Jewish Agency Takes on East Bloc Exodus : Israel: Group sees emigration from former Soviet Union as a challenge, but local authorities are cooperating.

Red and green pins dot the six-foot-wide map of the former Soviet Union--all spots where sizable Jewish communities remain, where economic collapse could bring political unrest and ethnic conflict but where Israel now has its own agents able to help the Jews to flee.

“There must be the option for every Jew to leave and to come to Israel, and I can say now that there is,” Baruch Gur, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Eastern Europe department, declared with a sweep of his hand across the map. “This is what we exist for--to keep the promise that Israel makes to every Jew.”

Gur’s 55 field workers in the former Soviet Union are ready for such an eventuality, he said, even if it means evacuating virtually all the Jews, an operation that would involve more than 2 million Jews who remain in lands that for generations have been both home and prison for their families.

“The decision of whether to leave is, quite understandably, the most difficult that a family can face,” Gur said. “But it is a decision that will be forced, literally forced, upon more and more families as the situation deteriorates in Russia, in Ukraine, in Central Asia, in the other former Soviet republics.

“They might have a month to decide, maybe a week, perhaps no more than a night, but for all this we are ready. . . . A Jew must be able to come to Israel--period.”

In the past three weeks, the Jewish Agency organized a “mini-airlift” that brought more than 5,100 Jews from Moldova to Israel.

“We can take out thousands of Jews each month, even tens of thousands, with the network we have in place,” Gur said. “And in an emergency, we could take out hundreds of thousands through transit points in Eastern Europe. We are on the ground there, and we have prepared for the worst situation, literally the worst, for the past three years.”

Gur, who is visiting the Jewish Agency’s 15 key outposts in the former Soviet Union, has arranged evacuations recently from Abkhazia, an embattled Muslim enclave in Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains and from strife-torn Tajikistan in Central Asia. In Moldova, ethnic Romanians have been battling Russians and Ukrainians in a virtual civil war over the future of that tiny country.

“This was not our fight,” Gur said, recounting his agency’s efforts assembling those refugees wanting to go to Israel from Moldova and then arranging for their official emigration, although it required a bus convoy through half a dozen front lines.

“No matter whose fight it was, our mission was to save the Jews, and that was not so simple,” he said. “To get everyone’s papers in order, we had to take them back to the capital, Kishinev, right through the battle zone. We had cannon to the right of us, cannon to the left and sometimes a lot of firing overhead. . . . But our relations with each side were quite reasonable, friendly even, and we got through, our people got out.”

The Jewish Agency, which has organized many dramatic rescues in its 63 years, including the Operation Solomon airlifts out of Marxist Ethiopia, is enjoying unprecedented cooperation with local authorities in the former Soviet Union, according to Gur.

“We have gone from banned under the Soviet regime to tolerated under President (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev to assisted and even privileged now in the post-Communist era,” Gur said. “This has made all the difference in terms of getting Jews to Israel.”

Agency envoys have also worked to bring Jews out of the Yugoslav conflict--”my most frustrating task,” Gur said. The agency has arranged for groups leaving Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Gur began building this network three years ago in anticipation of a huge outflow of Soviet Jews, a flow that in 1990 reached a record level of 185,227 as Soviet authorities dropped past barriers to Jewish emigration.

The Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization largely financed by contributions from Jews around the world, is committed to bringing “the maximum number of Jews to Israel in the minimum amount of time,” and it sees Jewish emigration from the former Soviet Union as a major challenge. “This is the Zionist mission today; this is what we exist for,” said Yehuda Weinraub, an agency official.

But the hardships of resettling in Israel--the massive unemployment, poor housing, social hostility to newcomers and overall uncertainty--have cut the inflow from the former Soviet Union to about a third of what it was at its peak. To the agency’s chagrin, more Russian and Ukrainian Jews now resettle in the United States, Germany and other European countries than in Israel. Thus, Jewish emigration from the former Soviet Union will total about 120,000 this year, but fewer than half of those are likely to resettle in Israel.

Gur is, nevertheless, certain that immigration to Israel, now running at 5,000 to 6,000 a month, will rise as high as 10,000 a month early next year and remain there for at least three to five years. And that quickly adds up to more than 500,000 new immigrants for Israel in the next four to five years from Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, according to Gur.

“We think there are 3- to 3 1/2-million Jews there--that’s much more than the official figure, but we believe it’s right because we find that many people have hid their Jewishness,” Gur said.

“If there is trouble, ethnic conflict, political instability, economic collapse, there will be problems for Jews,” he said. “That is the way it always has been. And then I would say that emigration would quickly double, probably triple, even quadruple. These are the possibilities for which we are preparing.”