Revekka Blumberg with her husband Moris Blumberg

This is my husband Moris Blumberg and I in the kitchen at home. This photo was taken in Tallinn in 1999. I was eager to move to Israel, but my husband had problems in this regard. Moris worked at a defense enterprise and had a strict security access permit form. Having access to defense affairs he was not going to be allowed a permit for relocation. He had to resign and find a job, which was not associated with any access permits, in which case he might be allowed to relocate in ten years' time. Anyway, this wasn't Moris' intention. He was fanatically dedicated to what he was doing and believed in the Soviet system. To be short, he was an 'appropriate' person. Considering the job he had, he was not entitled to travel abroad for whatever purpose. The only time he traveled abroad was in 1992, when we went to Israel together. When we returned home, I sensed that he had changed a lot. After our visit to Israel Moris understood that there are countries where people have equal initial positions, and each person is responsible for realizing them, while in the USSR we all appeared to be hostages and victims of the system. It's true, though, that this did not only concern Jews. Moris was a very honest man. I would even say, this was a hypertrophied sense of justice. For him, doing something good to his surrounding was more important than doing some good to himself and his family. This was the way his father was, and he was the same. Moris was a very tight-lipped person. He hardly ever shared his thoughts and feeling even with me, but I know that after our trip to Israel he started revising his value system. His career, his job, which cost him a lot of effort and life, in the long run, would surely have been much more successful in another country, and he wouldn't have had to take such tremendous effort, and this thought was bothering him. The thing is, our system was squeezing whatever was possible from a person before dumping him or her. Nobody cared about people or took any interest in those, who could work no longer. Actually, Moris burnt himself at work, and then he passed away at the age of 61.