merkaz.” Yosef Bentsionovich personally began translating articles into Russian from Hebrew newspapers published under the British Mandate in Palestine for the bulletin.

In 1934, the group was approached by a religious Jew, Boris Moiseyevich Deksler, a former resident of Minsk who worked as a photographer at Moscow’s No. 1 Sports Equipment Factory. He informed the underground activists that he had recently established a parallel Zionist-religious youth group. Deksler invited Yosef Kaminsky and his associates to a Hanukkah gathering, where the two organizations agreed to coordinate their efforts.

In May 1934, Boris Deksler raised the issue of establishing connections with Zionists in the provinces. He personally volunteered to travel through towns and shtetls in Ukraine. Following Deksler’s trip, a meeting of underground activists took place in mid-summer 1934 at the Hotel National. A prominent Zionist and rabbi from Tbilisi, David Baazov, arrived, and was joined in his room by Yosef Kaminsky, Viktor Kugel, Avraham Kariv, “Sasha,” and Boris Deksler. Deksler delivered a report on the condition of Zionist groups in Odesa and Kyiv and proposed organizing a conference of all Zionist group representatives. The idea was to elect a legitimate central committee and reinvigorate activity. Deksler insisted that the current Merkaz was not legitimate and had been ineffective.

Yosef Bentsionovich did not support Deksler’s proposal, arguing that those present represented only an initiative group, not a central committee. Kaminsky believed that even the bulletin should not be signed on behalf of a center that did not, in fact, exist. “Sasha” also disagreed, asserting that organizing a conference under the current conditions was too difficult and therefore unwise.

In the summer of 1934, the group was visited by a representative of the Zionist underground from Leningrad—Alexander Zarkhin. After meeting with Kaminsky and Deksler, Zarkhin shared that there were comrades in Leningrad and proposed coordinated actions. According to interrogation records, Zionists connected to Kaminsky’s group included a Tarbut member named Krasnopolskiy from Saratov and a staunch Zionist from Moscow, geodesist Fyodor Ilyich Vydrin.

Within the organization, Yosef Bentsionovich was held in the highest esteem. When members of the Zionist underground gathered, no one would sit down at the table until Yosef Kaminsky arrived. A gifted orator, intellectual, and polyglot, he united people and inspired hope for change.

At the very beginning of January 1935, the investigation against Kaminsky was concluded. It is difficult to say which of the charges leveled by the Bolsheviks were true and which were fabricated. Nevertheless, on February 15, 1935, the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced the hero under Articles 58-10 and 58-11 for participation in an anti-Soviet organization to five years in a labor camp. The Zionist, convicted by the infamous “troika,” was sent to Mariinsk, placed under the authority of the chief of Siblag, and marked for special surveillance.

In the fall of 1937, as the Great Terror reached its peak, the Third Department of Siblag rolled up its sleeves and began fabricating new criminal cases against previously convicted “politicals.” A directive from camp leadership demanded the “extraction” of all “socially alien” elements: nationalists, former Tsarist and White officers, clergy, and kulaks.

The character reference issued for Yosef Kaminsky by the head of the Biysk branch of Siblag was negative. Not only was he accused of a negligent attitude toward his duties (this, about a brilliant doctor with 25 years of experience!), but he also allegedly dared to regularly tell fellow prisoners jokes that compromised party leaders and the Soviet regime. The verdict: “incorrigible.”

Soon after, on March 3, 1938, Yosef Bentsionovich was transferred to a high-security prison within the Biysk camp. Agent Golubev of the Third Department, who spied on inmates, accused the imprisoned Zionist of involvement in a so-called “counter-revolutionary Kadet-Monarchist insurgent organization—the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS),” allegedly created within the Siberian camp system under the direction of a foreign center. According to the fabricated story, Yosef Kaminsky, a Zionist, had been recruited in the camp by a former staff officer of the Kolchak army, Vsevolod Stepashkin. The group supposedly planned sabotage and an armed uprising “in the event of intervention in the USSR by Japan and Germany.” The “investigation” was completed the same day as the arrest. According to testimonies by former Siblag employees questioned in the 1950s, confessions were simply beaten out of the accused—extracted by means of physical torture. The entire case was fabricated by Siblag staff.

The NKVD “troika” of the Novosibirsk Region issued its final verdict in the “ROVS” case on March 12, 1938. All 34 individuals imprisoned in connection with the case were found guilty under Articles 58-2, 58-8, 58-9, 58-10, and 58-11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. The sentence: execution. Yosef Bentsionovich Kaminsky was executed on April 4, 1938.

Kaminsky was not rehabilitated in connection with the first case—because he was not an invented but a real Zionist. However, in 1959, the case brought against him in the camp was reviewed, and he was posthumously rehabilitated.

Boris Deksler, who had been arrested with him in 1934, survived long enough to become a “repeat offender” in 1949—again sent to the camps for Zionism, though he never renounced his beliefs. Viktor Kugel was also executed in 1938. David Baazov, the leader of Georgian Jewry, and his sons did not escape Stalin’s prisons either. Only a few survived. One who did was Alexander Zarkhin, the Leningrad underground representative who had visited Kaminsky in Moscow. He later served on the front lines and, in 1947, fled to Eretz Israel, where he became the inventor of a world-renowned Israeli innovation—the method of seawater desalination by freezing.

Yosef Kaminsky, a fighter for the rights of the Jewish people, did not live to see the rebirth of the Jewish state. Nevertheless, he left behind not only a cherished memory but also heroic descendants. Kaminsky’s grandson, Yuri Stern, nearly 50 years after Yosef Bentsionovich wrote his memorandum on the condition of Soviet Jews, composed a similar document and attempted to send it to the West. As a scholar-economist, Jewish activist, and the grandson of a Zionist, he was ordered to leave the USSR immediately. Yosef Kaminsky’s dream came true—his grandson repatriated to Israel. But Yuri Stern went even further: he became a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

13.11.2021