In the fall of 1983, the events in the Old Country spoke against the joyfulness of the Jewish festivals. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, the Iron Curtain, remained in force across the continent of Europe. The Berlin Wall, the most striking symbol of the Cold War, was very much in place. Under the iron-fist leadership of Yuri Andropov, the Soviet Union remained a police state that denied basic civil liberties and crushed all opposition to the Marxist-Leninist worldview. The Soviet government was bearing down hard upon the Jewish population. Jewish and Hebrew learning was...