The recent election of Barack Obama as president of the United States represents one of the most notable grassroots political successes in American history. Looking back at Beth El Bulletins published in the late 1960s through the 1980s, the Archive Committee was reminded of another hugely successful grassroots movement—American Jewry’s protest campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism, which ultimately contributed to the release of more than a million Soviet Jews. Beth El Bulletins provide significant evidence of our congregation’s participation in saving Soviet Jewry.

Although the Soviet government did not attempt to physically annihilate its Jewish community, it did attempt a form of spiritual genocide. An estimated three million Soviet Jews—one quarter of the world’s Jewish population at the time—were the subjects of a state-sponsored campaign of religious discrimination that began in the mid-1950s.   While the officially atheistic Soviet government permitted other religious groups to train clergy in their own seminaries and allowed other ethnic groups to publish books and mount theatrical productions in their own language, Jews were denied almost all opportunity for religious and cultural expression. Of the 450 synagogues that survived the Stalin era, only ninety-six remained by 1963. KGB spies were planted in synagogues, and most worshippers were too terrified to even speak with Jewish tourists from the West.  Moreover, the Soviet government itself published anti-Semitic books, some of which ironically accused Judaism of being a Nazi-like religion. At the time, it seemed that the Soviet government’s gradual smothering of Jewish consciousness would result in the extinction of Soviet Jewry and nothing could be done to prevent it.

Demoralized by assimilation and shamed by its failure to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, American Jewry was slow to react to the plight of Soviet Jews. But in April 1964, Jacob Birnbaum, a thirty-eight-year-old English-Jewish émigré living in Washington Heights, founded a group called The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ). Birnbaum organized college students in the New York area. They implemented a multi-pillared campaign strategy—rousing dormant American Jewry with rallies, humiliating the Soviet Union by exposing its false pretensions as a model society, pressuring Washington into becoming the active guardian of Soviet Jews, and boosting the morale of Soviet Jews themselves. 

The SSSJ succeeded in mobilizing the American Jewish establishment, and, in 1971, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry was founded by leading Jewish organizations in the United States. Communal activism on behalf of Soviet Jews, in the form of synagogue committees, massive Solidarity Day rallies and protest marches, and Washington lobbying efforts, took hold. With the early 1975 passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a statute linking “most favored nation” trade status to Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration, Congress emerged as the protector of Soviet Jewry.

Public awareness burgeoned as the term “refusenik”—meaning one refused permission to leave—became a household word. The culminating moment of the Soviet Jewry movement occurred on December 6, 1987, when a quarter million people gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest the imminent visit of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Ultimately, the movement accomplished what it set out to achieve: more than a million Soviet immigrants settled in Israel in two waves, around 200,000 during the 1970s and the rest beginning in 1989.

Beth El Bulletins, from the late 1960s through the 1980s, show that our congregants were active participants in the Soviet Jewry movement. For example, an article in the May 1967 Bulletin urged congregants to attend a Shabbat service at Beth El dedicated to Soviet Jewry, where Rabbi Golovensky discussed means of facilitating Soviet Jewish emigration. In a December 1970 Bulletin article, Assistant Rabbi Edmund Winter sought to heighten the congregation’s awareness of the issue by comparing the story of the Maccabees’ successful resistance to forced assimilation into Greek culture to the struggle then being waged by Soviet Jews “against the quasi-official policy of their government to separate them from the sources of their existence as a people: Jewish religion and Jewish culture.” In the November 1971 Bulletin, a front-page article suggested various ways that Beth El congregants could demonstrate their support for Soviet Jewry—writing letters to Soviet Jews who publicly declared their intention to leave the country, sending trial-sized packages of goods not commonly found in the U.S.S.R., sending telegrams and letters to United States government leaders, and attending an upcoming rally for Soviet Jewry at Madison Square Garden.

An article in the April 1972 Bulletin mentioned President Nixon’s forthcoming visit to Moscow and urged American Jews who may have lost contact with relatives in the Soviet Union to contact United HIAS Service, the worldwide Jewish immigration agency, for assistance in locating their loved ones. In November 1972, then Assistant Rabbi Sirner urged congregants to “be continually cognizant of the plight of Soviet Jewry, and do what we can to assure a brighter and richer future for our people.” An article in the January 1975 Bulletin noted that Beth El had agreed to exhibit “underground” art by twelve Russian dissidents who had recently been the subject of harassment in Moscow, because “any expression of freedom that can be fostered by our synagogue, particularly in these times, is important.”

For over two decades, the Beth El Bulletin regularly informed the synagogue community about the plight of Soviet Jewry. It advertised upcoming Solidarity Day events, and urged Beth El members to travel into Manhattan to join thousands of their fellow Jews in protest marches or rallies. On Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, and Passover, it reminded congregants to pray that Soviet Jews soon regain their religious freedom. Like other synagogue publications across America, the Beth El Bulletin heightened community awareness of the plight of Soviet Jewry and thereby served to mobilize and organize grassroots support for its eventual deliverance from spiritual bondage.

To learn more about the Soviet Jewry movement, we recommend reading Yossi Klein Halevi’s  article, “Jacob Birnbaum and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry,” which was published in the Spring 2004 edition of Azure, a quarterly journal available online that offers essays on Jewish history and philosophy.