Chanukah is about the light and the holiness that God places within each of us. But it is also about a few brave men who stood up for Jewish values..

So I want to tell you a story – a story that lasted half my lifetime.  It’s a story that’s true, a story about how an average group of people defeated the most powerful dictatorship in the history of the world.

In the 1970’s, I was working on a master’s degree in computer science.  I wasn’t too political – just one of thousands who marched occasionally for one cause or another.  The Cold War was raging, and if you lived in the Soviet Union, if was dangerous to be a Jew.  Jews who expressed their religion or talked about moving to Israel were sentenced to prison.

I had gone to marches for Soviet Jewry, of course, like every Jew in our country.  But eventually it got personal.  The Soviet government declared that every Jewish computer scientist who talked about moving to Israel would be jailed for life, and Jewish computer scientists were exiled to Siberia.

My department chair at the time was Jewish, and he had been corresponding with of my counterparts in the Soviet Union, a sweet, brilliant graduate student who would never hurt a fly.  The student Jewish, end he was completing his PhD. The moment he graduated, he would be sent to prison for life.

We went to the State Department, asking them to help.  And eventually they came up with a plan.  We would go to Moscow for a joint conference on computer science.  And in turn, the State Department would pressure the Soviets to spare this student and to release the one of the leading Jewish activists.

And so, on my twenty fifth birthday, I delivered a paper in Moscow – the first American scientist in history to deliver a paper in the Soviet Union.  And the next morning, two burly men walked up to me – one from the State Department and one from the Soviet government.  If you agree to give your paper again at a laboratory outside Moscow,” they said, we will release an activist.”

The conference ended, and it was time travel to a secret city outside Moscow.  But there was one problem: when you checked into a hotel in the Soviet Union, they took your passport for “safe keeping” and stored it in the KGB office inside the hotel.  It was dangerous to go anywhere in the Soviet Union without a passport.  And when I went to checkout from my Moscow hotel, they told me that the “passport” office was closed.

 I had a once in a lifetime chance to free a dissident, to make a difference for all of the Jews in the Soviet Union, and the train out of Moscow was leaving.  If I waited for the office to open, I would miss my opportunity, and if I went without my passport, I would be risking my life.  By then, I had gotten to know the Soviet culture, and I knew exactly what to do.  I broke into the KGB office and stole my passport!

I knew that there would be no one to stop me.  I knew that the KGB agents were probably out somewhere, buying and selling on the black market.  And I knew that the lock would be flimsy, because that’s how the Soviet Union worked.  The government would pay a locksmith 100 rubles to install the strongest lock on a KGB office, and he would install a cheap lock and pocket the difference.

The State Department told us about Soviet culture beforehand.  “The whole country is filled with corruption,” they told us.  And I expected to find a country where people were miserable, and depressed.

But what I found instead was a nation of guerilla fighters.  For those KGB agents, coming in late, taking time off from work to engage in the black market were acts of defiance. And that fragile lock was not an accident.  It was the work of one unknown guerilla fighter, doing what he could to bring down the system, to bring freedom to his country.

And no one was depressed.  The Soviet people were alive and joyous. They knew something that we in America are just beginning to learn.  Every act of honesty, every act of joy, every act of letting the system collapse under its own weight is a step towards freedom.

My story doesn’t end there.  It goes on to New York and Jerusalem, and ends at Camp Newman, at the Bat Mitzvah of an incredible girl from the former Soviet Union who was acting as the president and “rabbi” of her congregation back home.

I’ll tell you more of the story tomorrow..  But know this: if an unknown locksmith can help defeat a dictatorship, so can you.