Postscript : Resettled Refuseniks Finding Israel a Challenge : Jobs are scarce, and it's not easy to adjust to a market economy. Still, many look back with no regret.

By MICHAEL PARKS

Dec. 22, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

REHOVOT, Israel —

The happiness of Alexander Lerner overflows from his small office in the basement of the Weizmann Institute of Science here and virtually envelops all who pass.

The warm and ebullient Lerner quickly ticks off the reasons for his joy. A coronary pump, the result of 20 years’ research on an artificial heart, is ready for trial use. He lives in a comfortable flat with his son and daughter-in-law; his daughter is just down the street. He cannot think of any unmet material needs. And, at 79, he is in good health.

“Best of all, I’m in Israel,” Lerner continued, saying it a second and a third time, articulating each word as if he were about to wake up from a lovely dream and find none of it true. “I am in Israel. I . . . am . . . in . . . Israel!”

Lerner struggled for nearly 17 years to be able to say those words. A leading scientist in the former Soviet Union, he applied to emigrate to Israel in 1971 but was repeatedly refused permission and became a leader of Moscow’s tightly knit group of longtime Jewish “refuseniks.”

“We turned the Soviet authorities’ refusal to let us come to Israel back on them,” Lerner recalled, “and in the end, not only were we freed but so were hundreds of thousands of other Jews.”

Lerner himself was finally allowed to emigrate in January, 1988, as Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev opened the borders to a massive Jewish exodus, which continues at the rate of more than 10,000 a month from Russia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics.

“Not every Jew will come to Israel, but I hope and expect that as many as 400,000 or even 500,000 more will come in the next two or three years, doubling the number who have already come,” Lerner said.

“This is what we really struggled for all those years--not only for emigration for ourselves and our families but for all of our people. . . .”

But Lerner, always one of the most politically perceptive of Soviet refuseniks, acknowledged that his resettlement in Israel was “next to miraculous” compared with the problems that most immigrants have.

“On my third day here, I was at work,” he said, “and I am working at a higher level, scientifically and creatively, than ever before. . . . This ‘coronary squeezer,’ as I call it, is really promising--it doubles the flow of blood into the heart--and my only problem now is making sure Israel does most of the production once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves it. . . . Everything has come together for me here in Israel.”

Far From Paradise

There are other Soviet immigrants, including some well-known former refuseniks, for whom Israel is far from the paradise of which they dreamed. Resettlement comes slowly and is hard. Israeli society is highly competitive, and after a lifetime of communism many immigrants are not prepared. Jobs are difficult to find, especially for scientists, engineers and doctors.

“Eighty percent of Tel Aviv’s street sweepers are Soviet immigrants, and half of them have university degrees,” said Vladimir Slepak, for many years the voice and the face of Soviet refuseniks in his role as spokesman for the group in Moscow.

“About 40 percent of the new immigrants are unemployed, and that puts an enormous strain on their families. All the Israeli government seems prepared to do is complain that it cannot absorb so many doctors and scientists and musicians. What we need is some creative thinking if this wave of aliya (immigration) is to reach its potential.”

Slepak, his famous black beard gone white and trimmed back, has serious difficulties himself.

His wife, Masha, a radiologist, was forced into retirement recently when she turned 65. But because she has not worked here for 10 years--they arrived only in October, 1987--she is not entitled to a pension.

Slepak, also 65, was the head of the main research laboratory at the principal Soviet television institute in Moscow before applying to emigrate in 1971. Today, he gets a part-time Israeli Science Ministry salary for making electronic instruments for researchers at Tel Aviv University. Otherwise he, too, would be unemployed and without a pension.

“The greeting we received was wonderful,” Slepak said of his arrival here. “It was a dream come true. All the pain and sacrifice was justified. We traveled a lot in the first two years to thank those who supported us for those long years and to continue the campaign.

“But our situation is very difficult--and quite typical for refuseniks. I did not work in my specialty for 20 years, and of course electronics went through several revolutions in that time. I worked hard to get up to the professional level required here, but I was too old to get a regular job. If I have to stop working, the welfare payment would just cover the mortgage.

“My problem is that I arrived in Israel too late. This is true of thousands of the Russian olim (immigrants). The people around you are sympathetic, we have found, and they really try to help. But officials let you understand that they couldn’t care less. They shrug and say, ‘What can we do? That’s the way it is. This is Israel.’ ”

Troubling Paradox

At least one Israeli official--Yuli Kosharovsky of the Jewish Agency--does care a great deal, for he, too, was a prominent refusenik and, like Slepak and Lerner, the focus for many years of worldwide protests in the international campaign “Let My People Go.”

“There’s a joke, ‘Israel wants immigration, but not immigrants,’ and it is more than partly true,” Kosharovsky, 51, said. “That is the troubling paradox of our success--we have managed to bring hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel, but what do we do with them? . . . Rarely has a country received such an immense amount of human capital, but Israel’s economic and social structures are too small to use it all.”

Kosharovsky, an electronics engineer and automation specialist with experience in the Soviet missile industry, initially wanted to “dissolve in Israeli society” after two decades as a Jewish activist in Moscow and Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg).

On his arrival here in March, 1989, Kosharovsky took a job to establish a cable television station, settled in an Orthodox Jewish community outside Jerusalem and strived to become “a real Israeli.”

“What I wanted after all those years was a normal life,” he recalled, “and I wanted time to adjust. I needed three years before I felt fully oriented. It took me a year and a half just to stop wearing socks with my sandals and another year and a half to have 30 or 40 places I could drive to automatically. I needed time to get my balance in this place.”

The focus of Kosharovsky’s energy now is the creation of export processing zones that will work in high-technology industries, bypass Israel’s notorious bureaucracy, avoid its high taxes and create jobs for the scientists, engineers and skilled technicians who are still flowing out of the former Soviet Union.

“Israel is continuing to pursue socialism when virtually every other country that tried the system is abandoning it,” Kosharovsky said, “and Israel has a bureaucracy that is nearly as massive and mixed-up as the one the Soviet Union had. No investor--not even Israelis--wants to put his money here, and consequently there are far fewer new jobs than the country needs.

“Export zones could mean 200,000 jobs in two years. They would be profit-oriented, they would soak up unemployment, they would speed our social integration. But all this also frightens the bureaucrats, who see their control of the economy slipping away, and so we face a hard fight.”

More than 100,000 Jews in the former Soviet Union are believed to have valid exit visas in hand, and Kosharovsky said that 1.2 million more have asked for and received the necessary Israeli invitations to come.

“We are risking tens of thousands of Jewish lives because of the problems that immigrants face here and that discourage others from leaving now,” Kosharovsky said. “Nationalism is rising throughout the former Soviet Union, and every ethnic group--except the Jews--has a territory to go to. . . . To my mind, it is necessary to take Jews out as quickly as possible before ‘ethnic cleansing’ starts in the former Soviet republics.”

Returning to Roots

For Ari Volvovsky, the ultimate answer to the problems that Soviet Jews face as they resettle in Israel is not jobs but a deeper understanding of Judaism and the Zionism that led to the establishment of the modern Jewish state.

“Our roots lie in Judaism, and if you want to live happily you should know and understand where you come from,” Volvovsky said. “Our life as refuseniks was very hard, and we had to know what we were suffering for. That is no less important now.”

A computer scientist by education, Volvovsky became a Hebrew teacher during his 15 years as a refusenik in Moscow and Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) and then “prisoner of Zion” after he was sentenced to three years in a northern Siberian labor camp on charges of “anti-Soviet slander.”

Now 50, he teaches Russian immigrants the history of Israel and, simply, “what it means to be a Jew. I tell people, ‘I can’t give you a job in your specialty, but I can explain how important it is to be here, how important it is to be here together as Jews and how to practice Judaism,’ ” Volvovsky said.

“We see Jews reborn as new people as they come to understand what has really brought them here and what binds them together.”

The majority of Jews arriving from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union know little of their religious heritage.

“When I was growing up in Gorky, there were 40,000 Jews there, and only a few old people knew anything of Judaism, its beliefs or its observance,” Volvovsky said. “Seventy years of Soviet dictatorship all but eliminated our religious and cultural traditions. People knew they were Jews because of what grandmother or grandfather told them, and they understood what discrimination they faced as Jews, but they understood little of what being a Jew meant.”

Volvovsky, who like many of his generation began his personal search after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, said that he came to see the Soviet Union as “a land of slavery, just as biblical Egypt was for Jews,” and decided to emigrate. “Like others, I read Leon Uris’ ‘Exodus,’ and it changed my life,” he recalled.

“Most of the Russian olim today come because they are fleeing the economic and social chaos that has come in the wake of the Soviet collapse rather than out of the Zionist motives we had,” Volvovsky continued. “But I still feel a responsibility to them. . . . We refuseniks of the 1970s banged on the door and insisted that it be opened. It was, our people are coming, and I feel I must help them settle here.”

‘100% Israeli’

Rabbi Yossef Mendelevich, 45, served 11 years in maximum security prisons and “hard-regime” labor camps before being released to come to Israel.

“I came to Israel to be 100 percent Israeli,” he said.

Another former “prisoner of Zion,” Mendelevich was jailed for his part in an abortive hijacking of a small Soviet aircraft in 1970. After 11 years in maximum security prisons and “hard-regime” labor camps, he was released to come here. He ultimately married a Tunisian immigrant he met on his second day in Israel, had five children with her, studied for the rabbinate and was ordained.

“I am an Israeli citizen, an Israeli rabbi and an Israeli soldier,” he said. “All our friends are Israeli, and I live in a completely Israeli environment. This was something I wanted from the time I was 16. I trembled then with excitement when I thought of Israel. When I was at university, I joined the Jewish underground in Riga (in Latvia) and published a Zionist paper as part of our struggle to come here.

“But we must realize,” Mendelevich continued, his eyes twinkling in anticipation of the forthcoming irony, “that not every Jewish heart burns with ardent love of Israel, that not every Soviet Jew wanted to come here, that not all of us are hard-core Zionists. Today, many people find themselves here and wonder how it came to be. These, we must help.”

Mendelevich works at the Jerusalem branch of Tuoro University, organizing classes in Hebrew and Judaism and helping retrain immigrant teachers for Israeli schools, social workers to work among the new arrivals and medical personnel for geriatric care.

“Four years ago, we saw that the battle for massive aliya had been won, and that the new struggle would be for absorption of the hundreds of thousands, even more than a million, of immigrants who would be coming,” Mendelevich said.

“This is work I began at high school in 1963. I feel like I was born for this, that God shaped my life for this. As a Jew, serving God today and achieving his will is to bring Jews to Israel and settle them here. This is the sum of all commandments.”

Missing the Spotlight

Even as they help other immigrants, however, the refusenik leaders of Soviet Jewry have struggled to find themselves as they resettled in Israel.

“Being a great Hebrew teacher in Russia does not make you a great Hebrew teacher in Israel,” said Yuli Edelstein, another “prisoner of Zion.” “That was a quick and very sobering realization.”

Another discovery was that his “15 minutes of fame,” as the late Andy Warhol had put it, were over within days of his arrival in Jerusalem in 1987 and he was just another new immigrant.

“There I was, fresh from the Soviet Union, fresh from prison, sitting in an English literature class on Chaucer at Hebrew University--I was famous, I thought--with all these beautiful 21-year-old women around me,” Edelstein, 34, recalled.

“Could they imagine, I wondered, that six months before I was in a prison camp where I was routinely beaten black and blue? No--they didn’t know, couldn’t care and wouldn’t listen. They could not relate to me, nor I to them. ‘Ah,’ I told myself, ‘life will be tougher here.’ ”

For veteran refuseniks like Edelstein, the difficulties have lain not in the short term, for there have been plenty of speeches to make here and abroad, nor in housing, for there have been special grants to buy apartments, nor even in jobs, for government funds can be found for a former “prisoner of Zion.”

“The problem for many prominent activists, quite frankly, has been going from somebody, a somebody who was a Page 1 name around the world, to almost a nobody in Israel,” said Edelstein.

He now works at an education foundation while his wife, a metallurgical engineer, earns a substantially larger salary.

“She makes real money while I deal with this Jewish business,” Edelstein joked.

‘Decision of Joy’

The Uspenskys, Igor and Inessa, have remained in the same line of work while moving from Moscow to Jerusalem. Ticks.

“We know a lot about ticks--quite a lot,” Inessa Uspensky said, sitting in her laboratory at Hebrew University. “We know how they breed, how they live, how they die and, as a result, we know how they can be killed.”

Inessa Uspensky smiled, and her husband smiled back, reflecting a lifetime of shared research and mutual knowledge.

For the Uspenskys, Jewish by birth and culture but not by belief, the decision to emigrate to Israel was difficult to make, difficult to adhere to but, as Inessa Uspensky put it, “so, so right.”

“It was very, very difficult because we had to stand as individuals against the regime, and that was dangerous in the 1970s when the big men could crush you and your family so very easily,” she said. “We cannot say we were the first--those people were brave beyond words--but we suffered, we truly suffered. . . .

“This was a decision we made for ourselves, for our children, for our parents because all were affected. Yet, it was a decision of joy for we freed ourselves, step by step, from the Soviet Union. Through the process of becoming and being refuseniks, discussing with other Jews our ambition to come to Israel and meeting with foreigners who supported us, we came to understand what freedom meant.”

Their decade “in refusal,” as Jewish activists termed the repeated rejections of their applications to emigrate, “took us out of our laboratories and opened us to other people,” Igor Uspensky said, recalling the odd jobs they had--as a veterinarian, translators, an elevator operator, typists, a night doorman--to survive.

“And now we are here,” Inessa Uspensky said, cutting in. “What do we find--a country that has succeeded in a deadly difficult situation, a very nice atmosphere among the individual people who all want to help, a terrible bureaucracy that is a throwback to the very things we left, almost like it was in one of my test tubes of dead parasites. . . .

“And so what do we think? Israel is clearly a very beautiful place, and I think that God gave it to the Jewish people to make up for a history full of difficulties. I am not religious--that’s not my way--but I really don’t understand Jewish people who don’t want to come to Israel.”

Immigrant Portraits

Name: Alexander Lerner

Age: 79

Emigrated: 1988

Soviet job: Scientist

Israeli job: Scientist

Quote: “Everything has come together for me here in Israel.”

Name: Vladimir Slepak

Age: 65

Emigrated: 1987

Soviet job: Laboratory head

Israeli job: Scientific instrument maker