Ninety percent of the immigrants wanted to return to their motherland as Soviet Jews had nothing in common with those who lived in Israel. They spoke a different language, they thought and lived differently. There was a strong feeling that Soviet Jews did not belong to a “World Jews Nation” which was invented by the Zionists.

Boris Bravstein, who went to Israel with his wife, two children and mother said they discovered that everything in that Jewish state was strange to them---the culture, the ideology and even the psychology of the Zionism turned out to be a variety of racism.

He described a playground of a block of modern apartments encircled by barbed wire. Children of European Jews were playing inside with children of Jews who came from African lands watched from the other side with envy in their eyes. Bravstein went on to say that Israel was chosen by God for a special mission to fulfill and that the Jews were of the purest race.

Hitler wrote the thing in his book “Mein Kempf”. There is an ideological kinship between the Nazis and the Zionists---both are racist.

The kinship was practically of no significance, when on January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of SS Intelligence Service of the Nazis planned the final solution to exterminate about eleven million Jews in Europe.

Step by step, the Jews were to be forced out of all levels of German life. It was the Reichsfuhrer SS’s will that the Jewish question was settled in one clean sweep.

The total Jews concerned—11,000,000. The breaks-down as: in the old Reich—130,000, in Austria—43,000, in the Protectorate—75,000, in the General Government—2,500,000, in the Balkans—1,600,000, in the occupied France—165,000, in England—330,000 and in Switzerland—180,000 of the chosen people. In the final solution, the Jews were to be seen as labourers in the east by marching both sexes, segregated in columns—building roads on the way, breaking rocks and draining marshes.

It was to give them every opportunity to find out what work meant. The calculation was that most of the Jews would succumb to natural wastage and the remainder, the toughest would be processed accordingly, otherwise they would seed a Jewish resurrection.

But Reinhard Heydrich was wounded in Prague on May 27, 1942 by two Czechs parachuted in from Britain. He died eight days later. The Jews who had faced extermination became tough when the Jewish state of Israel was created in 1949.

Isaak Kaplan described how he and his wife had to sell almost all their belongings on arrival before they landed jobs, he as a labourer and she as a charwoman. His wife hanged herself out of sheer despair. In the Soviet Union they were regarded as human beings.

In Israel they treated them like slaves. They were despised for being Russians, for not knowing the local language and for refusing to pray in the synagogue. Every few months, price doubled----rent, water, gas, electricity, telephone charges, foodstuffs and public transport costs.

In Israel, Kaplan was ready to hike across all Europe to kiss the stones of Moscow’s streets. He fled and returned to his real homeland. There he regained his spiritual composure and life again smiled at him.

Ilia Fuzilov described the “dept book” that all immigrants were slapped with as they were processed on entry. They made their own entry in the debt book in Hebrew. They din’t know what was written there. They just saw the figures and signed the document.

The reference was to the prices of all benefits the arrivals got. They eventually mounted to a sizeable sum to be settled before one could get permission to depart from Israel. Most pitiful was the state of Israel’s children. They had no future. The children of the emigrants were doomed to receive an education no higher than fourth standards.

Describing the wooden barracks in which settlers of occupied Arab lands lived; Israel’s main aim was to create a buffer, a barrier out of emigrants from the Soviet Union, who would receive the first blow if anything happened.

Itzhak Zeltzer, a mechanical engineer who received a higher education in the USSR, conceded that nationalism and Zionism had been a factor that led him to emigrate to Israel, also the concept that Israel was the “Promised Land” and the “Home of all Jews”.

Referring to the saying that it was better to see a thing once than to hear about it many times, he saw once what he had heard about it many times. It took him a little less than two years to understand that the only correct and reasonable decision was to get back to his country.

He was disillusioned at the sight of enmity among ethnic groups and class lines in the Promised Land. He saw the antagonism between poor and rich, between Sabras (Jews born in Palestine) and Jewish immigrants from Asia and Africa and favouritism toward Jews who came from Europe and America.

When he found himself in a different world and was confronted with social injustices, his decision was to return to the Soviet Union. He supported the call of the Communist Party of Israel----with the Arabs against imperialism, not with imperialism against the Arabs. As all those who returned had said, Zeltzer reported that he and his entire family were restored their former rights. He worked as an engineer in the Ukraine city of Chernovsty and everything was alright.

There were an increasing number of appeals from groups of emigrants for readmission to the USSR. One group of more than 300 in Vienna sent such an appeal, as did another of about the same size in Italy. Soviet citizens often reported letters from friends or relatives who left for Israel, pleading tearfully for something to be done to rescue them from Israel. But it soon became apparent that the Soviet Union would not permit the abuse of Soviet citizenship, as something that could be thrown and then

restored. When in Tbilisi, Georgia, George Morris asked Communist Party Secretary, Victoria Sigadze about the exodus of Georgian Jews who comprised the largest number of those who went to Israel. There was a sect which had settled in the Caucasian land centuries ago. To thousands among them the idea of a “Jew Homeland had an appeal, but they believed that in Israel they would be together in one area.

They were disappointed, however, when they were scattered, and came into sharp conflict with the Israelis over conditions of work and seasonal unemployment. The then undivided USSR whom the west called the evil empire was more lenient to the returnees, showing the world human rights were honoured in a high degree in the Soviet Land.

Thus, Georgian government received a flood of appeals for permission to return. But those appeals were denied. Many were asking for the right of return for the sake of their children. The Georgian Jews put out their own newspapers in the Georgian language in Israel and formed Georgian amateur art circles, much like those they had in the Soviet Union.

Many who did not leave the land held important posts in the government and in the academic world of Georgia. The story was the same in Lithuania, Latvia and the Ukraine. And fulfillment of condition for return to their motherland was the assurance that children would not repeat the mistakes of their parents.

In preference of the Promised Land, they had become immigrants at one time and emigrants at another during the subsequent Diasporas, the first being settling of the Jews among various non-Jewish communities after they had been exiled in 538 B.C.

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