Freeing the Captive

Many of us still remember the Seruvniks, the Russian Jews who lived in the former Soviet Union and were not allowed to practice their Judaism. At best, they had to hide their Jewish identity from colleagues and neighbors. At worst, they were denied jobs, harassed, and even put in jail for years on end, just because they were Jews.

In 1979, two young Seruvniks were able to flee Russia after rumors that the government was planning to exile all Jews to Siberia. Ella was 22 when she fled the Soviet Union using Israeli documents. She left Russia with her mother, a Ukrainian nurse and a Holocaust survivor who often talked about the survivors of extermination camps she treated at a Polish military hospital at the end of World War II. Ella met Mikhail, who also fled the Soviet Union, in Detroit then moved to New Jersey where they pursued their American dream.

How incredibly cruel, unjust, and ironic it is that Ella and Mikhail’s oldest child, 31-year-old Evan Gershkovich, is now imprisoned in the same country that his parents fled from and is held in the same prison (Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo) that held many rabbis and refuseniks like Natan Sharansky. Evan is the Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested on March 29, 2023, while on assignment and brought to Moscow to face trial. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has falsely claimed that Evan was collecting state secrets about the military industrial complex. Evan, the Wall Street Journal, and the United States government have categorically denied these claims, and he’s therefore considered “wrongly accused”, which makes him a political prisoner. Evan is facing 20 years in prison.

In Judaism, the mitzvah of Pidyon Shvuyim, freeing the Jewish captives, is extremely important. In his book, Mishne Torah, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the great rabbi, doctor, and Jewish scholar, declares that “... there is no mitzvah greater than the redeeming of captives.” He goes so far as to say that the mitzvah of freeing the captives is more important than the mitzvot of feeding and clothing the poor. Reasons for the importance of this mitzvah are rooted in Jewish history when Jews were not protected under common laws and were subjected to the cruel whims of captors and kidnappers. In fact, when someone’s life is on the line, we are commanded to do all that we can to redeem that person and save them from captivity.

I am telling you all this because I want you to be informed and pay attention to this case and to our religious obligation to bring a fellow Jew home. I want to encourage you to keep Evan Gershkovich in your hearts and in your prayers. This is a case where money and connections may not help, but if you are so inclined, the Wall Street Journal has put out ideas of how to raise awareness on social media. Evan was taken by the Russian authorities a couple of days before we sat at the Passover Seder. The exodus out of slavery in Egypt is the greatest Jewish story of escaping captivity. I pray that this was the last holiday he was not able to be with his family, and that his story will end with a miraculous flee out of Russia, like his parents before him.