#to be fair american jewry also disliked us tremendously and the feeling was mutual

[deadpanwalking]

My wife’s family also went through the Vienna-Rome pipeline. Did your family also get pressured to move to Israel instead of America by the international aid organizations? She says there is a lot of animosity in Israel for Soviet Jews who didn’t choose to immigrate .

I mean, all Soviet Jews literally had to use Israel’s Law of Return as a pretext in order to leave since going to the US was out of the question, my family included. Despite Jewish communities existing in the European part of Russia since the early medieval period, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union designated Jews as a nation, and required that they identify themselves on internal passports and legal papers. The rationale was that Jews qualified as a nation rather than just a religion because they were an ethnic group, with shared language (Yiddish), cultural practices, and historical ties that distinguished them from “real” Russians; the reality is that Jews were isolated socially (as well as geographically) and subjected to discrimination, restrictions, and pogroms. We weren’t Russian Jews so much as Jews who lived in Russia.  Do you see where I’m going with this? 

Lenin—correctly—disparaged Zionism as bourgeois nationalist ideology, but thanks to centuries of antisemitism, this played perfectly into the preexisting concept of Jews as a nation and complemented centuries of antisemitism in Europe.  As such, they were presumed to be inherently Zionist, disloyal, and counterrevolutionary (on the heels of being presumed to be Communist radicals plotting a Revolution against the Tsar).  Under Communism, all Jews were ostensibly granted full rights as Soviet citizens, and antisemitic restrictions on movement and professions were officially lifted but categorizing Jews as a distinct nationality allowed the state to better regulate Jewish life and manage the "Jewish question" in Soviet society. It facilitated antisemitic policies around population registration, migration, and designated us as targets for civilian and state-sponsored violence.

Soviet Jews were not allowed to emigrate until after The Six-Day War in 1967, then the restrictions were lifted slightly after both international orgs and countries in the West put pressure on Russia to let its Jews, who had lived there for over a millennium, make Aliyah to their “real” ancestral homeland, a country formed less than 20 years prior, in a region which their actual ancestors hadn’t set foot in since before the destruction of the Second Temple. This way, the Soviet Union didn’t even have to admit that its Jews were fleeing from political and religious repression, they were simply “repatriating” and reuniting with their heritage.

Anyway, in order to secure the exit visa, you had to get a vyzov (formal invitation letter) from a “family member” in Israel—this could be literally anyone, ours came via a random guy my dad met via the shortwave radio thing he did.  That vyzov got Soviet Jews as far as Vienna, and then all bets were off. There, Soviet Jews were given the first actual choice in their adult lives: where they wanted to live.  At Vienna station, we were met by a lot of different agencies that could help us get where we wanted to go—the big ones were HIAS, JDC, and Nativ (the Israeli liaison bureau). There was pressure from Nativ to make Aliyah in that it was incentivized: we could leave directly for Israel from Vienna instead of moving to Rome to deal with the American immigration process, we would be granted full citizenship on entry, there was government funding for programs specifically designated for Soviet olim ("those [Jews] who ascended") that could help with everything from transportation to immediate housing, education, and employment service, etc.  The derisive name they had for families like mine and your wife’s was “noshrim” (dropouts), we were seen as abandoning the mission of Aliyah and undermining the Jewish state, since Israel had invested considerable diplomatic and financial resources to secure emigration for more settlers vulnerable refugees—by choosing the US, we really were, as the Russians had always said, disloyal and rootless.