c. 1996 Religion News Service
TEL AVIV, Israel (RNS)-“My bones ache even as I am speaking,”exclaimed Alexander Kalentirsky.
A formidable man who once held a senior post with a high security clearance at a Moscow construction firm, 51-year-old Kalentirsky is not used to feeling ill or powerless.
Ten years ago, he volunteered to supervise the construction of the protective”sarcophagus”over the radioactive remains of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which exploded on April 26, 1986. He felt it was his professional duty.
Today, a new Jewish immigrant to Israel, he remains haunted by the disaster. He carries around a thick briefcase of documents: once-secret blueprints of the sarcophagus, as well as letters to Israeli ministers and officials, seeking Israeli government recognition for the health damage he suffered in quelling the accident.
This week (May 12-18), he and a group of 100 ailing Chernobyl liquidators-people who worked to contain the radioactive damage-staged a four-day hunger strike to call Israeli government attention to their plight.
And yet, so far all of his efforts have come to naught. After a four-year battle, Israel, the country in which Kalentirsky sought refuge from growing Russian anti-Semitism, won’t recognize that he is a Chernobyl victim.
Approximately 150,000 to 200,000 Jews from contaminated regions of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus have arrived in Israel since the onset of massive Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel in 1989.
About 150 to 300 of the new immigrants were liquidators, like Kalentirsky, mostly high-ranking Jewish professionals who were recruited from throughout the Soviet Union to help contain the explosion-and who were probably exposed to even heavier doses of radiation than many Chernobyl victims.
Together, the immigrants comprise the largest population of Chernobyl victims outside of the former Soviet Union.
Yet, while some Chernobyl Jews have found medical help and emotional support at individual clinics and programs operated by private religious and voluntary organizations in Israel, many others feel the homeland to which they fled has ignored their exposure and denied its responsibility to them.”The state has a moral obligation to address the special medical needs of this community and, in the most extreme cases, their legal, economic and welfare problems,”said Natan Sharansky, the famous Russian refusenik now running for the Israeli Knesset, or parliament.”For Israel, Chernobyl is a domestic issue.” But government officials say they see no reason to single out the Chernobyl immigrants or create programs tailored especially to them.”The government feels an ethical obligation to deal with every Jew that arrives here. All sick and needy receive aid according to their need,”said Amnon Be’eri of Israel’s Absorption Ministry, a government agency that facilitates the integration of immigrants into Israeli society.
The government policy was based largely on the recommendations of a 1990 government Health Ministry committee, which”found no proof of clinical or genetic damage”in the Chernobyl-area immigrants exposed to radiation.”I don’t think there are 150 Chernobyl victims in the country. I don’t think there are even 10 Chernobyl victims,”declared Dr. Paul Slater, a top Health Ministry official who headed the blue-ribbon committee of Israeli experts that shaped overall policy.”The exposure of the immigrants was very, very small,”argued Slater.”Israel provided them with a refuge where they wouldn’t be exposed any more. Now, these people need to get on with the business of being absorbed into Israeli society without having on their minds that they were exposed to radiation.”Let’s leave the Chernobyl catastrophe behind and let them get on with their lives.” Russian Jewish immigrant groups, leading Israeli doctors and environmentalists have been angered and baffled by the government’s stance.
Most critics attribute it to bureaucratic inertia or budget constraints. A few see more sinister motives-a deep-seated refusal to recognize the potential health hazards of nuclear energy, to which Israel itself is keenly committed both in its weapons industry and in future commercial energy development.
Whatever the motive, however, a number of prominent Israeli medical experts agree that there are high-risk groups among the immigrants, who suffered heavy radiation exposure, and that those groups warrant tracking. Other experts say the entire population of Chernobyl-area immigrants should be screened.
As time passes, medical evidence is mounting both in Israel and the former Soviet Union of permanent health damage among the Chernobyl victims. The observations run the gamut from sharply increased rates of childhood thyroid cancer to other cancers, bone and stomach ailments, immune deficiencies, hypertension and genetic damage never previously seen in radiation victims.
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The arrival in Israel of so many immigrants from the Chernobyl region is far more than pure coincidence. The 1986 explosion occurred in the heartland of an area once known as the Pale of Jewish Settlement, a region rich in Jewish culture and tradition where some 5 million Jews were forcibly settled in Tzarist Russian times.
Chernobyl itself is remembered in European Jewish history as the birthplace of a famous hasidic, or mystical Jewish, dynasty. When Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor No. 4 exploded, a half million Jews were still living in the region.
The collapse of Soviet communism opened the door to the exodus of thousands of Jewish families who had remained throughout centuries of pogroms, wars and famine. Roughly one in every five Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel has emigrated from contaminated areas where radioactive iodine was released in the aftermath of the explosion and long-living cesium 137 has infiltrated the food supply.
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Boasting world-class medical research facilities and a program of universal medical insurance, Israel was a likely haven for the Chernobyl refugees and an ideal research laboratory for learning more about the effects of radiation. Indeed, many immigrants saw the mere escape from persistent contamination, together with Israel’s high level of general medical care, as a boon.
But others found that the Israeli system was not prepared to deal with their health problems, disabilities and fears. Not only that, while the government refused to systematically track people who had been exposed to contamination, privately funded studies revealing excess disease rates have been deemed inconclusive by the same bureaucrats.
The dilemma was most acute for the liquidators, like Kalentirsky. Men in late middle age who in the former Soviet Union had been heroes of the hour, entitled to special pensions, medical treatment and even housing, found themselves bereft of any status or recognition that a radiation time bomb could be ticking in their bodies.
Moreover, many of them had volunteered to contain the Chernobyl radiation out of a deep sense of duty.”I knew that a place like Chernobyl would be dangerous,”said Kalentirsky, describing how in June 1986 he traveled from his home in Moscow to help in the cleanup.”I had worked in the atomic industry since 1963. I built many atomic laboratories. But I felt that the cleanup was a job only professionals could do.” For six months he lived, worked and breathed the radioactive dust of Chernobyl, overseeing the construction of the giant concrete sarcophagus that was thrown up hastily over the smoldering plant.
Safety was minimal. Masks didn’t filter out the smell of radioactive metal from the air, and workers couldn’t change clothes every day because there weren’t enough protective suits. The villages in the area had become as silent as graveyards, and forests had turned yellow from the radioactive dust. But Kalentirsky remained on the job until he had to be hospitalized in Moscow in mid-November for severe stomach disease.
He remained in the hospital for six months. His teeth fell out. His stomach lining had corroded, requiring constant medication. And his bones softened so that he couldn’t lift more than about seven pounds.
Still, he recovered sufficiently to return to his former job-even making a brief trip to Chernobyl to sign off on the completion of the sarcophagus that is today cracking and in danger of collapse.
Despite chronic health complaints, Kalentirsky felt that the special medical care and pension rights extended only to Chernobyl liquidators were at least partial compensation for his disability. As a senior professional, he had a comfortable city apartment, a house in the country and a car.
But as the communist regime collapsed, Kalentirsky’s wife, Jeanette, began pushing him to emigrate to Israel, fearful of growing anti-Semitism and the impact it might have on the future of their two daughters. Kalentirsky finally agreed, believing that if the decrepit communist regime had recognized his special contribution at Chernobyl, his Jewish homeland certainly would.
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The reality was a cold shock. Kalentirsky said that before leaving Russia in 1992, he had met with Israeli embassy officials who indicated they would help him sue in the Russian courts for a transfer of his liquidator’s rights to Israel after he emigrated. But the talk turned out to be empty.
Worse yet, Kalentirsky said his partial medical disability was not recognized by Israel’s social security system-even though it hampered his ability to find and hold down a job. When he fell chronically ill for a full year in 1993, he even had to fly back to Russia to obtain special medication for his stomach. The flight ticket was cheaper than buying the medicine, which health insurance would not cover, in Israel.
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Today, Kalentirsky lives in a shabby apartment on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and holds a novice engineering job in a small firm. His future job mobility-and earnings-are severely limited by his health. Sun sensitivity prevents him from taking on higher-paying field-supervision jobs, for instance. No large firm will hire him. Nor would a pension company enroll him in a benefit program.”The liquidators have been a very difficult problem,”admits Dr. Ze’ev Weschler, a radiation expert at Israel’s Hadassah University Ein Kerem Hospital.”In the USSR, they received financial aid and a special pension. Here they didn’t get anything special. Most of them are between 45 and 60, and nobody wanted to hire them. In the free world, everyone wants a young and healthy worker.”They should have received recognition of their disability. After all, while Israel didn’t send them to Chernobyl, if it hadn’t been for people like them the disaster would have been greater.” Always a fighter, Kalentirsky has devoted himself to winning recognition for Jewish survivors of the disaster. He organized a group of 150 fellow liquidators to press the Israeli government for recognition of their disabilities.
Two weeks ago, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the nuclear disaster, the liquidators appeared before an Israeli government committee that was supposed to issue recommendations on the special health problems of the liquidators.
Kalentirsky emerged deeply disappointed.”The committee hadn’t done anything,”he said.”They just asked us to tell our story all over again.” Said Be’eri of Israel’s Absorption Ministry,”The committee is conducting a series of intensive discussions on the treatment of the liquidators and will reach its conclusions shortly.” While Kalentirsky’s experience spells frustration with Israel’s public health system, some children from the Chernobyl region have had a far more positive experience with a private program run by the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Lubavitcher Chabad Hasidic sect in the settlement of Kfar Chabad on the edge of Tel Aviv.
In a Kfar Chabad boarding-school dormitory bedecked with posters of Star Trek heroes and the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitcher movement, 14-year-old Avi recalled how his family was evacuated from their home just a few miles away from the nuclear power plant in 1986. Even when they returned a year later, contamination lingered in the most basic foods, such as milk and meat.”There were many children who died,”said Avi (Chabad policy prohibits release of minors’ last names).”Others got a sickness in their throats and were sent to Germany.”He himself would tire easily. When he arrived in Israel about 18 months ago, doctors said he was asthmatic, a common complaint among some Chernobyl children.
Over the past six years, the ultra-Orthodox Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl program has airlifted 1,200 children from contaminated areas near Chernobyl, evacuating them to Kfar Chabad. For a year or two the children, who range from age 6 to 18, live and study at the village, awaiting the arrival of parents who typically follow them to Israel.
The program was the first among a handful of private or voluntary programs that have sprung up around the country to treat radiation victims. It was the brainchild of the rebbe himself, whose ancestry was rooted in the Ukraine.
Jay Litvin, medical liaison to the program, said it was created to answer a 1990 plea from Jewish families in contaminated areas of Belarus. The families feared for the health of their children at a time when Soviet officials, and even nuclear scientists, were still denying the extent of Chernobyl’s damage.”Many people perished throughout Jewish history because people didn’t act fast enough,”said Litvin.”If Jewish parents were concerned enough about the welfare of their children to send them thousands of miles away, then the rebbe decided that we couldn’t wait, we had to act immediately.” At Kfar Chabad, medical problems that might arise as a result of the radiation are closely monitored. In 1990, when the program was launched, about one-quarter of the children had enlarged thyroids-a result of the widespread release of radioactive iodine that followed the explosion.
Today, the number is lower, since radioactive iodine has a relatively short half-life. Still, many of the children face a sharply increased lifelong risk of developing thyroid cancer, according to experts such as Dillwyn Williams, president of the European Thyroid Association. Moreover, U.S. and Israeli studies have shown Jews to be more genetically predisposed to the malignancy.
While the medical care available to the children at Kfar Chabad is intensive, some 17,000 other immigrant children have arrived in the country since 1989 from contaminated areas who haven’t been screened or tracked.
That’s despite recommendations by such experts as Dr. Furio Pacini, a World Health Organization radiation specialist. Pacini visited Israel in February and told doctors that screening children was”very, very important”to identify problems such as thyroid enlargements that could develop into cancer later.
Dr. John Goldsmith, a public health expert at Beersheva’s Soroka Hospital who operates a privately funded clinic for Chernobyl victims, also has urged authorities to sponsor special preventative health programs, screening and research for the broader public of Chernobyl immigrants.”We have gotten zero response,”he said.
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Published research by Goldsmith and a team of Soroka doctors on 1,560 immigrants exposed to radiation, including special groups of children and liquidators, found higher than normal rates of hypertension, asthma, thyroid problems and overall health problems. There also were indications of abnormal blood function in laboratory tests on some subjects.
The findings come at a time when researchers studying populations in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine also are uncovering far higher rates of persistent health problems than were predicted at the time of the 1986 explosion. Williams of the European Thyroid Association has predicted that 40 percent of Chernobyl-area children exposed to the highest rates of radiation will develop thyroid cancer. A recent report in the British journal Science, found permanent damage to genetic makeup of Belarus children exposed to radiation-damage never previously observed in other radiation survivors.
Slater, however, stands by the 1990 Israeli Health Ministry decision that there still is no proven evidence of significant radiation-linked health damage.
Since thyroid cancer is very rare anyway, he predicts only”one additional case every couple of years”in Israeli immigrants from the Chernobyl area. He foresees virtually no other long-term health effects among immigrants here.”They won’t show up with anything,”he said.
Medical researchers working with Chernobyl survivors here are less certain, however. They note that Chernobyl was an unprecedented explosion in terms of size and the persistent, low-level radiation it released into the environment. New research is revealing unforeseen health effects.”I very much hope that there will be no long-term effect,”said Dr. Alf Fischbein, who studies Chernobyl-area immigrants at a clinic in the coastal town of Netanya.”But I’d like to know for sure.”
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