by Charlie Collie
7/2/2013

I thought journalism would be an interesting field to work in and decided to transfer to the Suffolk University Journalism program.

I earned my B.S. in Communications in 1977 and set out to work in television news. One of my professors at Suffolk was Arch Macdonald, a giant in New England T.V News. He was very supportive and encouraged me to try broadcast journalism at a small station. After sending out over seventy-five resumes, I was hired as a general assignment reporter at the CBS affiliate in Steubenville, Ohio. I covered different stories for the station and enjoyed the everyday challenge of reporting the news.

After two years, I returned to New England and organized western Massachusetts
for one of the presidential campaigns. I moved back to Boston and was looking for
work after the campaign when I bumped into one of my fellow journalism students
who went on to be a WCVB-TV reporter for many years. He mentioned that the
Governor’s press office had a vacancy. I rushed over to the state house for an interview and was hired as one of four press officers on governor Edward J King’s staff. It was a combination of my television news experience and presidential campaign experience that made the difference in my hiring.

My duties were writing press releases, answering reporters' questions, writing a
weekly column and travelling with the governor to work with the press for him. It was another interesting job that was both fun and serious at the same time. We had to get the message out to the media on what Edward King was accomplishing as Governor. In his last year as governor, the Jewish community of Metropolitan Boston requested that governor King travel to Washington and request the release of Ida Nudel, a refusenik and Israeli activist from Russia.  This involved us going to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C  and making the request to Russian diplomats. We made the request at a morning meeting at the embassy. The diplomats were friendly and smiling during the meeting, but they were giving us vague answers. We were very busy in Washington that day. Governor King also went to the Department of the Navy to talk about the Quincy Shipyard and to the White House to meet with Ed Meese, Chief Counsel to President Ronald Reagan.

After returning to Boston, we continued on to other state government issues and I left the governor’s staff several months later after an election defeat. One of the pictures I carried with me from the state house was Governor King and I and Massachusetts state trooper, Larry Bowlby leaving the Soviet embassy the day of our meeting in Washington D.C. As I continued my career work, I always wondered if we were successful that day in getting the Russians to allow Ida to join her family in Israel. Years went by and I taught in the schools for fifteen of them; part of my teaching was as a GED instructor at the national Job Corps Program.

I still wondered who was Ida Nudel and was she now in Israel. There was no Google searching in those years after the state house so I had no easy way of knowing if we were successful.  I recently discovered the incredible journey and work of Russian Refusenik, Ida Nudel. Several years after Governor King requested her release, Ida was visited by Jane Fonda. The two became friends and Fonda began a campaign to have Nudel released. Another actress, Liv Ullman also joined the campaign along with Israeli President Chaim Herzog. In Russia, Ida was known as the “Guardian Angel” for helping the prisoners of Zion in the Soviet Union. She is now 82 years old. In 1972, she organized a hunger strike in the Communist Party central office to protest the arrest of refusenik Vladimir Markman. Ida continued her activism by starting a campaign to keep in contact with Prisoners of Zion in Russia.

She got visitors from all over the world to provide practical items that the prisoners needed. For her continued activism, she was sentenced to four years of internal exile and was sent to Krivosheino on the River Ob in Siberia. She was under constant watch by the KBG. On March, 1982, she was released but not allowed to return to her flat in Moscow. She was permitted to live for five years in Bendary, Moldavia.

She became successful in leaving Russia after Jane Fonda visited her in April, 1984, and with the help of actress Liv Ullman and Israeli President Chaim Herzog, was finally granted an exit visa to Israel on October 2, 1987. When she arrived in Israel on October 15th, she was greeted at the Ben Gurion International airport by thousands of well-wishers including Jane Fonda, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as well as her sister. Ida immediately received an Israeli identity card and immigration papers.

She has written an autobiography, A Hand in the Darkness. In 1987, the book
became a movie, Mosca Addio starring Liv Ullman. Ida has continued this activism in Israel. In 1991, she established “Mother to Mother”, a nonprofit organization which seeks to take Russian immigrant children off the streets and into after-school activities. In 2005, she was voted the 120th greatest Israeli of all time in an Israeli poll which determines whom the general public considers the 200 greatest Israelis. My career has covered journalism, public service, and teaching.

It wasn’t by design when I started out as a reporter in 1978, but I share a special
bond with this great woman, Ida Nudel, the bond of helping people.

Charlie Collie and his family moved to Holliston in 1995. He is semi-retired and still enjoys writing about politics and current events.