“He Deliberately Understated His Age”

On 21 December 1926, officers from the Vinnytsia district branch of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR arrested Isaak Solomonovich Bresler, an activist in the Zionist youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair. At the time of his arrest, he gave 1909 as his year of birth. It might seem like a minor detail, but it could have played an important role in determining his fate.

In the mid-1920s, the OGPU was conducting an extensive campaign to dismantle underground and semi-legal Zionist organisations. One of its main methods of dealing with their members was to send them into administrative exile in remote regions of the USSR as “socially dangerous elements.” Being a minor could help someone avoid such a fate.

Thin and suffering from anaemia, Bresler could easily have passed for a seventeen-year-old. In reality, however, he had been born in 1907 and was already legally an adult at the time of his arrest.

The Chekists were not fooled. After all, when Bresler had been arrested a year earlier, he had given yet another year of birth — 1908. Asked by the investigator why this differed from his official birth record, which stated that he had been born in 1907, Bresler replied that “his parents had always thought so.”

Following his arrest, Bresler was held at the Vinnytsia House of Forced Labour (DOPR). The GPU charged him under Article 61 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, treating his activities as “counter-revolutionary.” The case file described him as an “active member” of Hashomer Hatzair who carried out “important assignments from its leadership.” The Chekists sought to have him sent into administrative exile.

Ultimately, however, Bresler managed to avoid exile. He wrote a statement renouncing his political views, intended “for publication in the press” (folio 21). On 8 March 1927, the case against him was closed.

Isaak Bresler’s story illustrates the price that young Zionists in the Soviet Union sometimes had to pay to avoid further repression. You can learn more about the Soviet security services’ campaign against Zionist youth organisations by exploring this and other case files in the J-Doc digital archive.