Jonathan Pollard: Has the Punishment Come to Outweigh the Crime? : Let him go: He was wrong to sell U.S. secrets to Israel, but his unusually harsh sentence--life--is for being a Jew.

I remember clearly my travels with Avital Sharansky as we worked for her husband Natan’s release. I can still recall how deeply pained we and all people were, how angry we all felt at the injustice of his incarceration in the Soviet Union. Today, I act as Jonathan Pollard’s rabbi, devoting countless hours working for his release. Again I feel the pain, again I feel the anger.

To be sure, there is a major difference between the cases. Pollard, unlike Sharansky, is not innocent. Although Pollard felt morally impelled to warn Israel that the U.S. military buildup of Iraq posed a great danger to the Jewish state, legally he was wrong. He violated American law, and he has said that he deserved to be punished.

There are, however, many areas of similarity. Pollard, like Sharansky, can now be labeled a political prisoner. Sharansky was a political prisoner from the first day of his arrest. By contrast, Pollard was not a political prisoner during the first few years of his incarceration. However, now that he is serving well beyond the time served by others who have committed comparable offenses, now that he remains incarcerated because of improprieties, prejudice, downright anti-Israelism and elements of anti-Semitism that still exist in the departments of Defense and Justice--now he has become a political prisoner.

I’m not alone in this assessment. Two years ago, Ida Nudel and 15 other former Soviet “Prisoners of Zion,” in a letter delivered to then-Defense Minister Moshe Arens, declared that there remained yet another political prisoner suffering for his concern for the Jewish people, this time an American--Jonathan Pollard.

Just as activists legitimately and correctly protested against the U.S. government for dragging its feet in Sharansky’s case, they appropriately raise a voice against a perversion of the American justice system that resulted in Jonathan Pollard’s excessive sentence to life in prison.

There is a second similarity between the two cases, one that is common to the notorious Dreyfus affair as well. Pollard was arrested as an American but punished as a Jew. Although Dreyfus and Sharansky were innocent while Pollard was not, what binds all three cases together is that the respective governments used the convictions of these individual Jews as political weapons against the Jewish community as a whole. The severity of sentence and the intense involvement of high-level officials was intended to send the message, “Beware of dual loyalty.”

A third element that Sharansky’s and Pollard’s cases share is the harsh and unjustified prison conditions to which they were subjected. Sharansky’s mistreatment is well documented. Pollard is in his eighth year of solitary confinement. For four years, he has been in the Marion (Ill.) Federal Penitentiary, the toughest prison in the U.S. system. A majority of the inmates are transfers from other prisons where they committed vicious crimes, hence its reputation as “the last stop” and “the belly of the beast.”

Recently, Jonathan’s kippah (skullcap) was thrown to the ground. He was spread-eagled against the wall and his testicles squeezed. His kosher food is served rotten and his tefillin (phylacteries) are constantly split open by overzealous guards. Before coming to Marion, Pollard spent 10 1/2 months in a hospital for the criminally insane in Springfield, Mo.; during the first month of his stay there, he was kept naked.

There are other points of similarity to Sharansky’s experience:

- In both cases, the Israeli government did little toward attaining the prisoners’ freedom.

- In both cases, the American Jewish Establishment had to be converted to the cause.

- In both cases, once people became aware of the facts, they understood that the individuals involved stood for much more than simply themselves--in Sharansky’s case, the right of Soviet Jews to freely emigrate; and in Pollard’s case, the right of Jews to be judged by the same standards as their fellow Americans.

- In both cases, Jews of all backgrounds and beliefs felt an inner stirring to become involved. Sharansky talks of students and housewives who were responsible for his release.

The effort to free Pollard is a grass-roots one. A powerful testimony to this fact was the recent open letter in the New York Times to President Bush asking that Pollard’s sentence be commuted to time served; it was signed by 570 rabbis and 80 rabbinic organizations, representing the board spectrum of the American Jewish community.

In the years of Sharansky’s incarceration, the American Jewish community expended enormous energies working for his release. The call “Free Sharansky Now” reverberated everywhere. Today, a new cry is daily gaining strength: “Justice for Pollard.”

Free Pollard now. And in the end, as in Sharansky’s case, justice will be done.