The Letter of the Eighteen: how the Soviet Jewry movement began

On 6 August 1969 (22 Av 5729) eighteen religious Georgian Jewish families—chiefly from Kutaisi, with signatories from Poti and Tbilisi—sent three letters: to the Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir; to Israel's representative at the UN, Yosef Tekoah; and to the UN Commission on Human Rights—asking to be allowed to emigrate to Israel. They grounded the request in faith and nationhood, not in persecution, and expressly asked that the letter be published and read in Russian on Kol Yisrael.

Why this is the turning point. Golda Meir read the letter at the UN, and the question of emigration ceased to be a private grievance and became a human-rights claim addressed to an international body. It is this document that is conventionally identified as the beginning of the mass movement for Soviet Jewish emigration—before the Leningrad hijacking affair (June 1970) and before the refusenik campaigns that Western readers remember.

Why from Georgia. In 1979 nearly half of all ninety functioning synagogues in the USSR were in Georgia, and the level of religious knowledge there was markedly higher than in the rest of the Union. The emigration movement began where religious life had survived—not where political organisation was strongest.

The consequence: between 1971 and 1981 about thirty thousand Georgian Jews emigrated to Israel—more than half the community. The numbers: the census of 1897 gives 6,407 Georgian speakers (a count of language, not of people); the peak of 1970 is 55,382; 1989, about 24,800; a second wave in the 1990s and 2000s, after independence in 1991 and the economic collapse. Today there are between 1,500 and 8,700 in Georgia—the spread reflects different definitions; in Israel, about 120,000 of Georgian origin.

And what belongs beside this letter, so that the Georgian chapter does not reduce to an idyll. Georgian Jewry indeed knew almost no expulsions—a presence unbroken for at least sixteen hundred years. And at the same time six blood libels are recorded in Georgia, reportedly the highest concentration anywhere in the world, and the Kutaisi case of 1878–80 ended in the first acquittal in Russian judicial history on such a charge. Both statements are true at once.