Ioffe Shmuel (Schmuel) (Mulka)
(1918, Riga – 1955, Birobidzhan) — underground Zionist activist in Latvia and the Soviet Union.
As a schoolboy Shmuel Ioffe joined the socialist Zionist group Netsah (No‘ar Tsofi-Ḥalutzi), which split from Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir and operated illegally under K. Ulmanis’s dictatorship (1934–40), and then in strict secrecy after the Soviet occupation (from 1940). Ioffe became one of the leaders of the organization, entrusted with important and dangerous tasks by its head, I. Gordon (?–1945).
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Ioffe fought in a partisan unit and was wounded, but his request to join the Red Army was denied. Together with Ya. Yannai, former head of the Riga branch of the organization, he went to Tashkent, hoping to gather comrades along the way and illegally cross the Soviet border to Eretz Israel. By the end of 1941, in Tashkent, he enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute and worked in a canteen — cover for his Zionist activity. Attempts to cross the border failed, but he managed to gather a group of like-minded people (I. Shur, K. Skop, G. Blauschild, Polya Aronas, and others). The “Tashkent commune” led by Ioffe was based on mutual aid and Jewish charity, maintained contact with Eretz Israel, and prepared new attempts to leave.
In late 1943 Ioffe moved to Moscow, and a year later returned to Riga after its liberation from the Nazis. In July 1945 he illegally crossed the Soviet–Polish border and connected with the Bricha organization. By September he was in Milan, where he insisted that Bricha leadership help repatriate Latvian Jews. Despite warnings of the danger, Ioffe volunteered to return to the USSR to lead the operation.
By November 1945 he reached Łódź, and with the help of Bricha agents I. Ben-Zvi and T. Nezer re-established contact with Yannai in Riga and moved to Vilnius. There Ioffe organized the so-called “Polish route”: Jews bribed Soviet officials for false certificates of prior Polish citizenship, then crossed into Poland, entered DP camps, and eventually reached Eretz Israel.
In May 1946, returning from Poland, he was briefly arrested by the NKVD but escaped. By September the “Polish route” was closed, but through Ioffe and his colleagues (M. Rabson, A. Mindel, I. Goldberg in Vilnius; E. Zaidin, M. Bachat in Riga), some 450 Jews from Latvia, Lithuania, and elsewhere managed to leave the USSR. Soviet security forces soon discovered the network; arrests followed. On September 27, 1946, in Baranovichi, Ioffe and Yannai were captured and sentenced to 25 years.
In prison and labor camps, Ioffe showed exceptional courage, but prolonged hunger strikes ruined his health. He died in 1955 in Birobidzhan.
Sources:
– A. Itai and M. Neishtat, Korataykha shel tenu‘at Netsah be-Latvia (Tel Aviv, 1972); Russian abridged translation Cherez tri podpol’ya (Jerusalem, 1972).
– Ya. Yannai, Mulka: Sippur “ha-Bricha” mi-Brit ha-Mo‘atsot, 1945–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1988).