Between the late 1960s and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, nearly two million Jews left Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the Soviet Empire. Their heroic struggle for the right to worship, to learn Hebrew, and to emigrate enlisted the support of diaspora Jewish communities around the globe, especially in the United States. American Jews supported Soviet Jewry's fight in many ways: from writing and calling individual “refuseniks,” remembering those imprisoned at Passover Seders, and “twinning” their children's bar and bat mitzvahs with those of Soviet Jewish children who could not celebrate them, to mass rallies, protests at Soviet embassies, lobbying Congress and the administration, and actually traveling to Russia to meet refuseniks and express their solidarity. In the 1970s and 80s it seemed as if every synagogue in America had a huge poster outside of it demanding freedom for Soviet Jewry.
But just as there is a myth that all Americans were united in the final struggle against communism and the Soviet Union, there is a myth about the Soviet Jewish exodus. The myth is that the American Jewish community was united from start to finish and that the power of this unity liberated Soviet Jews. There is much to celebrate in American Jewish activism in those decades, but the full story is more complex.
The plight of Soviet Jewry first came into focus for American Jews in the 1960s. In 1963, the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism was formed. In 1966 Elie Wiesel's The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry, based on articles he wrote as a reporter for Ha'aretz, was published in America and became a surprise bestseller. Thirty-two local groups formed the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ) in 1970, and the first World Conference on Soviet Jewry was held one year later, the same year the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) was formed.
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