Elijah from the Taiga

The story of Lithuania’s Betar head, who founded the Prisoners of Zion group.


Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
16 April '10

It was a short time before Israel’s 30th birthday. Again I found myself in the small, modest living room of Mr. and Mrs. Pulerevitch on Tel Aviv’s Ben-Yehuda Street. It was an old building and the rented apartment seemed suitably suffused with old-world ambiance. The metropolitan hustle, bustle and brashness were all left outside. Inside everything was genteel and unhurried. Another time, another dimension.

I had become a frequent family guest, was affectionately called Sarah’le and pampered more like a favorite daughter than a news-reporter. Originally I met Yechezkel at his workplace, the Tel Aviv municipality’s paymaster department. He had founded the Prisoners of Zion Association and among my beats was the then-climaxing aliya struggle in the then-extant USSR.

The Pulerevitches are both long gone now. Yechezkel had the kindliest face and eyes that forever twinkled with a smile. His wife Ella filled another tea-glass nestled inside a dainty silver holder and pushed toward me more cookies in a china dish she rested on a crocheted doily. In his impeccably erudite Hebrew, laced with traces of Litvak intonation, Yechezkel inquired where my immediate family was on the very day Israel was born.

Sighing, he remarked that he can’t say for sure what he did on that pivotal 1948 day except that he spent it in forced labor as a logger in a Siberian prison camp in the subarctic taiga forests. But that’s also how he spent the other days of that period and he couldn’t tell them apart.

He had been at one camp or another since 1941. At the time of his arrest for the crime of Zionism he was the de facto head of Betar (the Revisionist youth movement) in Lithuania. That made him equal in status to Menachem Begin, Poland’s Betar head, who was likewise sent by the Soviets to the gulag. Begin, though, was released a year later, while Pulerevitch spent 17 years in camps and exile.

Yechezkel couldn’t specify when he learned of the Jewish state’s birth: “Prison and the taiga know no dates. Days aren’t individually distinguished and labeled. Time is marked only by the seasons of the year. But I did have my own Independence Day. For folks with calendars it was probably another date, but calendars weren’t part of my reality. The inner subjective reality of the inmate is deeper and more powerful than that of the outside world, and for me the day on which I discovered that a Jewish state had come to exist became my Independence Day.”

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