Torah underground: seventy Soviet years

The law of 1918 separated religion from state and school; the decrees of 1921 forbade teaching religion to children under eighteen. The Jewish section of the party—the Yevsektsiya—undertook to carry this out with its own hands: heders and yeshivot were closed, synagogues handed over as clubs, rabbis arrested. By the end of the twenties no open Jewish study remained in the country.

Secret study remained. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, built a network of underground heders and mikvaot across the country—for which he was arrested in 1927 and sentenced to death, commuted to exile and expulsion. His emissaries carried on without him. In Kazan Rabbi Bentzion Chaim Zilber taught his son at home behind curtained windows, and the son, Rav Yitzchak Zilber, carried Shabbat through university, labour camp and Soviet school without breaking it once in half a century. Such people were few, and of most we do not know the names.

In the sixties the struggle for emigration began; in 1990 the gates opened and a million people left. Those who had learned Torah underground became teachers for those who did not know it: from Rav Zilber's lessons in Jerusalem grew Toldot Yeshurun. A thread seventy years long did not break—and that is one of the little-spoken wonders of that century.