“Reagan’s interest in Soviet Jewry was immense; it was close to the first issue on the American agenda and was part of the confrontation between the two superpowers,” Yitzhak Shamir told authors Deborah and Gerald Strober. “The Soviet leaders,” Shamir added, “told me that every time they met with Shultz, he raised the issue of Soviet Jewry, and they would ask him, ‘Why do you do this?’ Shultz answered that this was very important.”
Elliott Abrams, who served under Shultz as an assistant secretary of state, told the Strobers that “The Reagan administration kept beating the Soviet Union over the issue of the Soviet Jews and kept telling them, ‘You have to deal with this question. You will not be able to establish the kind of relationship you want with us unless you have dealt with this question…’ “
According to Richard Schifter, another assistant secretary of state, when Gorbachev came to Washington in December 1987 for a summit with Reagan, it was just a couple of days after a huge rally for Soviet Jews had been held in the nation’s capital and the person who was the note-taker at the meeting told me that Reagan started out by saying to Gorbachev, “You know, there was this rally on the Mall the other day.” “And Gorbachev said, ‘Yes, I heard about it. Why don’t you go on and talk about arms control?” And for five minutes, Reagan kept on talking about the rally and the importance of the Jewish emigration issue to the United States, when Gorbachev wanted to talk about something else.”
The Reagan administration was instrumental in gaining the release in 1986 of prominent Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for nine years on trumped-up treason charges. Now a government minister in Israel, Sharansky recalled his reaction when, in 1983, confined to a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border, he saw on the front page of Pravda that Reagan had labeled the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.’ As Sharansky described it, “Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s ‘provocation’ quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. I never imagined that three years later I would be in the White House telling this story to the president….Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.”
(Jason Maoz)
“I’ve believed many things in my life,” Reagan stated in his memoirs, “but no conviction I’ve ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United states must ensure the survival of Israel.”