This November marks the 100th anniversary of two great revolutions that overtook the Jewish people in 1917 and forever altered the course of Jewish history. To this very day, we live with the profound consequences of these two revolutions.

On Nov. 7, 1917, the Bolshevik Communist revolution succeeded and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. By the time the Communists took over the Czarist Russian Empire 2.5 million Jews had moved to the United States from eastern and central Europe.

When the dust settled and its borders were defined, approximately 2.5 million Jews were trapped behind the Iron Curtain. These Jews were subject to one of history’s most vigorous erasures of Jewish life in all its expressions: traditional Judaism, right, left, and center Zionism, Jewish socialism, and secular ethnic Jewish identity, Yiddishism. The Jewish population would grow to about three million on the eve of World War II. The Germans murdered 1.3 million Soviet Jews. The consequences of the Soviet Revolution were staggering. Were it not for the Bolshevik’s thoughtless decision to identify every Russian by ethnicity in Line Five of their internal passport, Jews would have assimilated in ever greater numbers.

Pobedonostsev, counselor to the Czar Alexander III, when asked in the 1890’s, “What will become of the Jews?” delivered one of history’s most devilish and possibly accurate prophecies. He said, “One third will be killed; one third will immigrate; one third will assimilate.” That happened. Between Stalin’s regime and the murderous Germans, approximately one third were murdered. Approximately one third assimilated. Approximately a third did migrate.

What neither the Czars, nor Pobedonostsev, nor the Communists, after they created their new world and perfect society could imagine was that nearly a million and a half Jews-270,000 in the 1970’s and 1.25 million in the 1990’s-would successfully leave and reunite with their brothers and sisters in the State of Israel and in North America. Never before in Jewish history did the Jewish people lose a community, fight for its liberation, and enjoy reunion. The struggle for the liberation of Soviet Jewry was one of American Jewry’s finest hours.

The Balfour Declaration was dated November 2, 1917, five days before the Bolshevik Revolution. It was published on November 9, 1917, two days after the Bolshevik Revolution. It proclaimed to the world: His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object… This is surely a remarkable document. It surely played a determinative role in the establishment of the State of Israel some 31 years later. However, the Balfour Declaration had long been imagined and dreamed of by Zionist leaders and activists many decades prior to 1917. In order to appreciate it let us step back a moment.

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was gobbled up in 1795 by the three great empires of Europe-Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, Russian-something remarkable happened to Czarist Russia. When the Russians took the lion’s share of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-meaning Latvia, Lithuania, present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Moldava, and that densest of Jewish population centers, eastern and central Poland-it came to the Jews by moving the border of the Russian Empire westward. The Jews did not come to Russia. Russia came to the Jews.

This Polish-Lithuanian-Jewish population, which had been flourishing for centuries, is the place in which Zionism took root and flourished. To be sure, the great original Zionist manifesto was written in the German language by a Western Jew, Theodor Herzl. The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland. Zionism, however, did not flourish in Western Europe. In Western Europe, the Jews had achieved emancipation, and some of the benefits of citizenship. This was not the case for the millions of Jews of Eastern Europe. It is no exaggeration to say that the single greatest accomplishment of Polish Lithuanian Jewish civilization, a part of the Russian Empire since 1795, was the State of Israel itself.

Indeed, many Mensheviks-that is to say democratic socialist Jews who were driven out of Russia by the antidemocratic dictatorial Bolsheviks-were indeed the ones who built Jewish civilization and communal life in Eretz Yisrael in what became the State of Israel.

It is 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution and the Zionist Revolution’s great document, the Balfour Declaration. Everything that the Jewish people in Czarist Russia and subsequently the Soviet Union, tried to achieve through the Zionist Revolution was opposed by the Soviet Union. Zionist Jews and Hebrew loving Jews were hunted and hounded.

Fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution it was the Zionist Revolution that inspired the Jews of the Soviet Union following the victory of the 1967 Six-Day War, to rise up and to leave for that land and that State envisioned by the Balfour Declaration. It is 100 years later, yet memory still defines and inspires who we are. We dare not forget the Bolshevik Revolution and what the Soviet Union did to us. At the same time our greatest dreams are realized in the Zionist Revolution. Let us remember the Revolutions of November.

Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko is the Rabbinic Scholar of the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago.