Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader died this week and his historic role of presiding over the dissolution of the communist regime is important to me as a Jew and personally as well. My maternal grandfather escaped the Soviet Union in 1947 as a teenage fugitive and my paternal grandfather endured seven harrowing years of forced labor in Stalin’s gulags for attempting the same. My father was born near Moscow, and his family miraculously emigrated to Israel in 1966, 25 years before the evil empire collapsed.
Professor Herman Branover, a Refusenik for over 15 years who eventually emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s, continued working on behalf of Soviet Jewry at the Rebbe’s behest and direction. In the spring of 1985, weeks after Gorbachev came to power, the Rebbe instructed Dr. Branover to notify his contacts back in Russia that the situation will change, and very soon every Jew will be allowed to emigrate. This was before the onset of Perestroika.
Despite his tremendous surprise and incredulity at such a prediction, he called his friends and communicated the Rebbe’s message in the codes they knew so well.
“How could that be?” one Refusenik asked. “I am under 24-hour surveillance from the KGB. One of their cars is parked outside my building as we speak!”
In 1987, months before President Reagan declared “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” the Rebbe set in motion an operation to construct thousands of homes in Israel for the Soviet Jews that would emigrate imminently. Again, no one appreciated the urgency of the matter, because the Iron Curtain seemed impregnable as ever.
A few years later, the Soviet Union was gone and while hundreds of thousands of Jews left, the underground Jewish infrastructure that survived over seventy years of persecution started flourishing openly.
Gorbachev visited Israel in 1992 and at a ceremony held in his honor at Ben Gurion University, Dr. Branover shared with the former president how the Rebbe had predicted this outcome in the spring of 1985. “How did he know that then?” he exclaimed. “Even I could not foresee these developments in 1985!”
Click here to watch how Dr. Branover tells this story.
In this week’s parsha we learn about prophets in Jewish life. In addition to communicating divine messages, predicting future events is integral to the role of the prophet and the basis of his or her legitimacy. Most people crave to know the future to take advantage of the markets or manipulate political power. In Judaism, however, the purpose of prophecy is to inspire us to remain loyal to G-d through learning Torah and doing Mitzvot, and to remind us that even if the world may seem to be going in the wrong direction, the future is brighter than ever.
In every generation there have been prophets in various formats, and the Rebbe declared that the ultimate redemption is imminent. The messianic era of world peace and tranquility our prophets predicted thousands of years ago will occur in our times and we can hasten its onset through increasing acts of goodness and kindness.