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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.
Jerry Goodman was a leading activist in the Soviet Jewry Movement and the founding executive director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, a national agency established to coordinate the efforts of the American Jewish communities on behalf of Jews in the Soviet Union. He co-established the organization in 1971 and directed it until 1988. [1]
The organization helped link Jewish emigration to trade restrictions, leading to increase of immigration of Jews from Soviet Union to Israel in the 1970s. It organized a march for human rights for Soviet Jews on December 6, 1987, the day before a meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev , known as Freedom Sunday for Soviet Jews .
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.
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]
By the end of the 19th century, many Belarusian Jews were part of the general flight of Jews from Eastern Europe to the New World due to conflicts and pogroms engulfing the Russian Empire and the anti-Semitism of the Russian czars. Millions of Jews, including tens of thousands of Jews from Belarus, emigrated to the United States of America and ...
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]
The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, also known by its acronym SSSJ, was founded in 1964 by Jacob Birnbaum to be a spearhead of the U.S. movement for rights of the Jews in the Soviet Union. [1] The organisation held [ 2 ] [ 3 ] demonstrations, at various important locations.