The tireless campaigning by members of the Irish Jewish community on behalf of persecuted Jews in the 1970s Soviet Union was retold in riveting fashion in Aoife Kelleher’s Iron Ladies (RTÉ One, 10.15pm, Thursday).
This striking film is a fascinating snapshot of the tensions that defined the Cold War and a testament to the fortitude of Irish Judaism in a world beset with anti-Semitism, much of it radiating from the workers’ paradise centred in Moscow, Russia.
What’s especially impressive is how it interweaves the broad sweep of history – starting with a relatively nascent Israel protecting itself from hostile surrounding countries during the 1967 Six-Day War – with the on-the-ground campaign by the women who dubbed themselves the 35s. This was in reference to the arrest, in 1970, of 35-year-old Odessa-born librarian Raiza Palatnik, whom the Soviet authorities had condemned as a “refusenik” who did not wish to contribute to their communist wonderland and instead sought a future in Israel.
Their slice-of-life memories are heart-warming and a stark reminder of the arbitrary cruelty of the Soviet Union, even in the relatively becalmed early 1970s when the terror of Stalin had given way to a less murderous, but no less vigilant, police state.
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But the complexities of the story are acknowledged, too – fleeing to Israel with an understandable loathing of far-left politics, former Soviet Jews boosted the right-wing in Israel, with consequences that rippled down the decades.
Among those giving testimony is Dubliner Joyce Shaper, who recalls picketing the Soviet Embassy in Dublin while heavily pregnant. “I went straight to the hospital where my daughter was born. My daughter Suzie is my refusenik baby.”
She later travelled to Moscow with other members of the 35s, where they defied the KGB to smuggle underwear and other items to the refuseniks. “Even if it’s something small, do it – because that’s what counts,” she says.
In the background of the story is the shadow of the Holocaust. Shaper talks about an aunt who survived Auschwitz and who, on its liberation, was handed boots by another prisoner. They told her: “Take my boots. I won’t make it.”
Celebrities flocked to the cause of the 35s, among them Judi Dench and Laurence Olivier. The pressure by campaigners in Dublin, London and elsewhere brought about concrete results, too.
When Mikhail Gorbachev met Ronald Reagan in Washington in the 1980s, 250,000 protesters filled the mall – symbolising the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
Sensing the winds of history shifting, Gorbachev relented and approved the release of refusenik Natan Sharansky, who had not seen his wife for more than a decade.
“I was part of something that could not be called any other word but a miracle,” says one former refusenik – astonished still by these remarkable women and their unyielding pursuit of justice.
