Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation.
Additional funding is provided through the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
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Archival Audio – Local News Report on Los Angeles Rally:
More than 2,400 people jammed the Sinai Temple on Wilshire Boulevard last night. The standing room only crowd represented 24 different organizations belonging to the Jewish Federation Council. They all have one cause in mind: to protest an increasing wave of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, a country that numbers 3 million Jews, one fourth of the world’s Jewish population. In an attempt to create a counterwave of public opinion, Jewish community leaders pointed to the closing of synagogues, economic and travel restrictions, and to the area that hits hardest and hurts the most: open ridicule and contempt for the Jew and his religion.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the ferment of the 1960s and ‘70s, protest movements of all kinds spread across the United States. Jewish Americans did not sit on the sidelines. In addition to marching for civil rights and women’s rights at home, and against an escalating war in Vietnam, they also took to the streets to demand human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union.
Starting a protest movement was no easy task. Demonstrations for Soviet Jewry did not erupt spontaneously. They had to be organized. But who would take leadership? In 1963 and 1964, pioneer activists founded the first American organizations in the fight for Soviet Jewry. Over the next quarter century, they would build a mass movement that mobilized millions.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: Open Up the Gates. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. This week, we meet The Coalitions. Our story begins with a dilemma. How could a handful of Jews working out of their kitchens and living rooms convince the Soviet superpower to end its discriminatory policies?
Archival Audio, Rally for Natan Sharansky: (children singing in Hebrew)
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Shaul Kelner, professor of Jewish Studies and sociology at Vanderbilt University and author of A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews.
Shaul Kelner: They knew they couldn’t, from the States, directly force the Kremlin to do anything, so what they wanted to do was to get the US government on board and have the US government, as an ally, pressure the Kremlin or put the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration and Soviet Jewish rights on the Cold War negotiating agenda. But the American government was not that interested in doing it because it was dealing with other issues.
If the umbrella bodies for all the synagogues in the country could get together, and if the umbrella organization for all the Jewish Federations, the charities, could get together and, along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, they went with a unified voice to the US government and said, “During the Cold War, fighting for the rights of Soviet Jews is a priority. Take this up. This is not just a Jewish issue. It’s an American issue,” that they could bring the US government on board as an ally.
So the strategy was this: you don’t go directly to the Kremlin. To pressure the Kremlin, you have to pressure the US government. And to pressure the US government, you have to pressure the Jewish organizations to take up the issue.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: For the strategy to work, activists first needed people power. This meant rallying Jewish Americans. By borrowing tactics from other social movements and by inventing new tactics of their own, they built a nationwide campaign.
Saul Kelner: They brought the Soviet Jewish cause into almost every aspect of Jewish life and into almost every type of Jewish institution in the States that they could think of.
So they mobilized the religious holidays. They created Passover rituals, “a matzah of hope,”…there are usually three matzahs on a Seder plate…. You take one of those matzahs, you take a fourth matzo, and you say that this matzo of hope is the matzo that we will raise here in America in remembrance of the Jews of the Soviet Union who are not free to celebrate the Passover.
They held rallies on Simchat Torah. And this was a holiday that was not really a major holiday in the American Jewish folk calendar. It wasn’t that popular. But in the Soviet Union, Russian Jews would turn out in front of their synagogues to sing and to dance in the thousands. And once Jews in the States knew that …this was happening over there, they said, oh, we’re going to have solidarity dance rallies in our own communities. And so Simchat Torah became a huge, huge moment of holiday mobilization for this cause.
They tried to engage every type of group. So they tried to get kids involved. They created curricula for teaching about Soviet Jewry in the Hebrew schools. They created escape-from-Russia simulation games for the summer camps.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: One of the more popular ways to involve youth focused on American Jewry’s favorite life cycle event: the Bar and Bat Mitzvah. American Jewish activists developed the “twinning program” – a comprehensive pen-pal initiative that connected Jewish children in the United States with a Soviet counterpart. Twinning created connections between Jews who were coming of age, and raised awareness for both this younger American generation, and for those in attendance at their ceremonies.
Organizations like the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and Philadelphia’s Soviet Jewry Council created how-to guides to incorporate the twinning program into the ceremony, and the program spread nationwide.
Shaul Kelner: It was very theatrical. There are two high points to the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony: the Torah service and the sermon. At the Torah service, the first high point of the ceremony when they call the bar mitzvah boy or bat mitzvah girl up to chant the Torah, they also call the Soviet twin. And so they will say ya’amod or ta’amod and the name of the Soviet twin. And then they let the silence echo. And then they call it again. Ya’amod. Ta’amod. And again, the Soviet Jewish twin does not show up. So they’re dramatizing the absence of the Soviet Jew, the Soviet Jew that cannot be there, that cannot be free to be in the States; the Soviet Jew that doesn’t have the freedom to celebrate the bar/bat mitzvah the way that the American kids do. And then, after they let the name echo, the American twin comes up and recites the prayers, recites the blessings in the name of the Soviet twin.
Voice Actor – Avital Ely reading Faith Lowy’s Bat Mitzvah speech: When Moses and the Israelites were camping in the desert, mana fell from the sky. It was the food that the Lord provided for the Israelites. After a while, the people grew tired of the mana and complained to Moses. They desired the meat and vegetables they had eaten as slaves in Egypt and decided that it was better when they had good food.
Apparently they had forgotten that their freedom was more important than the fancy food they craved. The Lord became angry with their greed and ignorance and punished them. Sometimes like the Israelites, we do not value our freedom in America. We complain about unimportant things and forget the reason we’re we are still living here, Jews as well as many other persecuted groups came to America because it offered them the independence that is essential for a rewarding life. In nations like the Soviet Union, many people do not have freedom of religion nor the freedom to leave the country. I’ve been writing to a Soviet Refusenik family, the growers. I am uncertain if Janna Grower will ever receive my letter because of the strict control of communications with America in the Soviet Union.
Shaul Kelner: After that, during the sermon, this same American kid will get up and explain to the congregation what just happened, why they did this, who the twin is, what the problems are that their family is facing, how they’re being persecuted, why they can’t get out, and then will give some type of call to action. I, as a responsible Jewish adult, am doing this. What are you doing? And the adults are either shamed or they feel proud and they kvell, look at what good Jewish kids we’ve raised that they’re taking responsibility like this. And that’s essentially how the ceremony went.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On April 30, 1972, organizers held the first of many “Solidarity Sunday” marches. The brainchild of Malcolm Hoenlein – a disciple of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry’s Jacob Birnbaum and the founding director of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry- these marches were modeled after the rallies held by the Triple SJ in the 1960s.
“A crowd estimated by the police at 45,000 jammed Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and overflowed onto side streets yesterday to protest Soviet treatment and imprisonment of Russian Jews,” reported the New York Times. “The rally was New York City’s contribution to National Solidarity Day for Soviet Jews, marked in some 90 communities across the country.”
The marches presented a united front, but beneath the surface, the American movement was divided. Two factions, the “Grassroots” and the “Establishment,” disagreed on strategies and tactics, and sometimes even on goals. In addition to fighting the Soviets, they also fought each other.
Shaul Kelner: The very first organizations that were created were actually grassroots organizations. These were small, independent groups. And the establishment organizations were essentially the large fundraising bodies, the Jewish Federations, the major denominational groups like the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
At the national level, there were two main organizations: one for the establishment which was known as the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, and the other for the grassroots was known as the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. And they would go by their acronyms, the NCSJ and the UCSJ. The acronyms differ just by a single letter, and it gets very confusing for people who are not spending all their time immersed in the movement. But within the movement itself, the activists knew the difference. And the ones on the UCSJ side tended to look at the NCSJ, the establishment, as too slow to act, too cautious, not willing to press quickly enough or hard enough among all the other issues that they were dealing with. And from the establishment side, the National Conference looked at the Union of Councils and they considered them to be rash and injudicious mavericks who would go it alone, who would not think about broader consequences, who wouldn’t coordinate their policies.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The split between the two factions dated all the way back to the founding of Birnbaum’s Triple SJ in April 1964. Just weeks prior, two dozen of the largest Jewish organizations in America gathered at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC to convene an “American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry.” We don’t need a conference,” Birnbaum declared, “but a struggle.”
He was not the only skeptic. Louis Rosenblum, a NASA scientist and veteran of the Battle of Okinawa, and Herbert Caron, a clinical psychologist, founded the Cleveland Council on Soviet Antisemitism in October 1963. They went to the Willard Hotel to make sure that the 3-day conference would do more than just talk.
Shaul Kelner: In April 1964, you also got the first gathering of the large Jewish groups, and they formed their American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, which they later renamed as the National Conference. And the debate was essentially whether—how important the Soviet Jewry issue should be for all of the organizations that were at this conference—there were, I think, twenty-four of them—and whether they should create another organization that would be specifically devoted to Soviet Jewry issues. And most of the organizations were not that keen on having yet another Jewish group competing for fundraising.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The grassroots tried to prod the establishment toward greater action because they believed in the power of the organized Jewish community to make a difference. But with time, the grassroots activists discovered that they had power too.
Shaul Kelner: And eventually, the grassroots groups—the Cleveland Committee—its leader, Lou Rosenblum, went around the country, and he helped to seed local community councils. And in 1971, they got together and formed their Union of Councils. They figured if the American Jewish Conference isn’t going to get its act together and give it—and create permanent staff, permanent budget, then they would create an alternative structure. And once that happened, the establishment groups created the National Conference with its permanent staff, with its own budget. And so the grassroots really forced the establishment to make the issue a higher priority.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The factional conflict brought a larger question to the fore: “Who has the right to speak for American Jews?”
Archival Audio – Rally for Natan Sharansky: (children singing protest song in Hebrew)
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Even with the factional disputes, the grassroots and establishment kept their eyes on the prize. They knew that they could win freedom for Soviet Jews only by building one large American Jewish movement.
Shaul Kelner: The split between the self-proclaimed grassroots and self-proclaimed establishment really ran deep in the way that the activists understood what was going on. That was largely at the national level. But on the local level, they ended up working pretty well together in certain communities.
And Philadelphia becomes one of the hubs of movement activism in part because it’s able to bridge this divide. It’s not the only place where that happened. In Miami or South Florida, in Washington, DC, as well, both the grassroots and establishment groups work together at the local level.
And so what you see at the national level—it spreads nationwide – and other communities are using resources that the Washington activists developed, and there’s a there’s a similarity in what the grassroots groups and the establishment groups are doing. So even though they were fighting with each other at the national level, they ended up doing a lot of the same things because there was an enormous amount of cross-pollination…. what one organization did, other organizations would pick up, and then they would feed it to the national groups which would send the information out.
That’s also an important point to understand as to how the national groups work with the locals. The national groups couldn’t dictate anything, but they largely worked as clearinghouses. So if a local community came up with innovative programing—a new curriculum, a new way of mobilizing for Hanukkah, for example—they would tell the national organization, and then the national organization would disseminate this through newsletters and telephone chains and the like to their local Soviet Jewry groups all over the country. And both the National Conference and the Union of Councils were doing this.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In their activism to free Soviet Jews, American Jews established themselves as an independent political force. They challenged not only the Soviet Bear, but also the American Eagle and Israeli Lion. When they lobbied for the Jackson-Vanick Amendment – a 1974 law that restricted trade with non-market economy nations that restricted human rights and freedom to emigrate, including the USSR – they fought an unsympathetic White House by building alliances on both sides of the Congressional aisle. And when they pressed Western countries to accept Soviet Jewish immigrants and thereby give them freedom of choice where to flee to, they staked out an independent position that angered the State of Israel.
They were able to do all this because they built a mass movement that connected Jews across the US, and similarly-minded Jewish communities around the world.
Shaul Kelner: You had major hubs of Soviet Jewry activity in Boston, Long Island, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Miami, South Florida, had it in Alabama, Chicago, Seattle—and that’s just in the US. And some of these groups then were international. You had groups in Toronto and in Montreal.
You had Israeli governmental organizations, and they were essentially establishment; but then you had Israeli public organizations that didn’t think that the government was doing enough or didn’t know what the government was doing, and so they created their own separate groups. In Canada, in the United Kingdom and in Canada, you had a women’s group called the 35’s, this was a grassroots group that ended up becoming a partner of the Union of Councils in the States. So there were a lot of groups all over the world, and they were connected to some degree with—they were networked internationally as well.
Archival Audio – Martin Luther King, Jr Address to Rabbis: While Jews in Russia may not be physically murdered as they were in Nazi Germany, they are facing everyday a kind of spiritual and cultural genocide.
Negroes can well understand and sympathize with this problem. When you are written out of history as a people, when you are given no choice but to accept the majority culture, you are denied an aspect of your own identity. Ultimately you suffer a corrosion of your self-understanding and self-respect.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, Martin Luther King addressed nationwide rallies for Soviet Jews on December 1, 1966. Civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis would quote King’s speech from the dais of the December 1987 Freedom Rally for Soviet Jews at the National Mall in Washington, in front of 250,000 people. He also added words of his own: “As long as one Jew is denied the right to be Jewish in the Soviet Union, we all are Jews in the Soviet Union.”
In addition to civil rights leaders, Americans of all backgrounds took up the fight. The movement to free Soviet Jewry even united people across the political aisle, bringing hardened Cold Warriors and passionate human rights activists together in a shared American cause.
Shaul Kelner: The grassroots and establishment groups understood that they could not fight this fight and win this fight without allies from outside of the American Jewish community. And they tried to enlist support from all different types of groups. So they had programs that tried to enlist allies from among Christian clergy, from among civil rights activists, from among the labor movement and other places as well.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Prominent Christian activists included Sister Ann Gillen, who led the National Interreligious Task force on Soviet Jewry, and Reverend John Steinbruck. For two decades, he and his congregants at Luther Place Church in Washington, DC made sure that the daily vigil at the Soviet Embassy would go on–even on Shabbat and Jewish holidays.
Many of the civil rights activists who rallied for Soviet Jewry were also clergy. Some, like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, were also active in the labor movement. Rustin, a prominent black gay activist, was drawn to the movement for Soviet Jewry as a human rights issue.
Archival Audio – Bayard Rustin PSA: Hello, I am Bayard Rustin. The world has shown its horror at the senseless persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. Falsely arrested, unjustly accused, over 30 Russian Jews have aroused international outcry against Soviet injustice. Exceedingly harsh has been the sentences handed down. Only world opinion – only our voices – can reach the Soviet authorities and persuade them to cease their campaign of terror. We must do our share in the community of mankind. Therefore on behalf of Soviet Jews, we shall be heard. YOU can be heard.
Shaul Kelner: Bayard Rustin was an important ally of the movement who was coming out of the civil rights campaign. And for American Jews, the ability to frame their cause as—this is a civil rights movement for Jews in Russia. So they’re taking something that was really important in the American context, to Americans overall and to Jewish Americans in particular, and said, just as we are fighting for civil rights here in the US, we’re also going to be fighting for civil rights, human rights, for Jews abroad in Russia.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Rustin was part of the movement to free Soviet Jews for more than two decades. He traveled to Brussels for the Second World Conference of Jewish Communities on Soviet Jewry, recorded public service announcements, chaired committees, and gave speeches. He was regularly in contact with both American Jewish activists and with world leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
Shaul Kelner: And having allies from within the civil rights community—and Bayard Rustin was a major, major ally of the Soviet Jewry movement—was super important for the Soviet Jewry activists because it was not just Jews saying this is an equivalent to a civil rights movement. You had Black leaders who also were saying essentially the same thing. And that message resonated so much more when it was coming from Black civil rights leaders than when it was coming from Jewish allies of the Civil Rights Movement in the States.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1964, just 537 Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union, By 1979, that number had risen to over 50,000.
The multi-pronged strategy was working. Activists had rallied a mass movement of American Jews. This galvanized Jewish organizations to make Soviet Jewry a priority, and helped pressure a reluctant US government to place free emigration on the Cold War agenda. And the Kremlin was responding to Uncle Sam’s carrots and sticks.
Even though the factions never fully resolved their differences, the split between the grassroots and establishment worked to the movement’s advantage. It doubled the opportunities for people to get involved. It fostered a competitive spirit that pushed the groups to continually experiment and innovate. And whether by cooperation or imitation, it let them take their successful experiments, like the twinning program, to scale.
Activists did what they did in order to help Jews in the Soviet Union. But they ended up accomplishing something more. By building a mass mobilization, the grassroots and the establishment – together – invigorated Jewish life in the United States.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In our next episode, we’ll hear more from Dr. Shaul Kelner, and meet the travelers who risked it all to enter the Soviet Union.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written and produced by Shaul Kelner, Andrew Sperling, and Gemma R. Birnbaum. Faith Lowy’s bat mitzvah speech was read by Avital Ely. Research was done by Melissa Silvestri. Special thanks to Walter Neagle. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society and its Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement and the New York Times.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
