A lot of people do not realize that there were Jews in Stalin’s secret police,” Brent said. “This is something that really needs to be talked about. Some of these individuals had fathers who were rabbis in the shtetls.”
NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda was Jewish, Brent says, and the first minister of justice in Soviet Russia, Isaac Steinberg, was a religious Jew. And, according to Brent, the instrumental person in the arrest of renowned Jewish author Isaac Babel was also Jewish.
