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The Soviet Jewry movement was an international human rights campaign that advocated for the right of Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate. The movement's participants were most active in the United States and in the Soviet Union. Those who were denied permission to emigrate were often referred to by the term Refusenik.
The Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, founded in 1963, was the first North American grassroots organization to advocate for Soviet Jews.<author=Gal Beckerman| title=When They Come for Us We'll Be Gone, The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, date=2010|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Harcourt|p59> In 1964 the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry was founded at Columbia University.
[13]: 567 [24] The share of Jews in the Soviet ruling elite declined during the 1930s, but was still more than double their proportion in the general Soviet population. According to Israeli historian Benjamin Pinkus, "We can say that the Jews in the Soviet Union took over the privileged position, previously held by the Germans in tsarist Russia".
In 1987, the reformist Soviet government led by Mikhail Gorbachev pardoned many political prisoners and told the American Jewish community that it would allow the emigration of 11,000 Jewish refuseniks. [40] According to the 1989 Soviet Census, there were 8,887 Jews living in the JAO, or 4% of the total JAO population of 214,085. [22]
This brought hundreds of thousands of Jews out to join him in the great struggle for Soviet Jewry, which made modern Exodus real." [3] The movement started by Birnbaum eventually led to liberalization of Soviet emigration policies, resulting in the eventual emigration of over 1.5 million Soviet Jews. [3]
Initially, most went to Israel, but after 1976, the majority began immigrating to the United States, which had a policy of treating Soviet Jews as refugees under the Jackson-Vanik amendment. In total, some 291,000 Soviet Jews were granted exit visas between 1970 and 1988, of whom 165,000 immigrated to Israel and 126,000 to the United States. [3]
Millions of Jews, including tens of thousands of Jews from Belarus, emigrated to the United States of America and South Africa. A small number also emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine. During the first years of Soviet occupation of Belarus, Jews were able to get powerful positions in the country's government and intelligentisa.
Institutional racism against Jews was widespread in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, with many sectors of the government being off-limits. [37] Following the failure of the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair , in which 12 refuseniks unsuccessfully attempted to hijack a plane and flee west, crackdowns on Jews and the refusenik movement followed.