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Alright so this is a chat between Josh Furman and Joyce Gilbert and Katie Webber. Today is November 16th, 2018 and we're talking about Joyce Gilbert's diary from her trip to the former Soviet Union in 1984. Okay, so we hooked onto this um tour group. I think it was

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General Tours, I don't remember, General Tours. And then I would say, "I have a stomach ache I don't think I'm gonna go with you today." And you know and then I would spend the day visiting Refuseniks. That's that's how we did it. And I went with three

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other people. Two of them were members of our congregation and one of them was the mother, the step-mother of one of the members and, people from Brith Shalom in Houston. And the step-mother went on all the trips. She didn't go to visit any of the refuseniks and the other three of us did

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our thing. So it said, "A taxi ride to," all of a sudden in the middle of my talking about the air trip it says, "A taxi ride to E. D." which was Elena Dubinskaya. E. D. lives in this small apartment and then

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I have the address up there, with T.V. and many many nice gifts. Oh even the cab driver was embarrassed to take our money. Okay breakfast was quick. So as you read this it'll be the stuff that's stuck in there in the middle in the middle

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of it. Um the wind was bitter as we landed the aeroflot plane. Daughter, meaning E.D.'s daughter, her name is Helen, is shy and did not stay. E.D. small very outgoing, full of information and requests and then I go on to talk more about the aeroflot plane. And then um

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can you clarify for us Joyce some of the initials, the ones that you remember? L.B. is Lev Bronstein. L.B. is Lev Bronstein. E. D. is Elena Dubinskaya. He phoned R. I'm trying to think. He phoned R? Moscow, so that was Lev. He phoned R and JB. And Joyce,

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The reason that you're doing all this in code is what? Because at that time, in 1984, customs would pick up something and we didn't we didn't want to make it too obvious and who had visited. Because there could be you could be repercussions for those

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people potentially? Oh absolutely, absolutely. For communicating with you. And people would would routinely bring things into the Soviet Union. They would bring what kinds of things? Everything, we brought, I'm trying to think. Well we brought kosher things like the Osem cubes for broth and stuff like that. We always brought in a kosher salami, a

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long kosher salami. We brought some books but not too many. We brought children's things. We brought things that we, that people asked for. I used to have, I had weekly phone calls with these people before I left. And people would ask me for specific things and

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I would send tours to the Soviet Union and I would send them with specific things for specific people. I remember some photographer needed some kind of special paper and I would, I sent that in. But um I would, there were ways of doing this. You know, in

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'84, one of the things that we did and I did with women was to have them have the first, the top layer of their suitcase have Kotex pads. Because the customs people didn't want to mess with that. You know, even though they were new, they were,

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they didn't want to, they didn't want to touch that. You know, those kinds of things. I tell people when you're, when you're talking to the passport people, who were either old men or young, young boys, but they could be very nasty, "Don't look them in the

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eye. Just look at their earlobe," like I'm doing right now and it looks like you're looking in somebody's eye. That's a good trick. It is a good trick. Next time you get stopped on the street by a cop in your car. Were you ever followed by anybody? Or interrogated? Any of that? Oh yeah. The

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one thing that I remember so so vividly was one of the people that I went to was was a guy and he was, it was a little bit, he wasn't paying a whole lot of attention sometimes to things. And we had, we had, we had visited

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in St. Petersburg, we were in Leningrad at that time. We had visited Zev Zunshayn who was a Refusenik and he had recorded something on a tape. And we had a tape, you play the tape. I had a Gershwin tape and you play the tape for 30 seconds and then you

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stopped it and then you recorded him so that when they played the tape, they got Gershwin for 30 seconds and you know, hopefully they wouldn't continue. Um so we were packing to leave and um and he said something about the Gershwin tape, and I went like this because he knew that the

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hotel rooms were booked. So I took the tape and there was other people on the General Tours who were also doing what we were doing. We met them at the synagogue, at Simchas Torah, and we said, "Oh." That was a big annual event, right? Simchas Torah was the day that everybody came

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out. And all of the Jews came out to go to the synagogues. There were thousands of people. Normally, like in those days of public demonstrations of Jewish. Not at that time. Not allowed. And the second time I went, there was no problem. But in '84 they were much stricter. So I took the tape

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and gave it to these other people and I said, "Would you give it back to me once we get out, once the plane is airborne and we're?" And they said, "Yes." So I'm standing in the customs line in um in Leningrad and I see somebody at the

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end at the end of the hall and I knew it was KGB. You know, you knew that from the way the were dressed, they all wore leather jackets. And he's looking straight at me and I just knew. And he came over and said something and they tore my stuff apart,

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but they couldn't find the tape because that's that's what they were looking for. They found a book that I that I brought back it was about antisemitism, and they asked me why I had it and I said, "I saw somebody reading this on the on the trolly."

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And I did, I saw somebody reading it on the trolly, and I said, "I thought it would be interesting," and they said, "Okay" and let me go. That was um I don't know if he's probably in here later on, Slepak, Vladimir Slepak. Yeah. And we met

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with him and his wife at Elena Dubinskaya's house. So, here it is, call older son for more information, Alexander Slepak 215, Leonetta's younger son. Boys are and then somebody else's boys, Maria, Maria is size 50, Vladimir is size, both need warm short coats. Um

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and so when we left their house and it was late when we left Dubinskaya's house, her apartment, it was, it was after midnight. And as we came out there was a militia guard walking back and forth in front of the apartment building with his gun on

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his shoulder. And I guess I must have tensed and Maria Slepak just put her arm through my arm and we strolled away. Like because they were used to that kind of surveillance. I'm sure they were. So that was an interesting time. But when we went back in '89, refuseniks

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came to the airport to meet us. I mean that's who it was Boris Kelman is B.K. Boris Kelman is B.K. It's not Burger King. It's not Burger King. Um yeah and he came to the airport and I was so not expecting that they would be there. That

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must have been quite the shock. And I walked right past him and he said, "Joyce." But the and then the other one that that in '89 that we visited that I was very close to was Vladimir Raiz, R-A-I-Z, and they lived in Vilna, in

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'89. We also went to Vilna but we had, by that time, it was a Union of Councils group. We didn't go on it, you know on on a General Tour. We went as a group and we held meetings, you know outright meetings. We had, we went to

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a restaurant I remember and we had a rabbi with us who stood up and there were KGB men at the next table and he stood up and did a bracha. But you know, it was it was quite changed by '89. Gorbachev was beginning to get

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some power. What, what did you do with the tapes that you brought back to the United States? How did you then go about disseminating those? Well, I held them until I was asked for them. And then they were all archived. Okay, so they were all in I think we did

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this maybe the first time we met. Yeah, and you knew the people. Where did, do you remember? I think they're at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Right. They are, there's a large collection from the Union of Councils. I think that first they went to a university in somewhere in the Midwest maybe? I don't know.

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Ohio State. No. No, it was not Ohio. I don't think it was Ohio State. And then they went, they went to New York. But earlier than that, so you've just come back in 1984. I had an office I kept them all in, you know. Did you play them for the media? Did you distribute

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them to other Jewish organizations? How did you then use that material to get the word out about the plight of Soviet Jews? Oh, well we did, we had op-eds in the media, I didn't talk about people unless they were famous people that everybody knew about. I mean, I

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wasn't going to talk about personal things that, that I felt that people would not know about. Slepak was perfectly willing to, to let anybody know about him. And but some of the others weren't, you know, they were not, they were they were they were scared

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about things happening. So, you know, we just used our common sense. But you talked about op-eds. What other kinds of activities in in Houston did the did Houston Action do? When I said that the Federation was here in Houston and the Union of Council was here,

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that was true in almost every city in the country but Houston was different. And I think Houston was different in a lot of different ways, mostly because Rabbi Radinsky, of blessed memory, was, and he was the rabbi at United, at UOS. And he was a very a

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very calming, very, he made it clear that we had to hold together. So although we didn't take, as Houston Action, we took no money from the Federation, they did let us sometimes have our meetings there. We did cooperate with them on on on events. The Moscow Ballet

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came to Houston and the CRC, and the Federation, and Houston Action mounted a protest. We have a picture of that. No, but you know what, I may have a television thing. No, we have a picture of it. Oh, you have a picture of it. Yeah I can, I can go get it later. Oh no, I think I have, or I mean, if

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I didn't if I didn't give it to you, I told you who the people were in it. Right and we have and we also have a collection from Ellen Trachtenberg. Okay. Yes, she probably, of other material. I did protests at the University of Houston. I remember, I'm trying to

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think, protests and op-eds. Right, we did a play which we did, a we financed and and sent around a photographic exhibit. We financed Janie Rubin's trip to the Soviet Union with a a writer. And then we sent that that that exhibit around for two years

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and I think I made something like 37 cents on it. I mean you know. Wow. That was, God, it was just awful. But those photographs are incredible. Going in and out of Canada people couldn't, you know, get the Customs to release it. What, the exhibit? Yeah. You know because people weren't

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doing what they were supposed to. We have materials from Janice also actually. Yeah it was a great exhibit. I've seen those photographs. So yeah we we sent that around and and and then Rosellen Hoffman, Rosellen Brown and her husband Mark Hoffman did a uh wrote a play that that we had,

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uh like a, it wasn't a stage, like a reading about the history of antisemitism and Soviet Jewry, different things like that. Question? Where, who were you trying to educate about this? Like what was your purposes of doing the plays, just everyone? The public and the other thing that

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of course I did constantly was constantly bringing bring it up with the congress, with the the Texas delegation. Which some of whom were very very helpful and some of them couldn't couldn't care less. I can remember Mike Andrews, who was my congressman at the time,

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was terrifically helpful. Tom DeLay was very helpful. I can remember, I got a phone call one day in my office from somebody who said, "Phil Gramm would like to meet with you tomorrow." And he gave me the address of the Houstonian Hotel and I said, "Fine."

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And the next day I put on my black power-suit, I knocked on the door and somebody, this aide answered and said, "Senator Gramm wasn't quite ready to talk to me, would I sit over here?" And I sat over there and I'm looking around this place and

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I'm thinking, "This looks so familiar. Where have I seen all of these pictures and stuff?" And then um I looked at some of the pictures and I realized I was in George H.E.B and Barbara's apartment at the Houstonian. Sitting at the table was Phil Gramm and who

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should walk in after his run, all sweaty in his shorts and his sneakers, was George. Whoa, so that's where, yeah. But Phil Gramm kind of adopted a family, and DeLay adopted a family. Yeah. And you never knew how things were gonna happen. I had a family that I

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was working with in Baku, and Baku was the sister city of Houston, and they were the sister city of Houston because they both were oil capitals. And many um Jews who were in the engineering and those kinds of things were sent to Baku by the

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government to work, to work in the oil industry. And I had this family that um I went, Kathy Whitmire was the mayor of Houston, and I went down to see Kathy Whitmire and asked her to write to the mayor of Baku on behalf of this family.

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And she wrote, she must have written to the mayor of Baku, because maybe four or five, four years afterwards, my son, one of my sons was working in California and he called me up on the phone and he said, "There's somebody in my office who would like to talk

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to you." And I said, "Okay," and it was the son of this family. And the story that he tells is when they went to OVIR, which was the Office of Visa and Regulations, where they thought that they were going to get denied again, they were given

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their, you know they were given whatever the papers were, and the colonel in charge of the office said to him, "Who are you people? Why are you so important that the mayor of Baku would do something?" So I knew that Kathy Whitmire then had

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contacted him and it worked. So those are the things, you know, that happened. It's good to talk about it because now I can remember things that I couldn't. Yeah, yeah. Well we're so grateful that you came in today and that you preserved this diary, and that you're able to tell us

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about it. Yeah, and then of course that's the first trip and then the second trip, which is going to be probably a different pen. Black pen? It's much easier. It's going to be much easier to read and it talks about the meetings that we had. And some of them. By

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that time in '89 um people were coming out of the woodwork. You know, I remember being in a, in a restaurant and the waiter said to me, "Can I, do you think I can come, you know, do you think I can come to America?" I said,

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"Are you Jewish?" And he said, "I think my aunt might have been Jewish." Sure, whatever it takes. Were you also involved in efforts to resettle Jews in Houston specifically? Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, well that was really the Federation, the Federation did that. But I did help with

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several families. And what happened in Houston a lot was that we would we would adopt a family and we adopted a mother, and a father, and a teenage son, and her parents. And I can tell you a funny story about that one. That we invited them

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to, the first year that they were here, we invited them for Passover seder and Mila, who was the woman, said that her mother wanted to make gefilte fish. I said, "Oh that's not necessary. We have, I have everything." She insisted, so I said, "Fine." So, she comes to the house with a

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platter that, Ziggy Gruber couldn't do better than this, it was a fish. And there were there were there were olives for the eyes and there was red pepper for the gills and around it was tiny little fish swimming. And I just couldn't believe it. And

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we put it on the table and when it was time to eat and I served it, and I I said to Mila, "How did your mother do this?" I said, "I knew she lived at Goldberg Towers and her kitchen with this big." She said, "Well she just, you

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know, she she ground the fish and then she took breadcrumbs." And my my son-in-law had, you can't have bread, and my son-in-law had the fork, you know like this and my daughter said to him, "Eat it." I remember, I remember a young family that

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came with a young young boy, he must have been about three. And he was, had something to do with a dress designer and she was, she was an artist. But they came late at night and we were we were late getting to them for some reason

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and we got to the airport or they they landed earlier than we expected them to and there was nobody there to greet them and she was hysterical, you know? And so I came running up to her to find her and we had set up an

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apartment for her, for them and I had put some, you know, I had gotten some food and put it in there and then took it to the apartment and took her to the kitchen and showed her the food, and she said, "Is this all for us?" Because they're used to

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having communal, or they were used to having communal apartments, and certainly communal kitchens. So it was very touching, some of those things were very touching. Yeah, those are incredible stories. Where was, where was the office for Houston Action for Soviet Jewry? It was on Bellaire Boulevard and Renwick, in the

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middle of the barrio. Yeah, it was cheap, cheap rent, cheap rent and it was, it was on the first floor. Now a lot of people would come in because they would be interested in finding out about Soviet jewelry, jewelry. Jewelry? And I would say, "No no no no, look at the door, this is nowhere." Really? That

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actually happened? Oh yeah and I would get phone calls about Soviet Jewelry. Wasn't there like a Gilda Radner sketch on SNL where she's like talking about Soviet, this is in like in the '70s, she's talking about, "Why is everyone so worked up about Soviet jewelry?" Maybe, I don't know. But I didn't know anybody actually made that, They did. And then there was on

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the second floor, there was a physician's office and the physician's assistant was a young man from Latvia, from Riga, who had just come with his family and so he, when I would get a phone call and there would be somebody who wasn't, didn't speak a whole lot

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of English on the phone, I would call upstairs and have him come down. And so that got to be, and then I would have him, when I was going to call somebody I would have him there. And that that was fine until he got to the point where

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he would say, I would say, "I want to find out about such-and-such." And he would say, "What he's gonna tell you is." You know, before I even got to, yeah, he was now he's. How was your Russian? Did you, did you learn Russian?

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No yeah, just you know, maybe one or two words. Most of these people spoke English, educated people. When did, when did the office close? When did you close it? I'm trying to think. I think it closed in maybe the early '90s, 93 or so, either '93 or '94. By that time, everybody who everybody who

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had a reason to get out, was out by then. And even in '89 there were people who had, you know, they might have even had their papers in their back pockets, but they were waiting to see what was gonna happen with the economy. Yeah. What do you what do

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you think is the legacy of the Soviet Jewry movement? I mean you sort of look around the Jewish world today and you know, in 2018, obviously antisemitism is very much at the forefront of people's minds in a way that it probably wasn't even a year

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ago. But, but it's hard to kind of remember another time in recent memory when the Jewish community was so galvanized and united about an issue. And I think that that, I think that is the legacy. You know, I think that that that really stemmed from the

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Holocaust. From, the Jews saying that, "Never again will this happen." And you know, there's a story that I've told your class about or maybe Rhoda told your class this year, about Brezhnev. When somebody asked him about the Soviet Jewry movement, he said, "Oh, don't

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worry about it. It's just a bunch of housewives and students." Well this is what a bunch of housewives and students can do. That's true. There you go. Joyce, thank you so much. You're welcome. That was a real treat for us. You're welcome. It was a treat for me too. I'm glad to remember some of those things. And you know, Josh has my phone number,

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don't hesitate to call me if you have any questions. All right, we won't.