Indeed, the fate of Soviet Jewry now became American Jews’ chief political concern after the well-being of the State of Israel. Independent initiatives proliferated. A network of small but highly effective adult advocacy groups formed the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. This was a crucial development: The Union of Councils would later emerge as a major force through the 1970s and 1980s, representing 32 member organizations around the United States, maintaining an office in Washington, and joining forces with activist organizations abroad, including refusenik groups in the Soviet Union. Its constituent members specialized in creative provocations—like painting slogans on the hull of a Soviet ship docked in Los Angeles and hiring a helicopter to fly over the Super Bowl trailing a Soviet Jewry banner. Like SSSJ, with which it worked closely, the Union of Councils engaged in daily, systematic activity, and played a central role in linking American Jews and refuseniks.

The months following the Leningrad Trial also saw the peak of the JDL’s Soviet Jewry activities. Along with bombings of Soviet offices in New York and Washington, the JDL dispatched teams to harass Soviet diplomats in Manhattan, creating a crisis in Soviet-American relations. On March 21, 1971, more than a thousand young Jews were arrested at a JDL sit-down demonstration in the streets of Washington—until then, the largest number of people arrested in an American demonstration for any cause.

Even the Conference on Soviet Jewry, which had not prepared a serious campaign in the months leading to the Leningrad Trial, intensified its public activities once the trial began. Embarrassed by the activism of the Union of Councils, SSSJ, and the JDL, the Jewish establishment finally realized that the community’s Soviet Jewry efforts could not continue to be left to the ineffectual Conference. The need to create a credible counter-weight to the JDL; encouragement from the Israeli government, which now unequivocally backed a vigorous protest campaign; pressure from Soviet Jewish activists; years of lobbying by Birnbaum—all combined to compel the Conference’s constituent groups to transform it into an organization that would mobilize the Jewish community on a daily basis.

In late 1971, the Conference, now renamed the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, was given a full-time staff and a modest budget. In parallel, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry was created as a local umbrella organization for establishment groups. Under the leadership of Malcolm Hoenlein, a longtime SSSJ supporter and today the executive vice president of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Greater New York Conference essentially implemented SSSJ’s vision of a grassroots campaign. Indeed, the communal activism that became normative in the 1970s and 1980s—from synagogue committees to massive Solidarity Day rallies—had all been envisioned by Birnbaum at the founding of SSSJ. (Even the term “Day of Solidarity” had been proposed in the early SSSJ literature.)³⁰ In essence, Hoenlein successfully put into practice Birnbaum’s key ideas in the New York area, which in turn served as a model for a nationwide campaign.

Three elements of Birnbaum’s initial four-point blueprint were now well on their way to fulfillment: The establishment was assuming responsibility for a grassroots movement; American Jews were actively encouraging Soviet Jews; and the Soviet Union was being pressured into opening the gates. All that remained was the fourth element: The “thrust” to Washington. With the introduction of the Jackson-Vanick amendment in 1972, a congressional act linking “Most Favored Nation” trade status with Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration, Congress emerged as the protector of Soviet Jews. But when the White House, outraged at the threat to Soviet-American detente, began pressuring Jewish leaders to withdraw support for the bill and warning that American backing for Israel could suffer, some establishment leaders wavered. SSSJ and the Union of Councils responded by lobbying both the establishment and Washington. “In one decade,” recalls Birnbaum, “I went from knocking on dormitory doors at Yeshiva University to knocking on doors in Congress.”³¹ SSSJ and the Union of Councils enlisted refuseniks for the lobbying effort, with the aim of embarrassing American Jewish leaders into supporting the amendment. In April 1973, more than one hundred prominent refuseniks signed an appeal to American Jewish leaders not to abandon the Jackson-Vanick amendment. The alliance between refuseniks and American activists over Jackson-Vanick was a milestone in the relationship between American and Soviet Jews. In large measure, it was that joint effort that helped the establishment to hold firm. The amendment was passed into law by Congress in January 1975.

With the Jackson-Vanick amendment, the Soviet Jewry movement had come of age. For American Jews, it was a stunning example of their capacity to influence international politics on behalf of their people—a powerful reversal of the failures of the Holocaust.³² For Soviet Jewry activists, it meant the fulfillment of their vision, mobilizing both the Jewish establishment and Washington for the rescue of Soviet Jews.

The American Jewish establishment continued to treat SSSJ as a tolerated stepchild. Still, the establishment did assume the leadership of the Soviet Jewry movement, just as Birnbaum had always insisted it must. Through the 1980s, both the Greater New York Conference and the National Conference operated a daily campaign aimed at local Jewish communities, the media, and Washington. The culminating moment of the Soviet Jewry movement occurred on December 6, 1987, when a quarter million people—the largest number ever to attend a Soviet Jewry demonstration—gathered in Washington to protest the imminent visit of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Only the establishment could have managed it. Jacob Birnbaum, whose determination and dreams had created this moment, sat silent and unrecognized among the many dignitaries and guests of honor on the stage.

 

April 27, 2004, will mark forty years since the founding of SSSJ and the grassroots Soviet Jewry movement. Jacob Birnbaum, now 77 and ailing, nevertheless remains active, working from his home in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, with the same phone number that appeared on SSSJ stationery in the early years. He advises the American Association for Jews from the USSR and promotes Jewish educational projects in Israel for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Yet most Soviet Jews do not know the name of the man who launched the movement for their freedom. Nor do most American Jews recall the man who transformed their community. Others, of course, have a share in the credit—the refuseniks, American activists and political leaders, the establishment Conference on Soviet Jewry, and, not least, the government of Israel and its Liaison Bureau. But it was Jacob Birnbaum who was first to declare, “Let my people go,” and to translate that longing into a systematic campaign.

For all its internal disagreements, the Soviet Jewry movement accomplished precisely what it set out to achieve, initiating a worldwide public campaign to save Eastern Europe’s last great Jewish community from extinction. More than a million Soviet immigrants came to Israel in two waves—around 200,000 during the 1970s, and the rest beginning in 1989. Undoubtedly, the mass migration to Israel in the 1990s owes a great debt to the Soviet Jewry movement of the 1960s. Though opening the gates of the USSR in 1989 was part of an internal process within Soviet society, the emigration to Israel was not a foregone conclusion. Most Soviet Zionist activists, after all, had already left in the first wave of emigration in the 1970s, and those Jews who remained behind were generally lacking in Jewish national sentiment. But the presence of relatives and friends in Israel who had left two decades earlier helped convince many Soviet Jews to consider the Jewish state a credible destination. And that first Soviet immigration in the early 1970s was, in large part, a result of the campaign mounted by American activists through the 1960s.

SSSJ’s early critics, who warned that the movement could never succeed, were right in one sense: Without the uprising of Soviet Jews themselves, the movement would almost certainly have remained marginal, perhaps forcing some minor concessions from the Kremlin but fundamentally unable to reverse the policy of forced assimilation. As a protest movement aimed at a foreign power, the campaign’s success depended on the emergence of a Soviet Zionist movement to generate domestic pressure. However, SSSJ was the first organization to recognize the importance of individual dissidents and broadcast their voices in the West. In the process, it prepared American Jewry for the moment when a broader Soviet Jewish awakening would require Western protection, thereby insuring its success.

A generation later, the massive immigration of Russian-speaking Jews has transformed Israeli society, infusing the country with talent and energy. But arguably a no less powerful transformation has occurred among American Jews. The Soviet Jewry movement roused them from their passivity, and taught them how to fight a diaspora-generated struggle and experience victory—not vicariously through Israeli heroism, but as active partners in their people’s fate. American Jews came to see themselves as a major force for Jewish freedom and security, protecting endangered Jews through political means, just as Israel did through military means. In its struggle for the freedom of Soviet Jews, American Jewry liberated itself as well.

Yossi Klein Halevi is an Associate Fellow at the Shalem Center and a Contributing Editor of Azure and The New Republic.

 

1. Ironically, in the early 1960s, large numbers of American Jews were becoming politically active, but not in Jewish causes: Of the white civil rights activists who went to Mississippi as Freedom Riders, no less than 40 percent were Jewish. Cf. Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). Yet for most American Jews, the notion that an ongoing protest campaign could be organized for a Jewish cause was foreign, even vaguely threatening. Drawing noisy attention to Jewish issues challenged the instinct of diaspora Jews, ingrained over centuries, to keep a low profile.

2. William W. Orbach, The American Movement to Save Soviet Jewry (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, 1979), p. 34.

3. Sue Fishkoff, The Rebbe’s Story: Inside the World of Chabad Lubavitch (New York: Schocken, 2003), p. 248.

4. “Declare the Truth About Yaakov,” speeches given at an evening commemoration of Jacob Birnbaum’s forty years of service to the Jewish people, December 1986.

5. Hillel Seidman, “Fifty Years After the Passing of Nathan Birnbaum: The Father of the Teshuva Movement,” Jewish Press, April 24, 1987, p. 56A.

6. Interview with Jacob Birnbaum, July 1972.

7. Jacob Birnbaum, “Algerian Tragedy,” Jewish Review 13:407 (July 1962), pp. 1, 8.

8. Orbach, American Movement, p. 20.

9. During this time, independent initiatives were also launched by American Jews frustrated by the establishment’s lethargy. The Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, founded in 1963 by several Reform Jews, became the prototype for adult anti-establishment Soviet Jewry groups around the country. In New York, a Revisionist Zionist businessman named Morris Brafman formed the American League for Russian Jews, whose ambitions to create an activist campaign were never realized. Moshe Decter, who directed an institute called Jewish Minorities Research (unofficially initiated by the Israeli government), provided crucial documentation about the unique discrimination that Soviet Jews suffered and organized public forums that drew prominent intellectuals and civil rights leaders.

10. This was not entirely fair. The Conference did sponsor demonstrations, including a rally in Washington that drew 10,000 people and a similarly attended protest in New York’s Madison Square Garden. For a vigorous defense of the Conference, see Albert D. Chernin, “Making Soviet Jews an Issue: A History,” in Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin, eds., A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis, 1999), pp. 15-69.

11. SSSJ leaflet: “College Students’ Struggle for Soviet Jewry,” distributed at Columbia University, April 2, 1964.

12. Interview with Jacob Birnbaum, December 2003.

13. Over 50 percent of SSSJ activists, moreover, would later be active in the anti-war movement. Jim Schwartz, “A Study of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry,” submitted to SSSJ leaders in May 1973.

14. Cf. Orbach, American Movement, pp. 30-31.

15. Orbach, American Movement, p. 29.

16. Jacob Birnbaum archives. A 1965 report to members about a meeting between SSSJ leaders and a Soviet Embassy official in Washington noted, “The discussion was tense but polite.”

17. Birnbaum archives.

18. Cited in Yossi Klein Halevi, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 69.

19. Klein Halevi, Memoirs,p. 70.

20. It is one of history’s ironies that Kazakov, later known as Yaakov Kedmi, eventually became head of the Liaison Bureau and one of Israel’s foremost officials acting on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

21. Klein Halevi, Memoirs, p. 80.

22. One Israeli official who consistently supported Birnbaum was Meir Rosenne, who represented the Liaison Bureau in New York in the mid-1960s and later served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington.

23. Birnbaum archives.

24. Birnbaum archives.

25. Interview with Birnbaum, December 2003.

26. Author’s archives.

27. Author’s conversation with Meir Kahane, August 1973.

28. Janet L. Dolgin, Jewish Identity and the JDL (Princeton: Princeton, 1977), pp. 40-42.

29. Orbach, American Movement, p. 159.

30. “Save Soviet Jewry” 2 (1966), pp. 5, 7, cited in Orbach, American Movement, p. 27.

31. Interview with Birnbaum, December 2003.

32. See, for example, Murray Friedman, introduction to Second Exodus, pp. 1-14.