Former Soviet “Prisoner of Zion” Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich unveils the shocking saga of the Cantonists—Jewish boys kidnapped, conscripted, and forced to convert in Tsarist Russia—linking their ordeal to the timeless struggle for Jewish freedom and faith.
A remarkable and deeply moving new book, “The Cantonists – Jewish Boys in the Russian Military 1827–1856,” has been released by Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich, one of Israel’s most revered former “Prisoners of Zion.”
Best known for his 11-year imprisonment in Soviet gulags for attempting to hijack an airplane to escape to Israel, Mendelevich has long symbolized Jewish courage and unbreakable faith. Now, through meticulous scholarship and moral depth, he resurrects one of the darkest and least-known chapters in Jewish history — the tragedy of the Jewish Cantonists under Tsar Nicholas I.
“I wrote this book as part of my master’s thesis at Touro College in Jerusalem,” Mendelevich explained in an interview after a full day of teaching at Machon Meir Institute of Jewish Studies. “Professor Aryeh Morgenstern encouraged me to study newly opened Russian military archives — and what I found was devastating.”
Between 1827 and 1856, Mendelevich reveals, 75,000 Jewish boys aged 13 to 18 were seized and sent to imperial military schools. Many were younger than 10, ripped from their homes by khappers — Jewish kidnappers working under pressure from community leaders and Russian officials.
“They didn’t speak Russian, couldn’t eat kosher food, and were forced into Christian rituals,” Mendelevich recounts. “Thousands were tortured until they agreed to convert.”
Only about 25,000 succumbed to conversion, while 50,000 remained Jewish in name but became the first “secularized” Jews — men spiritually detached from Judaism after decades of exile in the Tsar’s army.
One haunting testimony in the book, that of Chaim Merimzon, reads like a scene from a tragic novel. At just eleven years old, Merimzon was kidnapped on his way to buy Shabbat refreshments.
“A carriage came toward me… The driver was a Lithuanian gentile, and two older Jews sat inside. They said, ‘Come on up. We’ll take you.’ When I realized they were kidnappers, I cried and tried to escape, but they held me until sunset… until I couldn’t fight anymore.”
The 400-page work blends academic rigor with heart-wrenching human stories, reconstructing how Tsar Nicholas I sought to “integrate” Jews into Russian society by forcibly removing children from their faith. “It was cultural genocide disguised as education,” Mendelevich writes.
He also exposes the moral complexity within Jewish communities—where corruption and despair led some leaders to sacrifice poor children to protect the wealthy.
“The question is not whether they were moral,” he says, “but how a people in exile, under unbearable pressure, could preserve any sense of justice.”
The book’s conclusion is unmistakably Zionist in spirit.
“All the atrocities we suffered in exile stem from one truth — the curse of the Diaspora,” Mendelevich reflects. “Just as some Cantonists later became pioneers in the Land of Israel, the solution today remains the same: only in our homeland can the Jewish people live freely, as Jews.”
With The Cantonists, Rabbi Mendelevich has not only documented a lost chapter of Jewish endurance — he has drawn a straight, unbroken line from Tsarist oppression to Soviet tyranny to the miracle of modern Israel. It is a testament to how faith, when tested by fire, forges a nation that never forgets.
