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Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry
The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) was an American Jewish student organization founded by Jacob Birnbaum in 1964. It engaged in various types of advocacy for Jews in the Soviet Union, seeking to raise awareness of the denial of their civil and political rights by the Soviet government. Its members frequently demonstrated throughout New York City and rallied support for economic pressure against the Soviet Union, most notably including large protests of hundreds of people at the Permanent Mission of the Soviet Union to the United Nations. The organization also focused on Eastern Bloc emigration, which was a highlight of the Cold War; Soviet citizens, especially those who were Jewish, were largely not allowed to leave the country. As a result, the SSSJ worked in the United States to facilitate Soviet Jewish emigration, primarily to Israel. Although the organization was effectively disbanded following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Birnbaum continued his advocacy for the remaining Jewish communities of the post-Soviet countries until his death in 2014.
The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (often referred to simply as "Student Struggle" or "SSSJ" or "Triple-S-J") was created in 1964 by Jacob Birnbaum from the UK to spearhead an American grassroots movement to liberate the Jews of the Soviet Union. After Birnbaum founded an adult arm two years later, in order to obtain charitable status and adult support, SSSJ's official name became the Center for Russian Jewry with Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry but continued to be known as SSSJ. It was also known as the Center for Russian and East European Jewry in the latter 1970s and the 1980s.
Birnbaum's father and grandfather were recognized authorities on East European Jewry. He had extensive experience in assisting survivors of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism after World War II, and later mobilized British students to assist distressed Jews of North Africa.
A citizen of the UK, he arrived in New York City in the latter part of 1963 where he noted increasing expressions of public concern for the plight of Soviet Jews but encountered only one grassroots activist, Morris Brafman, who had just put together a small group, soon to be known as the American League for Russian Jews, in Brooklyn's Mill Basin area. (At the time Birnbaum did not hear of a 1962 one-time Matzoh demonstration by a small group of Yeshiva University High School students led by Columbia University student Bernard Kabak.) By January 1964 he was settled in Washington Heights near Yeshiva University where he began to build a teacher-student core and also contacted other metropolitan campuses. In the same month, he persuaded Bernard Kaplan, the Social Action Chairman of the national student organization Yavneh to set up a Soviet Jewry committee and by April he was ready to go national and issued a Manifesto titled "College Students Struggle for Soviet Jewry" convening a founding meeting at Columbia University for April 27, 1964. His use of the term "struggle" was ironically designed as a spinoff of the Marxist term "class struggle."
The New York Times wrote in Birnbaum's 2014 obituary: "Mr. Birnbaum insisted that every rally include posters declaring 'Let my people go,' the line from Exodus 9:1 that became the clarion call of the movement."
After the Eichmann trial in 1961 (witnessed by Birnbaum in Jerusalem) people had become increasingly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, so the Columbia meeting proved emotional and there was a call for action. Birnbaum proposed a protest rally outside the Soviet UN Mission on the Soviet May Day holiday, only four days later. He mobilized his Yeshiva University core, contacted other campuses, and some 1,000 students showed up, getting excellent media publicity. According to the Center for Jewish History, this May Day rally marked the commencement of public confrontation with the Kremlin and the initiation of the national movement for Soviet Jewry. Thereafter, four other Soviet Jewry pioneers, Dr. Moshe Decter, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israeli diplomat Dr. Meir Rosenne, and Dr. Louis Rosenblum of Cleveland (later founding Chairman of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews), were delighted to support Birnbaum's initiatives.
Ten days later, Birnbaum formed SSSJ's first steering committee and initiated a series of ground-breaking public events which in the course of two years resulted in a surge of public consciousness which pushed the hesitant U.S. Jewish establishment from a policy of quiet diplomacy toward a more activist mode. In 1964, this commenced with the dispatch of information kits to student summer camps nationally in May, a week-long interfaith fast in June, and a massive rally in October with the participation of President Lyndon Johnson's representative Mayer Feldman, New York Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, and Mayor John Lindsay on the Lower East Side, the original area of East European Jewish settlement.
One unique characteristic of Birnbaum's mobilization of public opinion was to draw on ancient Jewish redemptive themes — for example, the intensification of activities around Passover time, with its themes of liberation and exodus. SSSJ's first student button portrayed a shofar with the wording "Save Soviet Jewry." The years 1964–1966 served as the early "Shofar period" of the Soviet Jewry movement – a call to conscience and a call to action.
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Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry
The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) was an American Jewish student organization founded by Jacob Birnbaum in 1964. It engaged in various types of advocacy for Jews in the Soviet Union, seeking to raise awareness of the denial of their civil and political rights by the Soviet government. Its members frequently demonstrated throughout New York City and rallied support for economic pressure against the Soviet Union, most notably including large protests of hundreds of people at the Permanent Mission of the Soviet Union to the United Nations. The organization also focused on Eastern Bloc emigration, which was a highlight of the Cold War; Soviet citizens, especially those who were Jewish, were largely not allowed to leave the country. As a result, the SSSJ worked in the United States to facilitate Soviet Jewish emigration, primarily to Israel. Although the organization was effectively disbanded following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Birnbaum continued his advocacy for the remaining Jewish communities of the post-Soviet countries until his death in 2014.
The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (often referred to simply as "Student Struggle" or "SSSJ" or "Triple-S-J") was created in 1964 by Jacob Birnbaum from the UK to spearhead an American grassroots movement to liberate the Jews of the Soviet Union. After Birnbaum founded an adult arm two years later, in order to obtain charitable status and adult support, SSSJ's official name became the Center for Russian Jewry with Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry but continued to be known as SSSJ. It was also known as the Center for Russian and East European Jewry in the latter 1970s and the 1980s.
Birnbaum's father and grandfather were recognized authorities on East European Jewry. He had extensive experience in assisting survivors of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism after World War II, and later mobilized British students to assist distressed Jews of North Africa.
A citizen of the UK, he arrived in New York City in the latter part of 1963 where he noted increasing expressions of public concern for the plight of Soviet Jews but encountered only one grassroots activist, Morris Brafman, who had just put together a small group, soon to be known as the American League for Russian Jews, in Brooklyn's Mill Basin area. (At the time Birnbaum did not hear of a 1962 one-time Matzoh demonstration by a small group of Yeshiva University High School students led by Columbia University student Bernard Kabak.) By January 1964 he was settled in Washington Heights near Yeshiva University where he began to build a teacher-student core and also contacted other metropolitan campuses. In the same month, he persuaded Bernard Kaplan, the Social Action Chairman of the national student organization Yavneh to set up a Soviet Jewry committee and by April he was ready to go national and issued a Manifesto titled "College Students Struggle for Soviet Jewry" convening a founding meeting at Columbia University for April 27, 1964. His use of the term "struggle" was ironically designed as a spinoff of the Marxist term "class struggle."
The New York Times wrote in Birnbaum's 2014 obituary: "Mr. Birnbaum insisted that every rally include posters declaring 'Let my people go,' the line from Exodus 9:1 that became the clarion call of the movement."
After the Eichmann trial in 1961 (witnessed by Birnbaum in Jerusalem) people had become increasingly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, so the Columbia meeting proved emotional and there was a call for action. Birnbaum proposed a protest rally outside the Soviet UN Mission on the Soviet May Day holiday, only four days later. He mobilized his Yeshiva University core, contacted other campuses, and some 1,000 students showed up, getting excellent media publicity. According to the Center for Jewish History, this May Day rally marked the commencement of public confrontation with the Kremlin and the initiation of the national movement for Soviet Jewry. Thereafter, four other Soviet Jewry pioneers, Dr. Moshe Decter, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israeli diplomat Dr. Meir Rosenne, and Dr. Louis Rosenblum of Cleveland (later founding Chairman of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews), were delighted to support Birnbaum's initiatives.
Ten days later, Birnbaum formed SSSJ's first steering committee and initiated a series of ground-breaking public events which in the course of two years resulted in a surge of public consciousness which pushed the hesitant U.S. Jewish establishment from a policy of quiet diplomacy toward a more activist mode. In 1964, this commenced with the dispatch of information kits to student summer camps nationally in May, a week-long interfaith fast in June, and a massive rally in October with the participation of President Lyndon Johnson's representative Mayer Feldman, New York Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, and Mayor John Lindsay on the Lower East Side, the original area of East European Jewish settlement.
One unique characteristic of Birnbaum's mobilization of public opinion was to draw on ancient Jewish redemptive themes — for example, the intensification of activities around Passover time, with its themes of liberation and exodus. SSSJ's first student button portrayed a shofar with the wording "Save Soviet Jewry." The years 1964–1966 served as the early "Shofar period" of the Soviet Jewry movement – a call to conscience and a call to action.