Hirsh Remennik
1910–1986
In March 1957, a middle-aged man sat in a cramped, smoke-filled office on Korolenko Street in Kyiv. Behind him lay the war, years of hardship, and the loss of loved ones. He was being interrogated by the Soviet secret police. He kept repeating: “I was not engaged in anti-Soviet activities. I simply wanted to see the holy places. Yes, I passed newspapers from Israel to other people, but only because they asked me to. I did not know it was forbidden. I am not a spy–I am simply a Jew who wants to live in his historic homeland.” The man's name was Hirsh Shmulevich Remennik.
Hirsh Remennik was born in 1910 in the shtetl of Belilovka, Berdichev Uyezd, Kyiv Governorate. The local Jewish community made up the majority of the population and preserved its traditional way of life for centuries. Yiddish was spoken in the streets, Saturday was observed as the day of rest, and children usually began their education in a cheder, a traditional Jewish religious school.
The Remennik family was poor–Hirsh's father was a small trader. But, as was often the case in Jewish shtetls, even modest means did not prevent his parents from giving their son a solid religious education and instilling in him a love for his people's language and culture. At the cheder, Hirsh studied Hebrew and religious texts. His childhood shaped the rest of his life–he remained a deeply religious man until his final days.
In 1920, when Hirsh was ten years old, the family moved to Kyiv. It was a difficult and uncertain time: the Russian Civil War was still raging, and control of the city changed hands repeatedly. The Jewish population suffered from pogroms. With the establishment of Bolshevik rule, life became more stable. During the 1920s, the Soviet Union pursued a policy of indigenization, under which the nationalities of the former Russian Empire were granted limited rights. Jewish schools, theaters, and newspapers operated legally, though under the Party's constant supervision. Jewish cultural organizations sprang up across Ukraine, while Zionist underground groups continued to operate in secret. During this period, Hirsh joined the youth movement Hashomer Hatzair ("The Young Guard"). The dream of settling in Eretz Israel was his dream as well. There, he continued studying Hebrew and Jewish literature.
By the 1930s, the Soviet policy of indigenization had given way to rigid centralization. Stalin launched a campaign against what the authorities called “nationalist deviation.” For Soviet Jews, this meant that any expression of Jewish national identity could now be interpreted as “Zionism,” which was treated as a form of counterrevolutionary activity. For Hirsh, whose devotion to his people's culture ran deep, those years must have been especially difficult.
Yet even in the darkest of times, there is room for personal happiness and achievement. In 1934, Hirsh graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the All-Union Correspondence Institute of the People's Commissariat of Finance. His degree opened the door to a promising career in finance. In 1937, he married Rachel Libenzon, the sister of his friend Benzion Libenzon. A year later, their daughter Rivka was born.
In 1939, Hirsh was drafted into the Soviet Army. Thanks to his education, he was appointed head of the finance department. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By September, German forces had reached Kyiv. Martial law was declared, and the evacuation of the city began. Rachel and little Rivka miraculously managed to escape Kyiv on overcrowded barges under relentless German bombing. Rachel's parents, who remained behind in the city, were murdered by the Nazis…
While all this was happening, Hirsh was at the front. He took part in combat and suffered a mild concussion. In 1945, he was demobilized and returned to his family in Kyiv. Two years later, their younger daughter, Itta, was born. By then, Hirsh had gained considerable experience in finance and took a job as chief accountant at the Ukrainian Union of Art Industries. It seemed that a happy life lay ahead, filled with new opportunities and the ordinary joys of family life.
But the postwar years brought a new wave of state-sponsored antisemitism. It had always been part of Stalin's regime, but by this time it had become a systematic policy. In 1948, after the Soviet secret police orchestrated the murder of the renowned Jewish actor and theater director Solomon Mikhoels, the authorities launched a campaign against Zionism and “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Jewish theaters, newspapers, and magazines were shut down, while Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals faced growing persecution. In 1952, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was destroyed, followed soon afterward by the notorious Doctors' Plot.
Many hoped that Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, would put an end to the years of terror. For Soviet Jews, however, the Khrushchev Thaw proved far more ambiguous. Khrushchev once told Golda Meir, Israel's ambassador to the Soviet Union: “We are for communism, and you are for Zionism. And Zionism is the enemy of communism.” For the Soviet security services, the message was clear: the campaign against Zionism would continue.
Despite the risks, Hirsh remained faithful to the traditions in which he had been raised. During those difficult years, he organized Hebrew classes in his apartment. Through Nehemia Levanon, an employee of the Israeli Embassy in the Soviet Union who secretly helped Soviet Jews return to their historic homeland, Hirsh received newspapers from Israel, including Davar, as well as prayer books and other printed materials. These publications were passed to him during meetings with Levanon at the Kyiv Synagogue. Hirsh also became friends with the writer and publicist Baruch Weisman, whose works he and Levanon secretly smuggled to Israel.
The activities of Kyiv's Zionist underground did not go unnoticed by the Soviet security services. As early as February 1953, the 5th Department of the Kyiv Regional Directorate of the Ministry of State Security (MGB) had opened a case against a group of what it called “Jewish bourgeois nationalists.” Informants codenamed Emes and Kant–the latter was the writer Hirsh Blonshtein–reported on secret meetings where participants discussed Israeli newspapers, criticized the Soviet regime, and spoke openly about its treatment of the Jewish people. In 1956, Nehemia Levanon and two other employees of the Israeli Embassy were declared persona non grata because of their ties to the Soviet Jewish community. The net around Kyiv's Zionists was tightening.
Fully aware of the danger, Hirsh asked Benzion Libenzon to send him an invitation to immigrate to Israel. By then, his brother-in-law had already made aliyah and was able to sponsor the family's departure. In 1957, the invitation finally arrived–but the Remenniks never had the chance to leave.
The crackdown began. In February, Hirsh's associates–Baruch Weisman, Isaac Fridman, and Meir Draznin–were arrested. A month later, it was his turn. On March 19, 1957, Hirsh was arrested and taken to the MGB prison in Kyiv.
He was charged under Article 54-10, Part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” During interrogation, Hirsh did not deny reading newspapers and other publications from Israel or passing them on to others. He explained that he had done so out of religious conviction and a desire to preserve Jewish culture and the Hebrew language.
Among the case files is a revealing document–a psychiatric evaluation conducted at Kyiv's Pavlov Psycho-Neurological Hospital. The examination concluded that Hirsh suffered from psychasthenia, a condition then classified as an obsessive neurosis. He himself told investigators about his diagnosis, apparently hoping it would lead to a more lenient sentence.
The experts' report offers a revealing glimpse into Hirsh's character and the motives behind his actions. Far from being a cunning spy or a fanatical agitator, he emerges as a modest intellectual, deeply religious, devoted to his people's culture, and burdened by illness: “Religious since childhood, he observes all religious rites. He has always been anxious and prone to excessive worry. Around 1937, he began experiencing obsessive thoughts... He remains critical of these symptoms, has read extensively about such conditions, but has been unable to overcome them. He says that, being a deeply religious man, he expects deliverance only from God... He speaks of the holy places in Palestine with particular reverence, and tears come to his eyes. He believes that touching these holy sites could bring about his recovery.” For Hirsh, emigrating to Israel would have meant not only returning to his roots but also a genuine hope for healing.
The experts may well have sympathized with Hirsh, but they could do nothing to change his fate. They concluded that he fully understood the nature of his actions, and their final report stated: “He exhibits signs of psychasthenia but does not suffer from a mental illness within the meaning of Article 10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR and is therefore legally responsible for his actions.”
On July 23, 1957, the Kyiv Regional Court sentenced Hirsh to eight years in a corrective labor camp. His associates, Isaac Fridman and Meir Draznin, received ten years each, while the seventy-year-old Baruch Weisman was sentenced to five. Hirsh was sent to the Potma labor camps in the Mordovian ASSR. Even there, at great personal risk, he continued teaching Hebrew to fellow Jewish prisoners, including David Khavkin and Shimon (Semyon Moiseyevich) Podolsky, the father of the distinguished linguist Baruch Podolsky.
Immediately after Hirsh's arrest, his family began fighting for his release. They sent letters to the United Nations, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Israeli government, and the Committee of Solidarity with Soviet Jewry. Hirsh's wife, Rachel, even managed to break through to Khrushchev's motorcade and personally hand him a letter demanding her husband's release.
Their efforts evidently had some effect. Hirsh spent less than three years in the labor camp. On April 18, 1960, he was released under a ruling by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR. But after returning to his family in Kyiv, he resumed secretly teaching Hebrew and distributing Zionist literature. In 1969, after completing underground Hebrew courses, his younger daughter, Itta, joined her father's cause.
A year earlier, the Remennik family had once again applied for permission to leave for Israel, only to be refused. At the time, the Kyiv authorities employed a wide range of measures to pressure Jewish refuseniks. They were dismissed from their jobs, denied employment, and summoned for “interviews” with the security services, where they were subjected to direct threats. Many were placed under administrative arrest on fabricated pretexts, while criminal cases were built on trumped-up charges. Railway stations and airports became the scene of sweeping operations targeting people of “Jewish nationality” in an effort to prevent them from delivering petitions directly to officials in Moscow.
Despite this, the refuseniks continued their struggle to leave for Israel. They organized collective appeals to the authorities and staged hunger strikes in protest. Hirsh took part in these actions as well.
In 1971, Hirsh and his family finally received permission to emigrate. They settled in Haifa, on the slopes of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Until his retirement, Hirsh worked for ten years as an accountant in Israel's defense industry. His remarkable journey came to an end in 1986.
Hirsh's lifelong dream–the goal that had guided him for decades–had finally come true. He returned to his historic homeland and was able to stand before Judaism's holiest sites. But was he ever cured of the illness that had haunted him for so many years?..
One would like to believe that he was. At the heart of psychasthenia–an obsessive anxiety disorder–lies fear, a constant and unrelenting sense of тревога. The fear that your children will be persecuted simply because they are Jews. The fear that your devotion to your language and traditions will be discovered, and that the life you have built will collapse overnight. But in his homeland, Hirsh no longer had to live in fear. There, he found the happiness he had sought for so long–and, perhaps at last, peace of mind.
02.08.2026
Author: Mikhail Krivitsky
Translated by Lena Lores
Bibliography and Sources
• Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine. Fund 6. Inventory 1. File 71254fp.
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