Yosef Berger-Barzilay Israeli journalist and political scientist Date of Birth: 21.03.1904 Country: Israel

1. Biography of Joseph Berger-Barzilai
2. Arrest and Imprisonment
3. Further Imprisonment and Rejection
4. Return and Legacy

Biography of Joseph Berger-Barzilai

Joseph Berger-Barzilai, an Israeli journalist and political scientist, was born on March 21, 1904, in a religious Jewish family in Krakow. In 1920, he joined the Zionist youth movement "Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair" and immigrated to Eretz Israel. He worked in road construction and served as a translator for a construction company. Two years later, he joined a small group of founders of the illegal Palestinian Communist Party and became its secretary. He contributed to the organization of communist groups in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Transjordan and established contacts with Arab leaders in Palestine. Several times, Joseph secretly visited Moscow and had a five-hour conversation with Stalin in March 1929 regarding the Palestinian and Middle Eastern issues. During the Arab riots of 1929, Berger-Barzilai hid in an Arab village from where he directed communist propaganda. In 1931, the Comintern sent Berger-Barzilai to Berlin as the secretary of the Anti-Imperialist League, whose chairpersons were Albert Einstein and Henri Barbusse. In 1932, Joseph was summoned to Moscow and offered (or ordered?) to lead the Middle East Department of the Comintern under the name of Joseph Berger. In those times and in that company, refusing was not accepted...

Arrest and Imprisonment

However, two years later, Berger-Barzilai was suddenly removed from his position and swiftly expelled from the party. On the night of January 27-28, 1935, he was arrested for "Trotskyist agitation" and sentenced to five years of forced labor camps. In April of the same year, he was sent to the Mariinsky camp in Western Siberia. He worked in the construction of a distillery and a railway line to the city of Tashtagol. After a year, he was urgently brought to Moscow and placed in the Lubyanka prison, where he was tried to be used as a witness in the trial of L.B. Zinoviev. Berger-Barzilai refused to cooperate with the investigation, resulting in punishment. On June 29, 1937, his case was reviewed "due to newly discovered circumstances," and by the decision of the Special Meeting of the NKVD, Joseph was sentenced to 8 years of ITL (corrective labor camps), counting from the day of his arrest. In August 1937, he was transferred to the Vladimir prison and from there, in December of the same year, to Solovki. Later, he was sent to Dudinka and Norilsk as part of his sentence.

Further Imprisonment and Rejection

In July 1941, Joseph was arrested again in the camp "for attempting to organize an uprising against Soviet power." He was sentenced to execution. However, Berger-Barzilai refused to sign the sentence and went on a hunger strike. As a result, the Taymyr District Court issued a new verdict, increasing his term of imprisonment from eight to ten years. In 1951, Berger-Barzilai was released from the camp but sentenced to permanent settlement in Siberia. He worked as a night watchman in a collective farm and later moved to the settlement of Maklakovo near Yeniseysk. There, he engaged in translating the works of Anton Chekhov into German. On February 29, 1956, the Jewish communist Joseph Berger-Barzilai was fully rehabilitated and reinstated in the party. On April 21 of the same year, he returned to Moscow and then immigrated with his family to Poland, and from there, in 1957, to Israel. However, the leadership of MAKI (Israeli Communist Party) opposed this decision. The party's secretary-general, Shmuel Mikunis, reported to the Soviet ambassador to Israel, A. Abramov, on June 22, 1957: "... The Soviet authorities rehabilitated him. He was released, but he did not stay in the USSR, although he was given a good pension. He went to Poland and now works in the Polish Foreign Ministry in the Department of International Organizations. He is hostile towards the Soviet Union. In his letter, he wrote to me that, in his opinion, the Israeli Communist Party takes the wrong position on the Hungarian question. He writes that one cannot defend the 'Stalinist atrocities' in Hungary. Furthermore, he indicates in his letter that he will not forgive me if the memory of those who died at the hands of Soviet fascists is not honored at the opening of the 13th Party Congress. The arrival of this person will bring nothing but harm."

Return and Legacy

However, despite the opposition from Israeli communists, Berger-Barzilai returned to his historical homeland. Moreover, years of imprisonment brought him back to religion. Since 1968, he lectured on political science at Bar-Ilan University and became an international authority on Soviet studies and the international communist movement. Berger-Barzilai described his life in the Soviet Union in several books: "Zoar Ba-Hatzot" ("Light at Midnight," 1962) in Hebrew, "Ha-Tragedia Shel Ha-Mahpecha Ha-Sovetit" ("The Tragedy of the Soviet Revolution," 1964), and the extensive work in English titled "Krah Pokoleniya" ("The Collapse of a Generation," also known as "Nothing but the Truth," 1971). Joseph Berger-Barzilai passed away in 1978 in Jerusalem. His wife, Esther Feldman (1898–1972), shared her life as the wife of an "enemy of the people" in her book "Kele Blisugar" ("Prison without Bars," 1964).