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| Refusnik's
Story - Alexander Partinsky |
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Alexander
Paritsky’s father had experienced anti-Semitism during Stalin’s
regime and served in the gulag for ten years. When he returned,
Alexander, then a teenager, asked, “What does it mean to be a Jew?”
His father replied, “Now that you’re old enough to ask the question,
you’re old enough to discover the answer.” His father went to a
closet, pulled out an old prayer book, and as he opened the book he
began to cry. “I’ve been in prison for ten years because I’m a Jew.
I was going to teach you the aleph-bet but I don’t even remember the
letters.” This experience convinced Alexander Paritsky that someday
he must learn the aleph-bet and teach it to others. However,
attaining a doctorate in electronics engineering with expertise in
acoustics and optics and a prestigious position as chief engineer on
a project for the Soviet Navy were his top priorities initially. But
eventually he began to question the validity of Marxism. He read
whatever dissident literature he could find and one night he and his
wife, Pollina, came across a book of speeches and articles written
between 1907 and 1910 by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, an
uncompromising militant Zionist leader from Odessa,. The book
transformed Paritsky into a Zionist. He asked himself, “Why am I
struggling for Russia? Why don’t I think about my own people?”
He knew that with his position and access to secret technology it
would be very difficult to obtain an exit visa, but he applied
anyway in 1975. As he expected, his application was refused and he
was fired from his position. He was told, “You will never leave the
Soviet Union.” Paritsky found work as an elevator repairman and used
his knowledge of English to make contact with foreigners. In 1976
his family was adopted by a Soviet Jewry group in England who
organized a synchronized phone-in that jammed all the lines to
Kharkov, Ukraine where the Paritskys resided. Visitors from Lille,
France, Kharkov’s sister city, also wrote to the Paritskys and
expressed support for their right to emigrate in letters to the head
of Kharkov OVIR.
The Paritskys sought to have a memorial established at a site near
Kharkov where at least 15,000 Jews had been massacred by the Nazis.
The Soviets refused to recognize it and warned Alexander against
photographing and disseminating pictures of the site. KGB agents
questioned him and accused him of participating in an anti-Soviet
demonstration in 1978. Paritsky was undaunted in his effort to
reestablish Jewish identity. In late 1979 as exit visas were no
longer being granted in Kharkov he and his friends established the
Jewish University of Kharkov for new and old refuseniks. Partisky
volunteered to teach Jewish history based on a textbook given to him
by a professor who visited from Jerusalem.
Just before the school year began, on August 28, 1981, Paritsky was
arrested while he was using the public telephone at a post office.
The KGB and police claimed he was a spy passing secret information
over the phone, and charged him with anti-Soviet slander. The
Kharkov police, far more harsh than those in Moscow and Leningrad,
tried to beat him, as well as Pollina and their daughters. The
police then claimed that Paritsky had beaten them. While Paritsky
was awaiting trial his fifteen-year-old daughter, Dorina, was
visited at school by KGB agents who told her that unless she
renounced her father, she and her younger sister, Anna, would be
forcibly placed in a state orphanage.
Paritsky was found guilty and sentenced to three years of hard labor
in Siberia, near the Mongolian border. He was the only political
prisoner in a camp of young criminals who often beat him. His only
visitor and link with the outside world was Pollina, and he spent
400 days in solitary confinement, lacking warm clothes and with
nothing to eat but bread and water one day and bread and soup the
next. He had several heart attacks during his ordeal in the camp,
prompting Pierre Mauroy, the prime minister of France, and other
Western leaders to write to Andropov asking for Paritsky’s release
and permission to emigrate to Israel for medical treatment.
Pollina was able to accompany her husband on the five-day train ride
from the camp to Kharkov when his prison term ended in September
1984. When they reapplied for exit visas they were told that their
refusal would be for life, and they were fired from their menial
jobs as stokers. Dorina received permission to emigrate in 1987 and
went to Israel alone that year. Alexander, Pollina and Anna remained
in refusal until the following year when they received their exit
visas and arrived in Israel. At age fifty, Alexander started a new
active life in Jerusalem and founded a successful electronics
company, PhoneOr, which is based on a new technology, unconnected
with anything he did in the USSR. |
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