Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews was formed in 1970 as an umbrella organization of all local grassroot groups working to win the right to emigrate for oppressed Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. The movement was represented in Israel by Nativ, a clandestine agency that sought to publicize the cause of Soviet Jewry and encourage their ...
Soviet Jewish migration consisted of several waves, the main one in the late 1980s. Now, Jews born in the Soviet Union account for 5% of the American Jewish population. [14] 1980 Census data shows that 98.6% of Soviet Jews lived in a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, with 36% concentrated in the New York SMSA, or 300,000. [3] [14]
The Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ) was founded in 1971, as a non-governmental grassroots organization that worked to secure human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. It served as an umbrella agency for a number of regional organizations of the Soviet Jewry movement. In the 1980 GNYCSJ was renamed Coalition To Free Soviet ...
Initially, American Jews resisted Israeli efforts. Following Mikhail Gorbachev's decision in the late 1980s to allow free emigration for Soviet Jews, the American Jewish community agreed to a quota on Soviet Jewish refugees in the U.S., which resulted in most Soviet Jewish émigrés settling in Israel. [134]
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]
He called the new group Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) (a play on the Marxist term "class struggle") and his first office operated out of his bedroom. In its recent timeline of 350 years of American Jewish history, the Center for Jewish History marked 1 May 1964 as the beginning of the public movement for Soviet Jewry. [citation needed]
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]
In 1989 a record 71,000 Soviet Jews were granted exodus from the USSR, of whom only 12,117 immigrated to Israel. At first, American policy treated Soviet Jews as refugees and allowed unlimited numbers to emigrate, but this policy eventually came to an end.