The world is well acquainted with photographs showing the Nazis mocking religious Jews in occupied Poland. Nazi thugs cut off elderly men’s sidelocks, and forced Jews to pray publicly as entertainment for the crowd. Hard as it may be to believe, this scene was repeated almost exactly in the spring of 1953 in the inner prison of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Vinnytsia.
The central figure in this story was El Livshits, a bookbinder of accounting ledgers from Zhmerinka. Arrested for Zionism, Livshits was summoned late one night for another interrogation. The MVD operatives (as the NKVD was then called after yet another reorganization) Tkachenko and Zadorozhniuk, bored, decided to amuse themselves: they tied a tefillin they had obtained from somewhere onto Livshits and handed him a Torah scroll, ordering the prisoner to pray to G-d. Before El Livshits had even finished the prayer, the security officers burst out laughing and called in colleagues from other offices to enjoy the spectacle. Thus the 57-year-old Livshits prayed until the Vinnytsia operatives finally grew tired of it.
The torment inflicted on the arrested Livshits was systematic and sophisticated—an attempt to force a confession of involvement in a Jewish underground movement. His case was monitored in Kyiv itself, so the regional security men were expected to deliver results: the exposure of yet another “Jewish conspiracy.”
Over the course of his life, El Livshits had seen much. He was born on 10 January 1897 in the small town of Volkovyntsi, located exactly halfway between Vinnytsia and Proskuriv. His father, Mordko Shoilevich, was a mid-level trader, and his mother, Ita Yankelevna Silberman, ran the household. The family was large: the eldest brother, Ayzik, El himself, younger brothers Meshilom and Shmul, and sisters Bronya and Miryam.
In childhood, all the Livshits children attended cheder. El took easily to Jewish studies and learned with enthusiasm, but did not go on to yeshiva. His father’s shop needed an accountant, and the middle son, Elik, was perfectly suited for the role. In 1915 he completed a correspondence course in bookkeeping, received a diploma, and began working in the shop with his father.
Having endured the horrors of the First World War, the Civil War, and the Soviet-Polish War in their native Volkovyntsi, the Livshits family gradually began to get back on their feet. But then a typhus epidemic struck the area. In 1920 the elder Livshits fell ill and died almost immediately. After working for some time in his father’s shop, Elik moved to the town of Solobkovtsi and married a local girl, Gitla Eitesman. Their happiness was short-lived: two years later Gitla died.
From Solobkovtsi the young widower moved to the town of Brailov, where El’s sister Miryam lived. Her husband, Shlema Rovner, an employee of the local rural cooperative, promised to find his brother-in-law work—and kept his word. El Mordkovich settled in Brailov, taking a position as an accountant in the nearby village of Moskalevka.
El’s reluctance to return to his hometown was not due solely to the lack of work there. The Livshits family in Volkovyntsi were too well known, and not only to those whose acquaintance was pleasant. Confronted during the war years with a wave of Jewish pogroms, the younger generation of the Livshits family came to the conclusion that the only safe place for the Jewish people could be the Land of Israel.
El’s younger brothers were especially inspired by Zionism. The first to leave, in 1919, was Meshilom, who traveled to Palestine via Bessarabia and in Eretz Israel changed his surname to Yavnieli. Shmul soon followed. From the early 1920s he was, as people then put it, a “professional Zionist,” carrying out active national work in Volkovyntsi and the neighboring towns. In 1924 Shmul went to Palestine, where he stayed for about three years. Unfortunately, it was the worst possible time for repatriation: after an economic upswing in Mandate Palestine, a severe recession set in. Steady and even minimally paid work was hard to find, and the British treated the Jews arriving in the country with barely concealed irritation. Shmul, like many of his comrades, returned to the Soviet Union. In the Land of the Soviets, Shmul Livshits was forced to publicly repent of his “sins” and demonstratively take up work—sewing caps. This was a way of switching to labor acceptable to the Soviet authorities: becoming a real worker. Shmul settled in Solobkovtsi. He spent considerable time trying to find an accounting job in Brailov, closer to his brother.
In the same year Shmul returned to the USSR, in 1927, their sister Bronya was arrested by the Proskurov District Department of the GPU for participation in a Zionist organization. After holding her in prison for a short time, GPU officers released her, magnanimously offering her the chance to leave for Palestine. Bronya followed her brothers’ example and soon repatriated to Eretz Israel.
Formally, El Mordkovich Livshits did not belong to any Zionist organization. Earlier, when it was still possible, he sometimes got hold of the newspaper Davar, published by left-wing Zionists and reaching the Soviet Union from Palestine by convoluted routes. Fully sharing the idea of reviving a Jewish state, El Mordkovich nevertheless remained a religious man who had little faith in communist experiments. He passionately wanted to go to Zion, but Shmul’s return and family responsibilities meant that El Mordkovich delayed applying for permission to leave. It was now 1931, and by then it was already almost impossible to leave the Soviet Union.
Throughout the 1930s, El Mordkovich worked as an accountant in various cooperatives in Brailov. Having remarried—this time to Gena Moiseevna Reznik—in 1934 he became a father: the couple had a daughter, Tuba.
In 1937 the Livshits family moved to Zhmerinka. El Mordkovich took a job at the Progress cooperative. Soon tragic news reached him: in Brailov the NKVD had “exposed” a Zionist organization in which his brother Shmul was allegedly a member, and the investigation named him the ringleader of an anti-Soviet group. The so-called “counterrevolutionary group” consisted of former members of Zionist organizations and long-time acquaintances of the Livshits brothers. Shmul, who had once believed in the reasonableness of Soviet rule, was executed on May 15, 1938. El Mordkovich himself narrowly escaped imprisonment at the time. Gradually, things settled somewhat. In 1939 El and Gena had a son, Yakov.
The residents of Zhmerinka had barely begun to recover from the actions of the Red Moloch, devouring innocent people, when an even greater ordeal befell them—the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR.
The war caught El Mordkovich in Zhmerinka. Deemed unfit for military service, he remained with his family in the occupied territory, hoping for the humanity of the invaders. The extent of their “humanity” and “civilization” became clear as early as July 17, 1941, when Germans on motorcycles burst into the town and immediately began rampaging. A week later, a Jewish ghetto appeared in Zhmerinka, set up in one of the suburbs.
Not everyone managed to survive in the ghetto. El Mordkovich and his wife were forced to take the hardest, dirtiest jobs to earn a meager living, risking every day that they might not return from their assigned labor. When the town came under Romanian control, this brought some relief to the Jews: the Romanians abused them, but unlike the Germans, did not carry out mass killings. At the same time, the Jews of nearby Brailov were less fortunate. In 1942, El’s 69-year-old mother, Ita Yankelevna, his elder brother Ayzik, and his sister Miryam along with their families were brutally murdered there.
In early March 1944, Red Army troops approached Zhmerinka, and German and Romanian units began retreating westward. Rumors immediately spread through the ghetto that the withdrawing German soldiers intended to destroy all surviving Jews of Transnistria. Jews sought salvation, doing everything they could to find temporary shelter.
An elderly Ukrainian, Petro Khomik, came to the Livshits family’s aid. For two weeks he hid El, his wife, and their children in the cellar of his home. Red Army soldiers liberated Zhmerinka on March 20, 1944. Heartfelt thanks given to Petro, El Mordkovich and Gena Moiseevna returned home and began rebuilding their lives.
Not all residents of Zhmerinka were glad to see the Jews return, having grown accustomed during the years of occupation to the thought that they would never come back from the ghetto to reclaim their property. Apartments were vacated with great reluctance, not to mention items stolen during the occupation. Gradually, the housing issue was resolved. The Livshits family settled in a small two-room brick house on October Revolution Street in Zhmerinka.
Almost immediately after liberation, El Mordkovich resumed work as an accountant. Soon, however, Livshits was summoned to the prosecutor’s office—allegedly for keeping the books incorrectly and causing losses to the state. At the end of 1945 the court acquitted El Mordkovich, but at a retrial it was decided that the accountant should nevertheless be punished: he was sentenced to one year and six months in a labor colony. In Stalin’s time, any professional misstep could be punished harshly.
In 1947, El Mordkovich was released. He had to retrain from accounting, first becoming the storekeeper at a brick factory, and later a watchman at the timber warehouse of Zhmerinka station. Eventually, dissatisfied with the pay and working conditions, Livshits acquired the trade of bookbinder of accounting ledgers and began working on contract for various institutions in the city. His wife ran the household, his son Yakov attended school, and his daughter Tuba enrolled in the Zhytomyr Construction Technical School.
Living a quiet, inconspicuous life after the war, the elderly man could not have imagined that for several years already the Soviet security services had been following on his heels.
Livshits first came to their attention in April 1948 because of his correspondence with his sister Bronya Notkin and his brother Meshilom, who had left for Palestine before the war. All letters sent to them abroad through the Zhmerinka or Vinnytsia post offices were subjected to careful surveillance and censorship. Until an appropriate officer who knew a foreign language established what a Soviet citizen had written to the West, the letter was not dispatched anywhere. El Mordkovich always wrote to his relatives in Hebrew, the written form of which he mastered no worse than Israelis. The local Chekists had a problem finding staff who knew the ancient language, but when they finally did—and it turned out to be a translator-controller by the name of Maryanchik—the prospect of earning a few more stars on their epaulettes immediately loomed on the horizon.
“Here are my children: although they are growing up in a Jewish home, a religious home… still, they speak exclusively Russian,” Livshits wrote in December 1948 in one of his letters to his sister Bronya in Ramat Gan, congratulating her on Hanukkah. “That is why I envy you, that your children are being raised in a different spirit.”
In the same letter, El Mordkovich reflected philosophically that by the age of fifty he had come to the conclusion that a person should not concentrate solely on satisfying material needs. “I recall those times,” he confided to his sister, “when the Hasmoneans fought for our freedom, when our people were also threatened with the loss of their religious culture and assimilation into another, alien culture, but… the heroes of the nation risked their lives and defended the sanctity of faith and the freedom of the Jewish people.”
Comparing Theodor Herzl, who raised the question of building a Jewish state, with Mattathias the Hasmonean, the leader of the ancient Jews’ uprising against the Hellenes, the Zhmerinka bookbinder sent words of guidance to his sister, brother, and their families in Palestine: “Now this has once again been entrusted to you, the residents of Palestine. This war is our holy war. Do not lower your hands… now is the most appropriate time, when the Jewish question stands before all nations.”
El Mordkovich greeted the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, with unprecedented joy. He again wrote to his sister and brother. “My heart trembles on hearing that the prophecy has finally been fulfilled… that a Jewish state has been created,” Livshits could not contain his emotions. “One wants to plunge into the crowd of Jews… who have finally achieved success and reached their goal.” Speaking of his desire to leave for Israel, El Mordkovich simultaneously criticized the Soviet Union. Describing relations among citizens in the USSR, he used the well-known Latin saying, homo homini lupus—“man is a wolf to man.” As for attitudes toward Jews, there was no need even to speak.
After the Israeli embassy opened in Moscow, Soviet Jews felt that liberation from the galut was no longer far away. In a letter sent to Israel in November 1948, Livshits wrote with confidence that the Israeli “ambassadors” would do everything necessary to enable the repatriation of Soviet Jews to their historical homeland. “What my brother mentions in his letter about his relationship with the ambassador, Madam Golda, is a very good thing,” the elderly man hoped for a swift reunion with his family. “…I ask that you write her a letter as soon as possible concerning us, and perhaps she will answer my question directly, at my address.” El Livshits’s brother, Meshulem Livshits-Yavnieli, was indeed personally acquainted with Golda Meir’s personal secretary and undertook to assist his brother with repatriation. Nothing came of it. The Soviet authorities had no intention of letting any of their citizens leave beyond the Iron Curtain.
Using the correspondence seized at the post office, in April 1949 the Zhmerinka District Department of the MGB opened a surveillance file on El Mordkovich Livshits under the code name “Fanatic.” Judging by the intercepted letters, the Chekists classified him as a counterrevolutionary. To corroborate the information obtained from the mail, the MGB decided to deploy against Livshits their trusted agent, code-named “Okhotnaya.”
Agent “Okhotnaya,” whose real name was Eva Lvovna Glizer, was Livshits’s colleague at his job at Zhmerinka station. Before the war she had been a teacher, and in 1940 Glizer was recruited by the NKVD to identify anti-Soviet-minded individuals among the teachers and students at her own school. In mid-March 1949 the Chekists re-established contact with her and immediately sent her to spy on El Mordkovich. Glizer’s skills and experience allowed her quickly to gain the confidence of her “fellow Jew,” who, suspecting nothing, opened his heart to his colleague. In conversations with Livshits, the agent learned that he was “nationalistically anti-Soviet in outlook” and enjoyed authority in the Zhmerinka religious Jewish community.
Livshits was indeed an active congregant of the only synagogue that had survived in the city. Having lost 18 close and distant relatives during the war, El Mordkovich turned to G-d even more often. The synagogue was the place where like-minded people gathered—people who loved their nation and still read books in Hebrew. MGB agent Glizer claimed that Livshits frequently read aloud in the synagogue letters he received from Israel and kept company with well-known religious Jews in the city.
To the Chekists, these people were suspicious. Among them were “Jewish nationalists known to the authorities”: Levi Averbukh, chairman of the synagogue’s Jewish community; former community chairman David Ostrovsky; community secretary Ezra Krakopolsky; and many others.
There was no shortage of compromising material on Livshits’s acquaintances and friends. Thus, according to information from the agent of the Vladimir Region Department of the MGB, Stakan, after the war a prominent religious Zionist, Mordechai Khanzin, visited Krakopolsky, the secretary of the Zhmerinka Jewish community; together they discussed the Jewish question in the USSR in a sharply anti-Soviet vein.
In March 1950, agent “Okhotnaya” also reported to the MGB that while working for some time as a storekeeper at a brick factory, Livshits had become friends with a resident of Zhmerinka named Sukher. His son, Alexander Sukher, a student at one of Kyiv’s higher educational institutions, had been arrested in the case of the “Union of Jewish Youth.” “The ‘Fanatic’ condemned the repression of Sukher and his friends in a slanderous, anti-Soviet manner and expressed fear that he himself might also be arrested for expressing his political views,” the Vinnytsia Chekists reported to the Second Directorate of the MGB of the Ukrainian SSR.
After the arrest of Sukher’s son, El Livshits drastically limited his social circle; nevertheless, he did not stop expressing “anti-Soviet” views in his letters. In one of them he asked his sister to send him a tallit, an ancient symbol of Judaism. In another, he concluded that the humiliation of the Jewish people in the USSR had continued even after the Holocaust: Hebrew was banned; for more than ten years almost no one spoke Yiddish; the country had neither Jewish radio stations nor Jewish newspapers, nor synagogues nor yeshivas. “…From Volochisk to Kyiv we have only… five synagogues: in Proskurov, Zhmerinka, Slavuta, Berdychiv, and Odesa,” Livshits lamented. “Therefore the treasure of the Jewish people—the youth, which is dearest to us—is being assimilated… without knowing what our ancestors commanded us not to forget: our language.” Having received from his sister a Rosh Hashanah card depicting Israeli soldiers and members of the Israeli government, Livshits brought it to show at the synagogue. This was immediately recorded by the authorities, who were slowly but methodically building a case against the elderly man.
To intensify surveillance of Livshits, an operative from the 4th Section of the 2nd Department of the Vinnytsia Regional MGB even arrived at the Zhmerinka District MGB office in December 1950. Nevertheless, the Chekists failed to recruit another agent who might inform on Livshits.
El Mordkovich clearly became even more cautious. In 1951 he stopped all correspondence with his sister and brother after noticing unusual delays in mail delivery and realizing that many of his letters were not reaching their recipients.
No one, however, had any intention of forgetting about him. On February 12, 1953, there was an insistent knock at the Livshits home. On the doorstep stood Senior Operative Officer of the Vinnytsia Regional MGB, Senior Lieutenant Zadorozhniuk, and Militia Sergeant Pavlenko. Presenting warrants for arrest and search to the head of the household, the officers immediately began the search. After turning the entire house upside down, the Chekists took Livshits to the internal prison of the Vinnytsia MGB.
He was charged with having, in the postwar period, joined a nationalist group and carried out anti-Soviet activity within it, and with slandering the Soviet state and its regime through correspondence with contacts abroad. The indictment also specifically mentioned Livshits’s systematic listening to the radio station “Kol Yisrael,” his reading aloud of postcards and letters from abroad in the Zhmerinka synagogue, and his repeatedly expressed desire to leave for Israel.
Several officials worked on Livshits’s case. During interrogations he for a long time categorically denied having any connections in Zhmerinka, Vinnytsia, or other cities. However, a list of members of the Jewish religious community found during the search, Livshits’s correspondence with an acquaintance named Berka Brodsky, and other documents indicated otherwise.
He also had 164 books in Hebrew and Yiddish confiscated from him. A significant portion of them were religious in nature and had once belonged to Rabbi Alter Feingold, who was killed in the Zhmerinka ghetto. Shortly before his death, in 1943, the rabbi’s widow managed to pass the books on to El Livshits. Other books he had received from a religious Jew named Fliman, who was being worked over by the MGB, as indicated by the presentation inscriptions in the volumes.
Despite the abundance of evidence, El Mordkovich remained courageous and silent, steadfastly denying the charges of anti-Soviet agitation and refusing to testify against his acquaintances. The MGB’s favorite methods were soon employed—humiliation and torture.
The mockery of the Torah and the Jewish faith described at the beginning of our account was not the end of it. As a rule, Livshits was summoned for interrogation after 9 p.m. and was not allowed to rest during the day. At the interrogation he was forbidden to sit—only to stand, with no chance for the exhausted man even to lean against the wall.
The Chekists addressed Livshits at best as “bandit”; their other epithets were even more demeaning. Losing patience, Senior Lieutenant Zadorozhniuk and Tkachenko, deputy head of the 2nd Section of the Vinnytsia Regional MGB, would knock El Mordkovich to the floor and kick him.
The senior investigator who later handled the case, UMVD Captain Puchkin, was no gentler. Once, leaving during working hours for a movie theater, the sadist locked Livshits in a cold basement. After several hours, a staff member of the department took pity on him and let him out. All the while hurling ethnic insults at El Mordkovich, Puchkin liked to repeat that all Jews had sat out the war in the rear. “Your wives, fat Jewish women, don’t let people buy food at the market,” he explained his view of the national question to the prisoner. “And your hook-nosed Jews—scratch the surface and they’re robbing the government and the state.”
Trying to extract information from the detainee, Puchkin repeatedly threatened him: “You will not get out of here.” When the exhausted El Mordkovich once asked why Puchkin was tormenting him so, he answered bluntly, “This is my bread. I can simply shoot you in my office and nothing will happen to me for it.”
Despite everything, the elderly Jew never incriminated members of the Zhmerinka Jewish community or his other acquaintances whom the Chekists wanted to implicate in a case about a Zionist underground organization. In his ruling of April 9, 1953, Puchkin retained the earlier charge against Livshits under Article 54-10, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“Propaganda or agitation using the religious or national prejudices of the masses”), but was forced to drop the charge of participation in an anti-Soviet group.
Relying on the testimony of agent “Okhotnaya” and attaching to the case seventeen letters by Livshits and his relatives confiscated at the post office, the investigation prepared for the court an entire bouquet of facts purporting to prove the defendant’s “non-Soviet” views.
In one letter, Livshits, as a religious man, lamented that after the war Jewish young men were increasingly marrying non-Jewish women, which is strictly forbidden by Jewish law. Ignorant of Judaism, the Chekists interpreted these lines as nationalist.
Describing postwar reality to his family, El Mordkovich asked his sister Bronya and brother Meshulem not to judge the young people living in the USSR too harshly: “They were born in a sinful age…” And then, with hope: “…in the end we will outlive all our enemies and with great joy cross a great, though difficult, bridge.” Puchkin construed this as Livshits’s vehement criticism of the Soviet regime.
Livshits was also “charged” with transmitting confidential information abroad. A modern reader may be surprised, but the case treated as such lines from El Mordkovich’s letter about the number of Jews in various cities and towns of Ukraine: “The saved remnants of our people are concentrated, for the most part, in large cities, for example: in Kyiv—125,000; in Odesa—70,000; in Proskurov—10,000; in Vinnytsia—15,000; in Zhmerinka—10,000…”
In a letter sent to Bronya Notkin in mid-February 1950, El Mordkovich cautiously tried to convey something about the fate of his brother Shmul: “…You keep asking about Shmilik; I already wrote to you that it is hard to learn anything about him, one cannot write to him. The same situation exists for all his comrades. There is nothing I can do—one must wait.” In that same letter, he asked his sister to find out the fate of plots of land in Palestine that had been purchased before the war by his friend from Zhmerinka, Moishe Spector. Spector, a fur craftsman at the Novyi Shliakh cooperative, was originally from Libava in Estonia and in 1933–1936, through the organization Haklai, invested in the purchase of land near Yitzhak Alhanan and Shaaroni Streets in Tel Aviv. Hoping to leave for Israel sooner or later, Spector tried to learn something about his assets. Whether he received an answer is unknown; what is known is that the Soviet security services learned about the overseas property.
Similarly, the authorities learned of a resident of Zhmerinka named Abram Berchenko, at whose home Livshits often listened to radio broadcasts from Israel. The Jews of Zhmerinka tried not to miss these broadcasts, though they understood only fragments because of the Sephardic pronunciation used in the Jewish state.
El Livshits was interested in absolutely everything about Israel. He asked his brother and sister to write to him about the development of the Negev, the construction of housing and kibbutzim in the young country, and the reception of new immigrants from different countries.
The investigation established that El Mordkovich wrote not only to Israel but also to the United States. His uncle, Pesach Likhter, had lived in Milwaukee since 1912, and Livshits described to him as well the destruction of Jewish communities in the Soviet Union.
The trial of El Mordkovich Livshits took place on April 20, 1953. During the four-hour hearing, answering questions from Prosecutor Pozharuk and defense attorney Kenig, the defendant fully admitted to writing anti-Soviet letters. In the building of the Vinnytsia Regional Court, the elderly man publicly confirmed his wish to leave for Israel, explaining it by the absence of any Jewish “national spark” in the USSR. On his lawyer’s advice, Livshits “admitted his mistake” and asked the court for leniency and a lighter sentence.
No mercy followed. He was sentenced under Article 54-10, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR to twenty-five years in corrective labor camps, with confiscation of all property and five years’ deprivation of voting rights. They could even have given him “the supreme penalty,” as was hinted pointedly by the reference in the verdict to the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 26, 1947, “On the Abolition of the Death Penalty.”
Even by Soviet standards, the sentence was monstrous. In a cassation appeal submitted the same day to the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR, the convicted Livshits asked for his case to be reconsidered. Denying the charge of nationalism, he once again explained to the authorities that he had merely adhered to religious traditions. He also reported the unlawful methods used in the investigation. His appeal had no effect on the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR, which by its ruling of May 13, 1953, left the sentence in force.
Meanwhile, Livshits was sent under guard to the transfer point of the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, located in the town of Karabas. An elderly man, visually impaired and suffering from pulmonary emphysema and hypertension, he was assigned light work in the camp.
But even in Karlag El Mordkovich did not give up. Eventually, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the USSR reviewed his case. In Moscow it was deemed that the sentence had been excessively severe. The term was reduced to ten years in the camps, with confiscation and loss of civil rights. Livshits’s complaint about the use of unlawful investigative methods was forwarded to the Special Inspectorate of the KGB Directorate under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR for the Vinnytsia Region.
El Livshits did not remain in the camp for long. The Karaganda Regional Prosecutor’s Office released him on October 4, 1954. He was released, but his rehabilitation was delayed. Only at the end of March 1960 did Supreme Court Chairman Gorkin again review Livshits’s case. Analyzing the investigative materials and the texts of El Mordkovich’s letters, the highest judicial authority concluded that in substance they were not counterrevolutionary. Religion in the Soviet Union was not officially banned, and a religious worldview could in no way be qualified as anti-Soviet agitation. The criminal case against Livshits was dismissed for lack of corpus delicti, and the verdict was annulled.
In one of the letters confiscated in the 1950s, El Livshits wrote: “May G-d grant that I live to see better days. Though I am no longer young, I still hope and want to live a free life. But who knows whether we shall live to see it.” Sadly, this proud Jew never lived to see the happy day of repatriation to Eretz Israel. When it again became possible, El Mordkovich applied to emigrate, but in 1978 he was refused. Soviet bureaucrats, aware of his Stalin-era criminal case, denied him an exit visa.
Unable to repatriate to Israel himself, El Livshits actively helped other Jews return to their homeland. In his final years, living with his wife in Zhytomyr, he advised people on how to leave for Israel via the Soviet Baltic republics. He received only “his own” people and strictly behind closed doors, well aware of the ears and eyes of the Soviet KGB. Yet he could not bring himself not to help.
El Livshits passed away on September 1, 1981. The work he had begun was completed by his daughter Tuba, who repatriated to Israel in 1996. His son Yakov lives in the free world, in the United States of America.
28.08.2022
Author: Freddy Rotman
Translated by Lena Lores
El Livshits
1897 – 1981
