Culture is Not Apolitical

In the spring of 1964, a man rented a modest room in Washington Heights, next to Yeshiva University. Soon, he could be seen chatting animatedly to students in dormitories and libraries across the campus. Though his style of dress - a formal hat, well-worn black coat, and goatee - was so innocuous he practically blended into the university buildings, Jacob Birnbaum had come to New York City with a singular aim. He was going to start a movement.

Jacob Birnbaum was perhaps an unusual candidate for this task. He didn’t look like a troublemaker- he was in his late 30s, had short hair and didn’t even own a pair of jeans. He didn’t sound like one either, with his formal British accent. But Birnbaum had something more important than the right look - he had a vision, and the passion to see it through.

In 1964, the world's second largest Jewish community lived in the Soviet Union In the early Cold War years, very little information about Soviet Jews reached the West. Those reports that did make it through were frightening. Soviet Jews faced discrimination, prejudice, even violence. Emigrating to escape this mistreatment was near impossible. Report after report piled up, making the situation clear: the USSR's 3 million Jews faced unbearable conditions. 

In America, things were very different. Jewish Americans were wealthier, better educated, and more self-confident than ever. A new generation spearheaded campaigns for domestic and global issues. Three years before Jacob Birnbaum arrived in New York, the Freedom Riders had gone south to fight for an end to segregation on interstate buses. Two thirds of white freedom riders were Jewish.

Across town from Jacob Birnbaum’s room in Washington Heights lived a teenager. When he wasn’t studying for his political science degree, the young man volunteered for civil rights group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But the teenager, a native New Yorker named Glenn Richter, was looking for more.

A new ethnic pride was emerging among ‘hyphenated Americans’, and Jews like Glenn were feeling it too. All across America were young Jewish Americans just like him: proud of their identities and experienced in campaigning. All they needed was a cause to commit to. Jacob Birnbaum had a cause- all he needed was some activists to commit to it. It was a perfect match.

Glenn Richter met Jacob Birnbaum for the first time in April 1964. Despite their differing backgrounds, the teenage New Yorker and the thirty-eight year old Brit found they had a lot in common. Richter immediately signed up to Birnbaum’s new cause, and was one of the two hundred students who attended the first meeting of ‘College Students’ Struggle for Soviet Jewry’ on April 27th, 1964.

The nascent group’s first protest would bring together Birnbaum’s vision with Richter’s civil rights experience. The group decided on a march to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, to be held on May Day. The plan was deeply symbolic: held at the UN to highlight the USSR’s failure to give Soviet Jews human rights; held on May Day, the USSR’s biggest holiday, and channeling the methods of the civil rights movement.

College Students’ Struggle for Soviet Jewry had been born. But there was still a way to go before the organization could achieve its goal of liberating Soviet Jews. First of all, the name. Why restrict it to college students? So, the group became Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. Second, the silence had to go. In 1964, hundreds of advocacy groups jostled for media coverage and support. As Richter later put it, 'silence didn't get you anywhere'. From the second protest onward, SSSJ would talk, shout and sing their way into the history books.

Jacob Birnbaum put his heart and soul into SSSJ. The organization operated on a shoestring budget, selling buttons and decals for a dollar apiece to keep itself afloat. Birnbaum kept his personal expenses as low as possible. He wore the same formal coat for decades, lived off baked beans, and did his laundry in the bathtub, so that every penny possible could go to the cause. Despite its meager budget, the passion of SSSJ’s leaders transformed the organization from a couple of hundred college kids in New York City, to a global force for change.

Glenn Richter’s experience in the civil rights movement helped create a group which relied on non-violent direct action protest. Every weekend in urban centers across America, its members could be found rallying everywhere from the offices of Soviet businesses to the United Nations. Channeling the tactics of the anti-war movement, SSSJ favored eye-catching publicity stunts. On one occasion, the SSSJ baked a cake for the birthday of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and presented it to the Soviet Mission to the UN. Glenn Richter summarized their response: ‘Soviet officials rejected the cake, so we ate it ourselves’.

SSSJ’s use of direct action protest was challenged from both sides. On one end were organizations who had taken Jewish pride and imbued it with the tactics of the radical left. Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Jewish Defense League was established just a few years after SSSJ, also advocated for the rights of Soviet Jews. But his violent, even lethal methods repulsed SSSJ, which distanced itself from the JDL.

On the other side were older, more conservative groups, which found SSSJ’s public protests childish and feared they would be counterproductive. Instead, they favored quiet diplomacy, negotiating with the Soviet and American government behind the scenes. SSSJ rejected this kind of behind the scenes work. Activists like Glenn Richter had cut their teeth on the marches and sit-ins of the civil rights movement; they weren’t about to pack up their placards and speak politely to men in suits. 

SSSJ was a Jewish movement. Its cause was Jewish, its leaders were Jewish, and most of its activists were Jewish- in fact, the majority, including Richter and Birnbaum, were religiously observant. But SSSJ’s leaders knew they couldn’t build a movement just by appealing to the religious; a minority within a minority would not build the kind of mass support they would need. So when they designed their posters and wrote their flyers, they were sure to include simple and accessible religious symbols.

Hanukkah too was a central part of SSSJ’s year, becoming the holiday when the light of Soviet Jewry activism would push out the darkness of Soviet antisemitism. The shofar of Rosh Hashanah was blown by activists at SSSJ protests: as Freda Birnbaum put it, the shofar represents ‘the call to action. You make a loud noise, you rally the troops’. These symbols could be understood by everyone from the most to the least observant, by Jews and non-Jews, on an international scale. 

The civil rights movement had attracted thousands of teenagers and young adults to its cause. SSSJ now looked to do the same. So many teenagers flocked to SSSJ that its instructions to activists would restrict roles by high school year (‘you must be a freshman to hand out materials. If you are a junior, you can marshall crowds’). SSSJ’s leaders harnessed youth activism by encouraging young people to twin their bar mitzvah with that of a Soviet Jewish child.

During its first seven years- from 1964 to 1971- the SSSJ matured into a confident and powerful group. Though it was inspired by the civil rights movement, SSSJ soon developed its own unique style. It was a Jewish movement. It was a youth movement. And in these years, it was a lonely movement. Sure, other groups took an interest in the Soviet Jewish issue. Some even organized protests for the cause. But only SSSJ worked full time to fight for the rights of Soviet Jews. Only SSSJ made that cause its sole concern. Only SSSJ had activists devoted to the Soviet Jewry Movement. All that was soon to change, thanks to a former fighter pilot and a Senator from Washington.

In June 1970, eleven people arrived at a small airport on the outskirts of Leningrad. Posing as a group of wedding guests, they had purchased tickets on a twelve seater shuttle. The group were in fact refuseniks- Soviet citizens denied exit visas- and nine of the eleven were Jewish. Their plan, ‘Operation Wedding’, was an elaborate attempt to escape from the USSR. The group’s leader Mark Dymshits planned to use his Red Army pilot training to fly the plane to the West.

But something had gone horribly wrong with Operation Wedding, and the group were all arrested before they could board the plane.

In the years before Operation Wedding, there had been a spate of high-profile hijackings by terrorist organizations. Now the Soviet Union hoped to capitalize on the fear of hijackings by presenting the refuseniks to the world as violent terrorists. Soviet media heavily publicized the arrests, warping the facts to fit the story. But the Soviet plan would not have the intended effect. Instead, it would backfire spectacularly, changing the lives of Soviet Jews forever.  

Six months after the arrests, the group were put on trial, with the verdicts announced on 25th December 1970. The plot’s ringleaders, pilot Mark Dymshits and noted refusenik Eduard Kuznetsov, were sentenced to death. The others were given sentences of between four and fifteen years.

But the world didn’t react to these sentences in the way the Soviets had wanted. In fact, the trials caused outrage across the world. Schoolchildren in Stockholm and longshoremen in Genoa went on strike. Ninety cities held rallies in the United States alone. And SSSJ mounted its biggest protests yet. 

The efforts of thousands of activists throughout the world paid off. Horrified at the global reaction, the USSR backtracked, commuting the death sentences and reducing the terms of imprisonment.

But the Soviet government could not control the wave of publicity they had provoked. After the Leningrad trials, the whole world knew what SSSJ had been saying for seven years: Soviet Jews faced discrimination, and the Soviet Union wouldn’t let them leave. The Soviet Jewry Movement became a cause célèbre. 

SSSJ had long resented the Jewish American establishment for what it saw as inaction on Soviet Jewry. So when Leningrad trials prompted the creation of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (a mainstream group) and the National Coalition Supporting Soviet Jewry (a grassroots group) the SSSJ was pleased.

Yet the sudden creation of new organizations to fight for Soviet Jewry wasn’t without its headaches. Now the SSSJ would have to work alongside other groups to achieve its goals- groups with very different ideas about how things should be done.  

The Leningrad trials didn’t just galvanize Jewish activists. People from across the religious and political spectrum were horrified by the USSR’s treatment of the ‘hijackers’, and resolved to do something about it. One of those inspired by the trials was Richard Perle, then a young staffer to Democratic Senator Scoop Jackson.

 Perle came up with an idea, and persuaded Jackson to support it. In October 1972, the US and the Soviet Union would sign a trade bill after years of careful negotiation. The deal would have huge benefits for the USSR by giving it ‘Most Favored Nation’ status. Perle’s idea was simple: an amendment to the bill which added a single caveat ‘if you don’t allow free emigration, you don’t get MFN status’. 

 The idea- soon dubbed the ‘Jackson-Vanik Amendment’ after its proposers in the House and the Senate- was explosive. The fight for and against the adoption of the JVA revealed conflicts that had been simmering for years between grassroots groups like SSSJ and more recently established mainstream Soviet Jewry organizations.

SSSJ spent thousands of hours advocating for the amendment. Establishment Jewish organizations like AJCSJ were more cautious. They feared the JVA might push the Soviets away from the negotiating table and undermine their carefully cultivated relations with the White House. SSSJ had never sought this kind of close diplomatic relationship with the White House; in fact, the activists had clashed with the Nixon administration. 

The fight dragged on for nearly two years as the amendment made its way through Congress. The Nixon administration and the Soviet government were furious that the amendment had even been proposed. How could a ragtag group of ex-civil rights campaigners, rabbis, Cold War liberals and hippies unwind years of careful negotiation and detente in one fell swoop?

The amendment’s passage was a huge achievement for SSSJ. It had all started with a man with a vision, renting a cheap room in Washington Heights. Ten years later SSSJ was now a group with the power to influence American foreign policy and shape the relations between superpowers.

When SSSJ’s earliest activists silently marched to the United Nations on May Day 1964, they did so on behalf of ‘the Jews of Silence’. Ten years later, the Jews of Silence were silent no more. Instead, they led the movement.

When the eleven participants of Operation Wedding planned their flight out of the Soviet Union, they were acting not just for themselves, but for an international movement. SSSJ leader Avi Weiss recalled a conversation with ringleader Yosef Mendelevich:

‘I said Yosef even if you would have gotten that plane up in the air with Dymshits piloting, the Soviets would have shot you out of the sky.’ And he looked at me, and he said: ‘Avi, we were ready for that. We were ready to die for the cause.’ 

The strength which led eleven refuseniks to risk death for Soviet Jewry came from within, but also from the knowledge that across the world, thousands of people worked tirelessly to support them. And over nearly thirty years of Soviet Jewry activism, political and technological changes built stronger and stronger bonds between these groups, across the Iron Curtain. 

The first Soviet Jewry protests spoke only generally about the problems Soviet Jews faced- it was simply impossible to get specific information. But things soon changed as more Soviet Jews were able to emigrate. They bought vital information with them about Jewish life in the USSR. Detente also allowed activists to visit the USSR, make regular phone calls to refuseniks, and send parcels and messages by mail.

By the late 1960s names and occupations of refuseniks were often included; by the 1970s photographs of refuseniks feature prominently. In the last years of SSSJ’s work, during the 1980s, refuseniks themselves would attend protests and talk to attendees about their lives and activism. Just as Soviet Jews felt stronger with the support of those in the West, SSSJ also felt stronger knowing that its work was wanted and needed by Soviet Jews. 

SSSJ was a small, poorly funded organization- but it had an enormous impact. It pioneered activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry; it made contact with activists across the world; it kept the issue on the international agenda for nearly thirty years. Whatever Soviet- or American- leaders thought about the Soviet Jewry Movement, they could not ignore it.

Soviet Jewish migration soared in the 1970s; a change that could not have happened without years of patient, painstaking work by SSSJ. But the fight was not yet over; in the 1970s and 1980s, exit visas were granted or restricted according to the whims of Soviet officials. But in 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev finally allowed Soviet Jews to freely leave the country.

Over the next three years, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews left the USSR. Most went to Israel, but others settled in the United States, Canada, Germany and elsewhere. Altogether, between 1964 and 1991, around 800,000 Soviet Jews received exit visas. Nearly a million more would leave in the ten years after the collapse of the USSR. SSSJ’s former activists are deeply and rightfully proud of the impact their work had on this migration

In 1964, Jewish Americans were experienced activists. But they had usually focused their efforts on advocating for other minority groups. The Soviet Jewry Movement marked the first time that young Jewish Americans had taken to the streets to advocate for a specifically Jewish cause. Through participating in the Soviet Jewry Movement, young activists gained a sense of ethnic pride, of power and confidence.

SSSJ changed things- for American Jews, for Soviet Jews, for Israel, for the world. Their campaigning shaped the relations between superpowers and altered the lives of millions of Soviet Jews and their descendents. And yet today, few know the name ‘Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry’. Fewer still would recognize a photo of Jacob Birnbaum, the visionary leader whose hard work shaped an international movement. Young people would struggle to name a single refusenik, or know what decade the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was passed. SSSJ- and the movement it was a part of- has been forgotten. 

Why? 

Perhaps because the Soviet Jewry Movement was led by quiet, patient, hardworking activists who eschewed the spotlight to focus on collective campaigning. Perhaps because it has been overshadowed by other events in Jewish history. Perhaps because young Jewish Americans are more interested in new causes, from climate change to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Whatever the reason, the Soviet Jewry Movement deserves its place in Jewish history. Jacob Birnbaum, Glenn Richter, Avi Weiss and the many other activists who worked- year after year, for low or no pay- in the fight for the rights of Soviet Jews, deserve to be recognized. 

Additional reading

Altshuler, Stuart. From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

Beckerman, Gal. When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Peretz, Pauline. Let My People Go: The Transnational Politics of Soviet Jewish Emigration During the Cold War. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 2015.

Weiss, Avraham. Open Up the Iron Door: Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist. New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2015.

Many thanks go to Avi Weiss, Glenn Richter and Freda Birnbaum. Unless otherwise stated, all images are credited to Yeshiva University Archives, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Collection.