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middle of the music, because Soviet authorities tend to listen to the beginning and end of any
music tape to assure that it does not contain forbidden material. I managed to get his statement
back to the United States. Shortly thereafter he was released and came to live in my home while
he was trying to get into school here.

My interest in Soviet Jewry was stimulated by Elie Wiesel’s wonderful book The Jews of Silence.
But it became a passion only after a more personal encounter. In 1971, I was invited to become a
fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the Stanford campus in
Palo Alto, California. Forty fellows were invited from all over the world, to spend the year
writing and thinking. This year for the first time, a fellow had been invited from Communist
Romania, Michael Cernea. He was Chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
at the University of Bucharest and an active member of the Romanian Communist Party. On the
day before Rosh Hashanah, he invited me to take a walk with him through the woods. When we
were away from any possibility of surveillance he told me that his real name was Moishe Katz,
that he was a committed Jew, and that he desperately wanted to defect along with his family from
Communist Romania and move either to the United States or Israel. He swore me to secrecy and
asked if I would become his pro-bono lawyer in what would surely be a long-term activity, since
his family was being held hostage back in Romania. I immediately agreed and invited him to my
home for dinner that night, where we stayed up until dawn, listening to Jewish cantorial music,
which he had not heard since his youth some thirty years earlier. Tears flowed freely from his
eyes. Several years later, we were able to arrange for him and his wife to be out of the country at
the same time, and they both defected, leaving his two children and his elderly mother behind.
But within a year or so, with the help of Senator Kennedy and others, we managed to get the
whole family out. We have remained close friends since that time.

Another close friend who started out as a client is Natan Sharansky, now a cabinet member of the
Israeli government. When I represented him his name was Anatoly Sharansky and he was an
imprisoned Soviet refusenik. His mother and wife asked me, along with my friend and colleague
Irwin Cotler, now the Minister of Justice in Canada, to represent Anatoly on a pro-bono basis.
We continued to be his lawyer for nearly nine years. We were not allowed to meet our client or
even to communicate with him. For all we knew, he had no idea we were his lawyers. But we
represented him vigorously in the court of public opinion as well as in the courts of the Soviet
Union. We were also involved in proposed prisoner exchanges which included Sharansky, Nelson
Mandela and several Eastern European spies being held by the United States. Neither Sharansky
nor Mandela wanted to be part of any exchange for real spies, since they were political dissidents.
It is interesting to note, a especially in light of Sharansky’s high position in the Israeli government,
that when Sharansky was first arrested, the Israeli government wanted to have nothing to do with
his case, since they regarded him as a human rights dissident rather than as a prisoner of Zion. He
was, of course, both. When he was finally released some of the very same people who fought
hardest against Israel doing anything on his behalf were among the first to claim credit for his
release.

I will never forget how I watched my client walk - - really bounce - - across the Glinicke Bridge
and into the safety of the West. I knew he was well even while watching him on television.
Shortly thereafter I met him in person for the first time. He threw his arms around me and
whispered in my ear, “Baruch matir asurim,” which means, “Blessed be those who help free the

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