Introduction
In October 1971, a visitor to the United States Mission to the United Nations in New York City would have seen an unusual sight: a group of smartly dressed young men, busy unfurling banners, putting up posters, and making a large booth out of bars and cloth. Megaphones in hand, the group soon informed passers-by of their intentions: “We are here to demand that the US government speak out clearly and specifically against the antisemitic persecutions now in the USSR, and that the UN show its support of Russian Jews.”1 These young men belonged to the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (the SSSJ), a national organisation formed in 1964 to advocate for the rights of Soviet Jews. By 1971, their cause had garnered international attention, and the SSSJ in particular was famous for its creative approach to advocacy. As historian Shaul Kelner puts it, “the SSSJ’s rallies and vigils combined a penchant for high drama, a sensitivity to the power of religious symbolism, and, not unrelated, a delight in what [SSSJ leader Glenn] Richter called shtick;”2 that is, drama and gimmick.
The group’s protest at the US Mission to the UN that day in October 1971 might have seemed eccentric and even silly to onlookers, but the SSSJ was more than just another countercultural youth movement. Leaflets handed to passers-by explained that the protest was imbued with spiritual meaning:
The booth we have here is a sukkah. Our sukkah is composed of prison bars symbolising the imprisonment of Soviet Jews who wish to go to Israel. Yet, the sukkah, this fragile structure, manages to stand during the week-long period of the holiday, and in doing so symbolises the Russian Jew who, despite difficulties, has and will survive.3
This was a typical approach for the group, whose advocacy was informed by their religious observance and who strategically planned their protests to maximise their use of Jewish religious symbolism. For the SSSJ, protest was a religious act.
Focusing on the work of the SSSJ in the 1960s and 1970s, this paper will explore the place of the Hebrew bible and of Jewish religious ritual in the activism of the American movement for Soviet Jewish emigration. It will argue that religious symbolism lay at the heart of the SSSJ’s work, with the organisation’s entire approach to campaigning imbued with spiritual meaning. The SSSJ’s emphasis on public observance of religion in its protests and advocacy aligned with the background of its members, some 65 percent of whom identified as observant Modern Orthodox Jews.4 This distinguished the SSSJ from the broader Jewish American community, the majority of whom were Conservative or Reform Jews. The SSSJ also stands out among the Soviet Jewry Movement for the way it combined the visual culture of the counterculture with the language and ritual of Orthodox Judaism.
Yet as this paper will show, the SSSJ was not an Orthodox movement; that is, a movement designed exclusively for Orthodox Jews. Just as it welcomed non-Orthodox and indeed non-Jewish members, the SSSJ’s rhetoric was designed to appeal to a broad audience with a range of religious backgrounds, education levels and approaches to observance. To do so, the SSSJ worked to translate the Hebrew Bible (sometimes literally, in its slogans’ translations from Hebrew to English) and render Jewish ritual understandable and meaningful. This paper will focus on selected examples of this process, considering how the SSSJ used biblical stories, holiday observance, and religious ritual to advocate for the rights of Soviet Jews. It will begin by exploring the religious, social, and political currents that led to the development of the SSSJ’s unique approach to advocacy, before considering the particular elements of religious engagement that the SSSJ used in its work.
Jewish Identity and the Development of the Soviet Jewry Movement
Although there had been a small Jewish population in America since the seventeenth century, the majority of Jewish Americans in the postwar era were descended from a more recent wave of immigration; the two million Jews who left the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement between 1880 and 1924. As such, by the 1960s, the majority of young Jewish adults were third generation Americans; this group became the majority of the total Jewish American population in around 1975.5 The political and religious effects of the rise of the third generation of Jewish Americans were compounded by its size: Jewish Americans, like other demographic groups, had seen a significant rise in the birth rate in the years following the Second World War. These third generation Americans did not feel the same “uncertainty surrounding ethnic identity”6 which had plagued their parents. Young Jewish Americans in the postwar years were comfortably integrated into American life. Few spoke Yiddish, fewer still retained a dedication to the culture and values of the immigrant generation.
Yet this comfortable American-ness did not lead young Jewish Americans to abandon their Jewish identities for total assimilation. Indeed, quite the opposite effect occurred; now that Jewish Americans were an integral part of American society, young people could accentuate their Jewishness publicly and confidently.7 The Jewishness these young people chose to explore was not usually the Orthodoxy of their grandparents’ generation, though for a significant minority—including many in the SSSJ—returning to observance of religious ritual was a key part of maintaining Jewish identity in postwar America.8 Rather, the new Jewishness meant belief in a civil religion, with the emphasis on the cultural and political aspects of Jewish life as much as, if not more than, on tradition and observance. The rise of Jewish-centred campaigns such as the Soviet Jewry Movement was thus symptomatic of a wider shift in Jewish American identity and values, as young people began to place Jewish interests at the heart of their political, social, and cultural lives.9
The changing nature of Jewish American identity was not merely the result of demographic factors. As part of the American mainstream, American Jews were at the centre of wider currents in the postwar years which helped to bring about this renewal and re-emphasis of the Jewish half of Jewish American identity. Two trends in particular shaped Jewish identity in transformative ways in the postwar years: the Cold War, and the rise of a new ethnic politics. The latter became particularly important in the 1960s, as a variety of other minority groups—African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans—began to emphasise their ethnic identities in new ways. Jewish Americans were an important part of a wider movement in American life as many minority groups discovered or rediscovered their ancestral cultures and identities. As Barnett puts it, “identity politics had become fashionable. Jews were acting just like others.”10
The impact of the Cold War was felt earlier than the impact of ethnic politics, as part of the wider shift in American society prompted by the changes in international alliances and the start of US-Soviet tensions in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This shift placed religion at the heart of American Cold War life, setting the theistic USA against the atheistic USSR. Judaism was thus “mobilised in the struggle against communism.”11 America in the 1950s was supposedly “One Nation Under God”—and it mattered little whether that God was Christian or Jewish. As Herberg argues, the emerging social structure of American society in the late 1950s consisted of “three great branches or divisions of American religion”12 with Judaism taking its place alongside Protestantism and Catholicism as one of the “three big sub-communities”13 at the heart of “the American’s faith in faith.”14 Religion in the Cold War was “our greatest resource, and most powerful secret weapon;”15 religious belief was seen as the duty of every patriotic American citizen in the early Cold War decades. To emphasise one’s Jewishness now made one not just more Jewish, but more American as well.
Information about the “all pervasive discrimination”16 faced by the roughly three million Jews of the USSR thus reached the West at a key moment for Jewish American identity and advocacy. The community responded with the creation of a variety of organisations, among them the SSSJ, collectively known as the Soviet Jewry Movement. In its early years, the movement focused on highlighting antisemitic policies in the USSR; advocating, for example, for the publication of books and newspapers in Yiddish, and speaking out against the closure of synagogues and Jewish schools.17 But by the 1970s, the Soviet Jewry Movement had changed its focus—now, its campaigning pushed for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate from the USSR to the West or Israel.18
Broadly speaking, the many organisations of the Soviet Jewry Movement can be split into two strands: establishment groups, and grassroots groups. Establishment groups had older members and preferred private lobbying over public protest, which the grassroots put at the centre of its approach. The SSSJ sits firmly within the grassroots end of the spectrum: indeed, Jacob (later Ya’akov) Birnbaum created the SSSJ in 1964 with the intention of focusing its work on direct nonviolent protest in the vein of that practised by the civil rights movement in the United States. He began his efforts to create the organisation by specifically targeting young, politically engaged Jewish students at the universities of New York City, tailoring his rhetoric to resonate with “idealistic students who hoped to change the world.”19 A significant portion of those who joined the SSSJ had experience in other grassroots movements— initially, usually the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s; later, the anti-Vietnam movement.20 Their complementary experience of rising Jewish consciousness and civil rights activism would shape the choice of rhetoric used by the SSSJ’s campaigns, with its unique blend of religious and countercultural symbolism.
Let My People Go: Ritualising Protest and Protest Ritual
The SSSJ presented the Jewish American community as having a duty towards the Soviet Jewish community on the basis of a collective, transnational Jewish identity—an identity which transcended the Cold War barriers of US and Soviet nationality. The group’s very first press releases referred to Soviet Jews as “our brethren,”21 with the early slogan “I am my brother’s keeper” reflecting the notion of American responsibility towards their Jewish “family” in the Soviet Union. The strength of this bond is referenced over and over by the SSSJ, indicating that notions of brotherhood and solidarity towards the Soviet Jewish community were deeply felt and seen as uncontroversial. This is potentially surprising given that the Jewish American community had for much of its history been subject to allegations of split loyalties due to its supposed links with Jewish communities abroad. Although the Cold War made expressing solidarity or brotherhood with those oppressed by the Cold War enemy relatively easier, the SSSJ’s leaders and activists were clearly secure enough in their American identities to publicly identify themselves as being eternally and deeply connected to a group of people living in a state which was viewed as the greatest enemy of the American people.
Literature on the Soviet Jewry Movement has usually attributed this idea of transnational Jewish identity to the “grandparent factor,”22 arguing that American Jews felt “a direct personal link with Jews in a country from which they themselves or their ancestors had come.”23 However, analysis of the SSSJ’s rhetoric in the 1960s and 1970s reveals that the organisation focused not on the literal familial relationship between American and Soviet Jews, but rather on a more spiritual connection between the two groups. Rather than emphasising their shared recent ancestry, the Jewish American activists of SSSJ emphasised the notion of Klal Yisroel—a spiritual bond connecting Jewish people across the world.24 It was this notion—grounded in Jewish learning and expressing a religious, rather than a familial, connection, on which the SSSJ’s activism was based. The SSSJ campaigned not on behalf of the cousins left behind, but on behalf of their fellow Jews—wherever they may be.
The SSSJ’s activism was publicly and proudly Orthodox, featuring activists dressed as if for a synagogue service, in formal suit, yarmulke and tallit; some went further and wore additional symbols of personal observance such as tzitzit and tefillin.25 Protests frequently featured additional displays of Jewish ritual, including prayer, religious singing, and the presence of Orthodox rabbis leading the events.26 SSSJ leaders felt that presenting their organisation as Jewish—and, even more emphatically, as religiously Jewish—would be neutrally if not positively received by such witnesses and by the media. This was not an assumption without basis in fact. While the Cold War and the rise of ethnic politics had made publicly expressing one’s religious beliefs acceptable and even fashionable, it was the dramatic fall in antisemitism which really transformed Jewish Americans’ attitude towards public expression of their religious beliefs. The drop in antisemitic attitudes in American life was astounding in its speed and completeness. In 1946, according to an American Jewish Committee Poll, some eighteen percent of non-Jewish Americans, when asked “which national, religious, or racial groups pose a threat to America, if any?” answered Jews. By 1964, fewer than one percent gave the same response.27 Thus, the SSSJ’s activists could be confident in identifying themselves as Jewish without fear of backlash or antisemitic incidents.
Given that the activists of the SSSJ were themselves religious, it is not surprising that the organisation made many attempts to engage with religious Jews in its campaigning. Indeed, on occasion it even tried to appeal to those who were strictly Orthodox, through references to Haredi rabbis’ support for the Soviet Jewry Movement.28 The SSSJ consistently sought to accommodate Orthodox Jews through ensuring that protests did not impede religious observance; all food offered at the SSSJ’s protests was kosher, and regional groups of the SSSJ were instructed not to offer literature for individuals to take away on Shabbat, so as not to prevent observant audiences from accessing SSSJ materials.29
Repeatedly, the SSSJ presented activism on behalf of Soviet Jews as a religious imperative. In 1965, the SSSJ argued that “we must not allow ourselves to be in the position of Joseph’s brothers,” thereby comparing inaction in the Soviet Jewry Movement with the infamous Torah story of fraternal betrayal.30 The SSSJ’s later slogan, Let My People Go, placed religion at the heart of activism. In this slogan, SSSJ activists are in the position of Moses saving the Israelites from slavery—with God firmly on their side.31 As a slogan, Let My People Go epitomises the Soviet Jewry Movement. It is a clear, short, and accessible phrase, a biblical reference familiar both to Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. In the postwar period, the Exodus narrative was associated with the struggle for African American civil rights and particularly with Paul Robeson’s 1953 recording of the spiritual Go Down Moses (Let My People Go). The SSSJ made this connection between the Soviet Jewry Movement and the Civil Rights Movement in a 1967 flyer, stating “when Paul Robeson sang Let My People Go, his meaning was clear.”32 Thus, the slogan linked the SSSJ’s work with wider civil rights advocacy, and offered a pithy summary of their aims which could be understood and engaged with by both Jews and non-Jews.
It is clear from the use of language such as this that the SSSJ sought to appeal not just to Orthodox or religious Jews, but also to secular Jews and non-Jewish people. The SSSJ took care to ensure that all its religious symbolism was accessible to these different groups. For example, the SSSJ used familiar Jewish holidays for symbolic purposes in its work. Holidays were an effective means of appealing to a wider audience for two reasons. Firstly, most Americans were aware of Jewish holidays such as Hanukkah and Passover. Most Jewish people—no matter their usual affiliation or level of observance—celebrated these holidays annually, while most non-Jewish Americans would be familiar with the holidays’ basic narratives and meaning. Secondly, the holidays’ stories of redemption, survival and escape easily lent themselves to the SSSJ’s rhetoric. The Shofar of Rosh Hashanah was reframed as representing “the call to conscience and the hope for redemption and freedom;”33 the booths of Sukkot designed to represent “the imprisonment of Soviet Jews who wish to go to Israel.”34
While holidays such as Sukkot, Purim and Tisha B’Av were employed as part of the SSSJ’s rhetoric, the majority of references to religious holidays by the organisation featured either Passover or Hanukkah. This was because both holidays were very well known and widely practised, and because they offered useful narratives for the Soviet Jewry struggle. Passover, as “the most widely practised Jewish holiday in the USA,”35 was at the very heart of SSSJ activism. Each year huge events were organised to coincide with the holiday, and the Exodus narrative was “invoked as a rhetorical frame”36 with the Soviet Jewish community cast as the enslaved Israelites and the Soviet government as Pharaoh. The SSSJ’s rhetoric described the holiday as “the festival of freedom”37 and suggested that the restrictions on matzah baking by the Soviet government were a direct result of the food being symbolic of “deliverance from bondage.”38 The Passover story was brought into the present and the repression in the Soviet Union was stylized with the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt. This example shows how the SSSJ used Jewish and biblical narratives and transferred them to political reality.
A key element of the SSSJ’s rhetoric on Passover was the assumption that its American Jewish audience would be celebrating, and attempts to link this celebration to Soviet Jewry activism through guilt trips and direct appeals. In 1970, the SSSJ asked “How can you celebrate Passover—the festival of the Exodus—in good conscience without bringing your family to the Exodus March?”39; the following year, the organisation argued “As we sit with our families and friends at the Seder table this year, we are obligated to remember the three million Soviet Jews for whom freedom is not yet a reality.”40 Hanukkah, with its natural symbolism of freedom from oppression, also lent itself to SSSJ activism; the holiday was described in a press release as “commemorating the Jewish fight for religious and national freedom.”41
By using popular holidays which were understood by the wider population and celebrated by most Jewish Americans, the SSSJ was able to employ an effective rhetorical device to persuade its audience to support its activism. In doing so, it reflected its role as part of a community which was proud of its Jewishness. The SSSJ was a publicly religious organisation, neither ashamed nor embarrassed of its Jewish identity, but rather confidently expressing that identity on the national and international stage. In doing so, its rhetoric helped to construct a wider Jewish American identity which was proudly and unequivocally Jewish.
Conclusions
This paper has used the work of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry as a lens through which to consider the place of Jewish ritual and religious observance in the American Soviet Jewry Movement. The SSSJ represented the grassroots end of a movement characterised by significant variation in approach and ideology. It also represented the youth wing of the Soviet Jewry Movement; the SSSJ’s activists were rarely older than thirty, and many were teenagers. Their generational consciousness is reflected in their confident, public approach to protest; while their elders negotiated with diplomats and politicians, the SSSJ’s activists could be found on the streets outside, handing out flyers and holding placards. The SSSJ was inspired by the approach of civil rights protestors; in the drama of its advocacy, one can see an irreverent approach it shared with groups like the Youth International Party.
If the activists of the SSSJ had read Martin Luther King and Jack Kerouac, they had also read Abraham Joshua Heschel—to say nothing of the Torah itself. The organisation, unusually among the sometimes-uneasy coalition which made up the Soviet Jewry Movement, consisted of activists with an Orthodox Jewish background and education. Led by rabbis and buoyed by students at Yeshiva University, the SSSJ imbued its activism with religious meaning. Viewing the Soviet Jewry Movement as a Jewish imperative—indeed, as a mitzvah—the activists of the SSSJ considered themselves to be working for a higher cause. Peppering their vocabulary with phrases like Klal Yisroel and Pidyon Shvuyim, SSSJ protestors revealed both a knowledge of Jewish law and a confidence in expressing religious devotion in the American political sphere.
Yet the SSSJ’s members were conscious of their place within Jewish American life, aware that most Jewish Americans were less religiously observant and less knowledgeable about Jewish religious concepts. Adjusting these concepts for a broader audience was therefore a cornerstone of the SSSJ’s work, exemplified in their use of pithy religious slogans like “Let My People Go.” In using such terms, the SSSJ both literally translated the Hebrew bible into English and metaphorically translated Jewish tradition for a broader audience which was less familiar with the intricacies of Jewish ritual. Doing so allowed the SSSJ to reach a larger group of people with their activism, balancing their religious observance with the need for broad public appeal. The aim of the SSSJ’s work was not to bring the non-observant to Orthodox Judaism. Instead, the SSSJ took a pragmatic approach, imbuing their protests with biblical symbolism and religious ritual in a way that was accessible and understandable for non-Orthodox Jews and indeed for Christians. This strategic approach to advocacy was highly effective, making the SSSJ the most visible and public reminder of the cause of Soviet Jewish emigration rights from 1964 to 1991.
Bibliography
Altshuler, Stuart. From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
Barnett, Michael N. The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Beckerman, Gal, ‘When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Buwalda, Piet, They Did Not Dwell Alone: Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union 1967–1990. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Cohen, Steven M. “From Integration to Survival: American Jewish Anxieties in Transition,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480 (1985): 75–88.
Ferziger, Adam S. “‘Outside the Shul’: The American Soviet Jewry Movement and the Rise of Solidarity Orthodoxy, 1964–1986.” Religion and American Culture 22, no. 1 (2012): 83–130.
Herberg, Will. Protestant – Catholic – Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. New ed., completely revised. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960.
Kelner, Shaul. “Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry.” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 3 (2008): 1–37.
Ro’i, Yaacov. The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration 1948–1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Sachar, Howard M. A History of the Jews in America. New York, NY: Knopf, 1993.
Shapiro, Edwars S. A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II. Volume 5 of The Jewish People in America, edited by Henry L. Feingold. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Svonkin, Stuart. Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Wertheimer, Jack. A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Brandeis, 1997.
Soviet Jewry Sukkah flyer, October 1971, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 8, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
S. Kelner, “Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 3 (2008): 15.
Soviet Jewry Sukkah flyer, October 1971, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 8, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
A. S. Ferziger, “‘Outside the Shul’: The American Soviet Jewry Movement and the Rise of Solidarity Orthodoxy, 1964–1986,” Religion and American Culture 22, no. 1 (2012): 92.
S. M. Cohen, “From Integration to Survival: American Jewish Anxieties in Transition,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480 (1985): 80.
W. Herberg, Protestant – Catholic – Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 18.
J. Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (Hanover NH: Brandeis, 1997), 29.
H. M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York, NY: Knopf, 1993), 689.
S. Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), 178.
M. N. Barnett, The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 156.
E. S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II, vol. 5 of The Jewish People in America, ed. H. L. Feingold (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 53.
Herberg, Protestant – Catholic – Jew, 38.
Ibid., 38.
Ibid., 89.
Ibid., 60.
P. Buwalda, They Did Not Dwell Alone: Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union 1967–1990 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 30.
Y. Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish emigration 1948–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6.
Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 214.
Ferziger, “‘Outside the Shul’,” 89.
Ro’i, The Struggle, 209.
Prayer Service for Soviet Jewry, 25 August 1964, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 1, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
S. Altshuler, From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) 12–13.
Ro’i, The Struggle, 202.
12E1974.
Exodus March photograph, 1970, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 6, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
Jewish Chronicle Article, 8 May 1964 Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 1, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
G. Beckerman, ‘When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 42.
Picket Sign Slogans List for Brooklyn March, 27 February 1966, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 2, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
National Conference on Campus Action for Soviet Jewry information booklet, 23–25 January 1972, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 9, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
Soviet Jewry handbook, June 1965, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 220, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
World Day for Soviet Jewry suggested placard slogans, 20 September 1970, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 7, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
New York Times Passover Advertisement, 28 April 1967, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 3, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
Prayer Service for Soviet Jewry, 25 August 1964, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 1, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
Soviet Jewry Sukkah flyer, October 1971, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 8, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
Kelner, “Ritualized Protest,” 10.
Ibid., 9.
Passover Vigil Poster, April 1967, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 2, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
New York Times Passover advertisement, 28 April 1967, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 3, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
So You’ve Never Gone to a Rally Flyer, Spring 1970, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 6, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY. The Exodus March was a large rally held in New York City by the SSSJ, its route representing the movement of the Israelites out of Egypt and the hoped-for migration of Soviet Jews out of the USSR.
We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt leaflet, April 1971, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 226, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.
Why Freedom Lights newsletter/information sheet, December 1971, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Box 8, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.