I enclose an account of our expenditure. I have taken 1,200 shekels from the amount sent, for my personal needs. If you were able to find a way of paying me even the most minimal salary that would ease our situation, the more so since the addition to our family entails extra expenditure and has temporarily deprived my wife of the opportunity of working.
We invite His Beatitude to visit our weekly service, which usually takes place on Sundays at 18:30 hours.
Father Efim (Dovitas)
7. 1 April 1985
D
OCUMENT
107-M
MARKED “SECRET”
MINISTRY OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS
In accordance with our agreement I am sending the quarterly report with a list of citizens of the State of Israel who have accepted baptism in the period 1/01–25/03/1985 in the churches of the ROC.
1. Anishchenko, Petr Akimovich, b. 1930, Church of the Trinity, Jerusalem
2. Lvovskaya, Natalia Aaronovna, b. 1949, Ein Karem, Gorny Convent
3. Rukhadze, Georgiy Noevich, b. 1958, Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem
4. Rubina, Eva, b. 1985, parents Rubin, Andrey Yosifovich and Rubina, Elena Antonovna (maiden name Kondakova), Church of St. John the Warrior, Be’er Sheva
5. Rapoport, Raisa Semyonovna, b. 1938, Church of St. John the Warrior, Be’er Sheva
6. Dovitas, Isaak, b. 1985, Church of St. John the Warrior, Be’er Sheva
Total baptized, 11 persons, of whom citizens of Israel (listed above), 6 persons.
Kindly be advised that my superiors await your response in respect of category TT individuals. We hope to receive the relevant notification no later than 15/04 of the current year.
N. Laiko
DOCUMENT 11/345-E
MARKED “TOP SECRET”
FOR N. I. LAIKO
23-34-98/124510 IYR UKL-11
Ir. Al. - Kadomtseva, Irina Alexeyevna, French citizen, Poisk Publishers;
Author - Mikhail Kuleshov, pseudonym Andrey Belov.
Informant: Ef. D.
8. 1984, Hebron
F
ROM A LETTER FROM
G
ERSHON
S
HIMES TO HIS MOTHER
, Z
INAIDA
S
HIMES
… details. I was called up for the “miluim,” a six-week retraining period for reservists. Deborah was left alone with the children, but our team is very solid and I knew she would be looked after. Deborah is a person who cannot bear having to ask for anything. Everything she can do for herself she invariably does. She needed to sort out our bank loan so she put the children in the car and drove to Jerusalem. We have a bus which takes about one hour to Jerusalem, the No. 160. It is armored and has security, but she decided to take the car. It wasn’t even particularly urgent, the forms could perfectly well have waited, it was about some insignificant penalty. The children were in the back seat, the baby sleeping in a basket, the boys on either side holding it. On the way back, right next to our house, at the crossroads as she was about to turn in, 30 meters from the checkpoint, the car was fired on. Deborah heard the glass breaking behind her, put her foot on the accelerator, and within five minutes was home. She drove into the yard, looked at the backseat, and saw Binyomin sitting in blood, silent, his eyes open wide. The blood was not his, it was the blood of Arik. The bullet hit him in the neck. Either it was a sniper, or ordained by fate. Deborah believes this was the revenge of the Arab workers I drove out when the house was being built. I haven’t been able to write to you for two months. Deborah is pregnant. She is silent and will not say a word. Her parents came from Brooklyn. Now they have left. That is our news. Our boy was buried in the old Jewish cemetery where Yishai, the father of King David, is buried and his great-grandmother Ruth. At that time nobody had heard of any Arabs. Then for seven centuries the Arabs owned these lands, profaned and fouled everything. One hundred and eighty years ago, Jews bought them out, and again the Arabs slaughtered everybody. That was in 1929, and now the cemetery has been partly restored. An artist from Moscow we know, whose newborn baby died, buried him in the cemetery ten years ago, without permission from any authorities, of course. Deborah decided to bury our little boy in this ancient place. There is a view from there over the whole of Judea. Our Arieh’s funeral was attended by all of Jewish Hebron. Everybody loved him, he was always smiling, and the first word he said was “lovely.” Deborah tries to speak Hebrew to the children, but in spite of that it’s mostly English.
Soon after this terrible event, our local Rabbi Eliyahu, with whom we are great friends, invited us to move not far from the cemetery. We sold our new house and on the site of the old Jewish quarter of Admot Yishai we set up our caravan. Seven mobile homes, seven families. I do not want to restore an old house, I want to build a new one, I already have experience of that. We will leave here only to go to that land. Do not be afraid, Mama. I hope we will live a long time and have new children here, but I will never leave this place, no matter what anyone says. I don’t give a damn that the graves of our forefathers are here. If Adam and Chava are buried here, Avraham and Sarah, Itzhak and Yakov, fine, but what holds Deborah and me here is the grave of our son. You will have to agree that the graves of children are a different matter from the graves of ancestors from thousands of years ago.
The Well of Avraham really is next to our house, though. I send you our last photograph of Arieh and the view from our mobile home over land which we will never leave.
INSCRIPTION ON PHOTOGRAPH: This is our little house. We planted the orchard behind it ourselves. Deborah is standing with her back to you and you cannot see her enormous belly.
9. 1984, Moscow
L
ETTER FROM
Z
INAIDA
S
HIMES TO HER SON
G
ERSHON
My dearest son,
We have been weeping for the past week over the photograph of Arik whom we were never able to see. You know what losses we have endured. Your elder brother died when he was 10 as a result of a terrible mistake by the doctors. I lost a beloved husband before he was even 50. The history of our family is terrible. We have been killed young and old, men and women. Almost nobody has died of old age in their own bed. What has happened to you, though, is unimaginable. Knowing how you hate wordiness, I will not describe to you all our thoughts and feelings about it, but simply tell you that Svetlana and I have decided to come to Israel. It will not be tomorrow, because although it is already two months since Svetlana left Sergey and is living at home with Anya, it will take some time to formalize the divorce. I also need time to complete my work, to get my class through to their school-leaving exams, and sort out my pension. What a panic there will be at school when I announce I am retiring! I carry all the literature teaching in the older classes because the second teacher is very weak. I cannot imagine how this ridiculous Tamara Nikolayevna is supposed to teach nineteenth-century Russian literature. She’s completely uneducated. For your part, find out what documents we need here, and yourself sort out whatever is needed in Israel.
I keep wondering what my departed Misha would say in this situation, and I feel that he would approve of our decision. Even though you and your father were constantly arguing and quarrelling, and you left home before you were even 18, your father always loved you most of all. It seems to me that what he liked about you were precisely those characteristics which he did not possess himself.
What you called cowardice was actually his boundless love for his family, for all of us. He was prepared to put up with anything in order to preserve the life of his children. When Vitya died of straightforward appendicitis, Misha told me—he allowed himself to say this just once in his life!—what a dreadful curse lay on our family. His grandfather had buried his son, and now he was doing the same. Who could have imagined that it would happen to a third generation?