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U.S. Rep. Charles Vanik remembered
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BY: Douglas J. Guth Senior Staff Reporter
In November 1999, the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland organized a 25th anniversary celebration of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a measure intended to force the Soviet Union to allow more Jews to emigrate.
Ohio congressman and co-sponsor of the bill, Charles A. Vanik, was at the event. Vanik, 94, died on Aug. 29.
At the end of that celebratory night in 1999, many people lined up to speak to Vanik. Two of them were Esther and Boris Kolker, who immigrated to Cleveland in 1993. “Do you know that you are
“Do you know that you are one of the most hated people in the Russian mass media?” Boris asked Vanik. Vanik just smiled and said, “Yes, I know it, and I am proud of it.”
Local leaders of the effort to free Soviet Jews say Vanik’s landmark bill stands tall on the landscape of the Soviet refusenik movement. Those who knew the outspoken liberal Democrat from Cleveland remember him as a “righteous gentile” of vision and compassion.
Vanik’s legislation allowed thousands of Jews out of the Soviet Union while “changing the course of how the United States confronted the forces of oppression,” said Ed Robin, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, in a recent interview with JTA.
It is not incidental that a Cleveland congressman was interested in the refusenik issue, as Northeast Ohio was the epicenter of the movement. Clevelander Mark Talisman (see related story on p. 68) worked on the amendment’s text as head of Vanik’s staff. Moreover, the movement to free Soviet Jews was founded in the early 1960s by Clevelanders including Herb Caron, Daniel Litt and Louis Rosenblum.
In 1963, Rosenblum established the grassroots Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism with other congregants of Beth Israel-The West Temple. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1974 to meet refuseniks and spread the word about the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
Rosenblum was appalled by exorbitant education and travel taxes imposed on citizens who wanted to emigrate. The amendment that answered this government-sanctioned prejudice, he believes, is the “most important piece of ‘human legislation’ to come out of Congress in the last century.”
Vanik’s commitment came not just from his lifelong closeness to Jews in his native Cleveland, but to his impassioned support of civil rights, contends Al Gray. A Moreland Hills resident, Gray helped reveal the plight of Soviet Jewry to the U.S. government as one of the few attorneys invited to observe the 1978 trial of Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in Moscow.
“Vanik made freeing Soviet Jews a cause,” notes Gray. “I practiced law for 30 years and met many politicians during that time. Vanik was one of the great ones.”
One of Vanik’s most famous acts was abdicating his seat in 1968 so an African-American, Louis Stokes, could become the first black congressman elected from Ohio.
The congressman’s appeal crossed party lines, says William Daroff, a former Republican lobbyist who now serves as vice president of public policy and director of the Washington office of United Jewish Cimmunities. The ex-Clevelander remembers Vanik not just for his famous bow ties, but as a representative of a “bygone era of statesmen seeking positive collaborative change.”
Vanik’s milestone amendment “was a megaphone by Congress toward the Kremlin,” adds Daroff. Suddenly, Soviet Jews “had the full weight of the American government behind them.”
As a Jew living in Ufa, a city in Russia’s Ural Mountains, during the ’60s and ’70s, Kolker never thought he would be able to leave his home country. “I always thought (living in America) was a dream that would never be realized,” he admits.
While Kolker and his family did not leave Russia during the first major wave of emigrations, “Jackson-Vanik opened the door for Russia’s Jews,” Kolker maintains. “Now that door is wide open for everyone.”
With Vanik’s death, adds Rosenblum, “the world has lost one important mensch.”
dguth@cjn.org
Jackson-Vanik amendment
Beginning in August 1972, the Soviet Union began assessing exorbitant “education reimbursement fees” (diploma taxes) on its citizens wishing to emigrate, primarily targeting Soviet Jews.
Charles Vanik, who represented Northeast Ohio for 26 years, asked Mark Talisman, who was his chief of staff on Capitol Hill, to find a legislative solution. In his research, Talisman discovered an account of President Abraham Lincoln imposing trade restrictions on Russian imperialists who were conducting pogroms against Jews.
It turned out there were other, similar U.S. precedents as well.
Talisman wrote the House version of the amendment, and Vanik introduced it at a press conference in 1973 together with Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Rep. Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. The amendment was designed to deny unconditional normal trade relations to certain countries that had non-market economies and that restricted emigration rights.
Mills originally opposed the bill. Clevelander Harry Stone learned of Mills’s reluctance to support it, and as head of an American Greetings plant that employed 1,000 workers in Mills’s district, Stone and his brother Irving exerted pressure on the congressman to publicly endorse the legislation. Vanik’s bill eventually passed Congress with an unprecedented 388-44 vote.
Stone was happy to lend a hand. “I knew the Jews in Russia needed help,” he told this reporter. “They didn’t have jobs, and their way of life was poor.”
In 1974, 13,221 Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union. Just five years later, in 1979, 51,320 Jews emigrated. The Russian Jewish community in the United States today numbers between 750,000 and one million, though some estimates are twice as high. In addition, an estimated one million more Jews have immigrated to Israel during this time.
Cleveland experienced a trickle of Soviet immigration before 1975 n approximately 2,500 resettled here from 1971 to 1988, according to the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland. The numbers increased significantly after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1989 through 2003, Federation helped resettle approximately 6,200 Soviet Jews in Cleveland, at one point averaging nearly 80 per month. An estimated 10,000-12,000 live here now.
In 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev urged scrapping the bill that had helped so many, saying: “Why should the dead hold onto the coattails of the living? I mean the Jackson-Vanik amendment. One of them (Jackson) is already physically dead. The other is politically dead.”
The New York Times reported that Vanik countered: “Lenin has been dead for a long time, and they still live under his guidance.” The amendment is still on the books today.
With reports from The New York Times.
Charles Albert Vanik, a great and true man
BY: MARK TALISMAN Special to the CJN
U.S. Rep. Charlie Vanik set a standard as a leader, which we could only hope to keep up with (literally) or understand. Locally initiated issues and momentous times often found him in the center, radiating confidence and assurances:
• A rabbi from South Taylor Road, agitated and forlorn because cucumbers and apples were coated with a glossing wax of beef tallow, making them treif (non-kosher). Charlie solved the problem for the entire country in two hours.
• Medicare legislation was liberated from its hostage status for over five decades when Charlie became the one-vote margin needed to vote the Medicare bill into law.
• An 83-year-old Cleveland Heights woman took three buses to get to the only Social Security office at the Federal Building downtown. One blustery winter’s day she fell on the ice and was injured just trying to get what she was owed. Esther Becker’s case allowed Charlie to convince the Social Security Administration to create convenient neighborhood Social Security offices all over the country.
• Then there were the years (20 in all!) working with Akron’s Rep. John Seiberling to create the first-ever urban national park. Now named the Cuyahoga Valley Park, it encompasses over 30,000 acres of protected waterways, marshlands and wildlife sanctuaries smack in the middle of a densely populated Cleveland-Akron corridor.
As Charlie mellowed and aged, he migrated to international affairs.
Meetings between Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Vanik, first at Blair House (across from the White House) and later in the Kremlin and other private places, helped open doors through the much-vaunted Jackson-Vanik amendment embedded in Section IV of the Trade Reform Act of 1974. This amendment kept the door open for millions of émigrés! Millions of Jews from all over the Soviet Union, plus Pentecostals, Baptists and evangelicals benefited.
Vanik’s patience, guile, cunning, street smarts and, above all, inner belief in himself that all was possible, catapulted this kid from the neighborhood into the white hot light of so many issues seeking solutions that would work.
He never forgot that real people’s lives were at stake, Many times I was told by family members of a recently deceased loved one that they found the letter from their friend Charlie among prized correspondence or in a bank vault, assuring the recipient that all was done or that he had tried his best and would not stop until the problem was resolved.
Let his light be a blessing and lesson for so many now who seem to have forgotten why we all are here and what may really be important.
Mark Talisman served as legislative assistant to Rep. Charlie Vanik.
Ohio congressman and co-sponsor of the bill, Charles A. Vanik, was at the event. Vanik, 94, died on Aug. 29.
At the end of that celebratory night in 1999, many people lined up to speak to Vanik. Two of them were Esther and Boris Kolker, who immigrated to Cleveland in 1993. “Do you know that you are
“Do you know that you are one of the most hated people in the Russian mass media?” Boris asked Vanik. Vanik just smiled and said, “Yes, I know it, and I am proud of it.”
Local leaders of the effort to free Soviet Jews say Vanik’s landmark bill stands tall on the landscape of the Soviet refusenik movement. Those who knew the outspoken liberal Democrat from Cleveland remember him as a “righteous gentile” of vision and compassion.
Vanik’s legislation allowed thousands of Jews out of the Soviet Union while “changing the course of how the United States confronted the forces of oppression,” said Ed Robin, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, in a recent interview with JTA.
It is not incidental that a Cleveland congressman was interested in the refusenik issue, as Northeast Ohio was the epicenter of the movement. Clevelander Mark Talisman (see related story on p. 68) worked on the amendment’s text as head of Vanik’s staff. Moreover, the movement to free Soviet Jews was founded in the early 1960s by Clevelanders including Herb Caron, Daniel Litt and Louis Rosenblum.
In 1963, Rosenblum established the grassroots Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism with other congregants of Beth Israel-The West Temple. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1974 to meet refuseniks and spread the word about the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
Rosenblum was appalled by exorbitant education and travel taxes imposed on citizens who wanted to emigrate. The amendment that answered this government-sanctioned prejudice, he believes, is the “most important piece of ‘human legislation’ to come out of Congress in the last century.”
Vanik’s commitment came not just from his lifelong closeness to Jews in his native Cleveland, but to his impassioned support of civil rights, contends Al Gray. A Moreland Hills resident, Gray helped reveal the plight of Soviet Jewry to the U.S. government as one of the few attorneys invited to observe the 1978 trial of Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in Moscow.
“Vanik made freeing Soviet Jews a cause,” notes Gray. “I practiced law for 30 years and met many politicians during that time. Vanik was one of the great ones.”
One of Vanik’s most famous acts was abdicating his seat in 1968 so an African-American, Louis Stokes, could become the first black congressman elected from Ohio.
The congressman’s appeal crossed party lines, says William Daroff, a former Republican lobbyist who now serves as vice president of public policy and director of the Washington office of United Jewish Cimmunities. The ex-Clevelander remembers Vanik not just for his famous bow ties, but as a representative of a “bygone era of statesmen seeking positive collaborative change.”
Vanik’s milestone amendment “was a megaphone by Congress toward the Kremlin,” adds Daroff. Suddenly, Soviet Jews “had the full weight of the American government behind them.”
As a Jew living in Ufa, a city in Russia’s Ural Mountains, during the ’60s and ’70s, Kolker never thought he would be able to leave his home country. “I always thought (living in America) was a dream that would never be realized,” he admits.
While Kolker and his family did not leave Russia during the first major wave of emigrations, “Jackson-Vanik opened the door for Russia’s Jews,” Kolker maintains. “Now that door is wide open for everyone.”
With Vanik’s death, adds Rosenblum, “the world has lost one important mensch.”
dguth@cjn.org
Jackson-Vanik amendment
Beginning in August 1972, the Soviet Union began assessing exorbitant “education reimbursement fees” (diploma taxes) on its citizens wishing to emigrate, primarily targeting Soviet Jews.
Charles Vanik, who represented Northeast Ohio for 26 years, asked Mark Talisman, who was his chief of staff on Capitol Hill, to find a legislative solution. In his research, Talisman discovered an account of President Abraham Lincoln imposing trade restrictions on Russian imperialists who were conducting pogroms against Jews.
It turned out there were other, similar U.S. precedents as well.
Talisman wrote the House version of the amendment, and Vanik introduced it at a press conference in 1973 together with Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Rep. Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. The amendment was designed to deny unconditional normal trade relations to certain countries that had non-market economies and that restricted emigration rights.
Mills originally opposed the bill. Clevelander Harry Stone learned of Mills’s reluctance to support it, and as head of an American Greetings plant that employed 1,000 workers in Mills’s district, Stone and his brother Irving exerted pressure on the congressman to publicly endorse the legislation. Vanik’s bill eventually passed Congress with an unprecedented 388-44 vote.
Stone was happy to lend a hand. “I knew the Jews in Russia needed help,” he told this reporter. “They didn’t have jobs, and their way of life was poor.”
In 1974, 13,221 Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union. Just five years later, in 1979, 51,320 Jews emigrated. The Russian Jewish community in the United States today numbers between 750,000 and one million, though some estimates are twice as high. In addition, an estimated one million more Jews have immigrated to Israel during this time.
Cleveland experienced a trickle of Soviet immigration before 1975 n approximately 2,500 resettled here from 1971 to 1988, according to the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland. The numbers increased significantly after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1989 through 2003, Federation helped resettle approximately 6,200 Soviet Jews in Cleveland, at one point averaging nearly 80 per month. An estimated 10,000-12,000 live here now.
In 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev urged scrapping the bill that had helped so many, saying: “Why should the dead hold onto the coattails of the living? I mean the Jackson-Vanik amendment. One of them (Jackson) is already physically dead. The other is politically dead.”
The New York Times reported that Vanik countered: “Lenin has been dead for a long time, and they still live under his guidance.” The amendment is still on the books today.
With reports from The New York Times.
Charles Albert Vanik, a great and true man
BY: MARK TALISMAN Special to the CJN
U.S. Rep. Charlie Vanik set a standard as a leader, which we could only hope to keep up with (literally) or understand. Locally initiated issues and momentous times often found him in the center, radiating confidence and assurances:
• A rabbi from South Taylor Road, agitated and forlorn because cucumbers and apples were coated with a glossing wax of beef tallow, making them treif (non-kosher). Charlie solved the problem for the entire country in two hours.
• Medicare legislation was liberated from its hostage status for over five decades when Charlie became the one-vote margin needed to vote the Medicare bill into law.
• An 83-year-old Cleveland Heights woman took three buses to get to the only Social Security office at the Federal Building downtown. One blustery winter’s day she fell on the ice and was injured just trying to get what she was owed. Esther Becker’s case allowed Charlie to convince the Social Security Administration to create convenient neighborhood Social Security offices all over the country.
• Then there were the years (20 in all!) working with Akron’s Rep. John Seiberling to create the first-ever urban national park. Now named the Cuyahoga Valley Park, it encompasses over 30,000 acres of protected waterways, marshlands and wildlife sanctuaries smack in the middle of a densely populated Cleveland-Akron corridor.
As Charlie mellowed and aged, he migrated to international affairs.
Meetings between Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Vanik, first at Blair House (across from the White House) and later in the Kremlin and other private places, helped open doors through the much-vaunted Jackson-Vanik amendment embedded in Section IV of the Trade Reform Act of 1974. This amendment kept the door open for millions of émigrés! Millions of Jews from all over the Soviet Union, plus Pentecostals, Baptists and evangelicals benefited.
Vanik’s patience, guile, cunning, street smarts and, above all, inner belief in himself that all was possible, catapulted this kid from the neighborhood into the white hot light of so many issues seeking solutions that would work.
He never forgot that real people’s lives were at stake, Many times I was told by family members of a recently deceased loved one that they found the letter from their friend Charlie among prized correspondence or in a bank vault, assuring the recipient that all was done or that he had tried his best and would not stop until the problem was resolved.
Let his light be a blessing and lesson for so many now who seem to have forgotten why we all are here and what may really be important.
Mark Talisman served as legislative assistant to Rep. Charlie Vanik.
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