Our Great Cause

One Shabbat morning in the mid-1950s, I was playing on the great expanse of lawn in front of Congregation Shaaray Tefila in Far Rockaway, when my father came out to call me inside to listen to the rabbi’s sermon. This was unusual—our shul was big on decorum, especially when the rabbi was speaking. (For many years I thought “decorum” was a Hebrew word, since I only heard it uttered from the pulpit.)

My father said: “You should come and listen. It will be memorable.” I doubt that I understood the meaning of “memorable,” but I knew there was a buzz that Shabbat. Rabbi Rackman, who would become one of the great influences on my life, had just returned with a group of American rabbis from a six-week trip to the Soviet Union. It was the height of the Cold War, and, yet, in the post-Stalin thaw (from arctic to a bit less icy), they had been allowed in by Soviet authorities.

The report Rabbi Rackman and his colleagues issued on their return was extremely pessimistic. Having visited synagogues and Jewish institutions, they concluded that Judaism in the Soviet Union was “seriously threatened with extinction.” Most synagogues were shuttered. Those that remained open were dilapidated and frequented by a few elderly people. The officials who ran them—rabbis and sextons—were all on the government payroll and obligated to spy on the attendees. Just entering the building was a subversive act that could undermine any chance of success in Soviet society.

And yet the rabbis’ dire predictions about Russian Jewry turned out to be wrong. Not only would Russian Jews survive Soviet efforts to extinguish their Jewish identities; the Jewish renaissance they sparked would contribute to the demise of the Communist system. Their movement demonstrated that a dedicated group of activists could challenge an authoritarian superpower, question its legitimacy, expose its hypocrisy, and, ultimately, help to ensure its demise.

It would never have happened without the bravery and audacity of Soviet Jewish refuseniks, but they were aided in ways both small and immense by a well-organized mass mobilization effort, much of it conducted by the American Jewish community. Every American Jew of a certain age, who had even the most peripheral connection to the organized community, felt a degree of accomplishment and satisfaction when the gates of the Soviet Union opened and Jews came flooding out. It was world Jewry at its best.

A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews, Shaul Kelner’s compelling account of this movement, does more than just tell the story of how American Jews helped free Soviet Jews. He argues, persuasively and subtly, that as much as American Jews might have done for Soviet Jews, the movement did more for them, both collectively and individually. It changed the nature of American Jewish communal life for three decades.

A few years after I heard Rabbi Rackman’s sermon about his trip to Russia, I heard him speak about the liberation of the concentration camps, which he had been a part of as an Air Force chaplain. A group of American soldiers came upon a heap of Jewish cadavers. One soldier noticed that the arm of one of them was moving slightly and, quite literally, rescued him from the dead. By the late 1960s, he might have applied this story of resurrection to Soviet Jewry.

The movement began small. During my high school days, friends would join the protests conducted by Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in front of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. Then in 1966 Elie Wiesel published The Jews of Silence. Visiting the Soviet Union, he had found thousands of Jews who would gather in front of synagogues, especially on Simchat Torah. Even today, more than fifty years later, many of us can recall his haunting opening phrase: “Their eyes—I must tell you about their eyes.”

These Jews were not silent, Wiesel observed; their fellow Jews worldwide were. Sometimes Wiesel is credited with having sparked the Soviet Jewry movement, which is not really true. But his slender, powerful book—it had begun as a series of Hebrew essays for Yediot Aharonot, which were quickly translated into English—did both galvanize and popularize the movement.

Three decades after the book’s publication and several years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Wiesel revealed that his visit to the USSR, which he officially made as a reporter, had in fact been arranged and funded by a little-known semiclandestine bureau in the office of the prime minister of Israel. Known colloquially as the “Lishkah” (the office), it worked to bolster Jewish life in the Soviet Union and, whenever possible, assist Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. It also worked closely and quietly with American Jewish efforts on Soviet Jews’ behalf.

Kelner contends that historians, sociologists, and journalists who have studied American Jewry of the 1970s and 1980s completely failed to recognize the impact of this movement on the interior lives of American Jews. They have tended to identify the tragedy of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel as the two poles between which American Jews rooted their communal and spiritual lives. But this missed the way in which the Soviet Jewry movement gave them a purpose and a sense of solidarity. Not only could they help three million of their fellow Jews in Russia, but it also connected them with one another.

The American activists for Soviet Jewry, who eventually numbered in the hundreds of thousands, did not intend to reshape American Jewish communal life or change the trajectory of their own Jewish lives. But they did. The movement they created engaged Jews at every age and social and political level. They relied on never-before-seen mobilization tactics that, Kelner argues, “sustained Jewish American communal engagement for thirty years.”

Protestors staged guerrilla theatre Seders in front of Soviet consulates. Groups of women would buy blocks of front-row orchestra tickets to the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets. The women would silently rise right before the performance began, turn to face the audience, and remove their elegant jackets or shawls to reveal satin sashes stretched across their chests calling for freedom for Soviet Jews.

Many Jews stopped buying Pepsi because it did business with the Soviet Union; there were children’s coloring books about the refuseniks; summer camps staged pageants. People wore bracelets and pins for Soviet Jewry. Then, influenced by the campaign for American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam, they personalized their bracelets to identify with particular refuseniks.

The activism moved beyond political protest and became deeply embedded in Jewish religious life. Simchat Torah became an opportunity to express solidarity with Soviet Jewry as well as rejoice in the Torah; an extra candle was often lit on Hanukkah, and, by the height of the movement, there was hardly a family Seder in the United States that did not add a matza of hope.

Then there was twinning, which took wearing a bracelet with a refusenik’s name into the heart of American Jewish ritual life. Kelner speculates that for almost a decade, a Shabbat didn’t go by in American synagogues without children symbolically celebrating their bar or bat mitzvah with a Soviet “twin.” Each bar or bat mitzvah would reach out to their twin, learn their personal story, and urge others to act on their behalf. As Kelner notes, twinning demanded public activism and helped teenagers “discover their own self-efficacy in the political realm.” American Jewry’s central rite of passage became an act of Jewish solidarity and political protest.

But American Jewish activism was not confined to this side of the Atlantic. Tourism became one of the movement’s most effective tools. Initially, the Lishkah would rely on educated elites—rabbis, communal leaders, and graduate students in Jewish studies (I was one of them)—to visit refuseniks. Some would be assigned to lead holiday celebrations. Others would be given books and even medicines to smuggle in. Still others would teach underground classes. These trips were made quietly and without fanfare.

Then, as word spread, Jewish communal organizations began to arrange trips—initially only for their trusted leaders. But by the mid-1980s, thousands of Jews were going. They filled their suitcases with new pairs of jeans, cartons of cigarettes, and other things that refuseniks could sell on the black market. They also brought in siddurim, Hebrew primers, mezuzas, menorahs, tallitot, and tefillin. This was not only meaningful; it was exciting to outwit Soviet minders. Kelner quotes Rabbi Barry Tabachnikoff’s exuberant report of his visit in 1984:

Wednesday, March 21
Up early and take a walk before breakfast to “get oriented.” . . . We walk a few blocks to find an isolated phone. “No, let’s not call from RED SQUARE. Perhaps not this phone, directly in front of a police station either. Nah, let’s get out of the earshot of the nice crossing guard.” . . . 

As I dial for Mark and Slava Shifrin, I notice an elderly woman sweeping snow from the streets. She even cleans the inside of the phone booth adjoining ours. On the third ring, as I am about to make contact, the cleaning woman enters MY PHONE BOOTH. . . . “Shalom” “Shalom.” Damn, I wish this lady would get out of here—how can I talk with “agents hanging onto my every word?”

Tabachnikoff, who led a Reform congregation in Miami, had read a spy thriller by Ken Follet on the flight to Moscow.

Eventually, Jews who were in the Soviet Union on museum or ballet tours got in on the act. Having heard about these visits from activist friends, they arranged to break away from the ever-present Soviet minder on the tour’s free day to visit a refusenik. They would find themselves in a refusenik’s apartment and get a close-up view of life in the Soviet Union that few Americans ever saw, and, as Kelner writes, the experience often spurred “self-reflection as self-critique.”

They suddenly recognized how fortunate they were as Americans and as Jews and how little they valued what was available to them. They would smuggle in books for learning Hebrew or Jewish history, books that were readily available to them in America but that they had never read. Kelner quotes Jewish Federation of Greater Houston leader Ellen Trachtenberg’s trip report:

They reminded us of the beauty of Judaism, of the need to study it . . . of the basic truths it teaches us. And we need them also for the heroic Jewish struggle which they are undertaking for all Jews everywhere. They made us proud to be Jews and proud of our heritage, and they reminded us that in the land of freedom, it is easy to take too much for granted. (emphasis added)

As Kelner makes clear, this sense of purpose sustained not only Jewish activists but American Judaism more generally, especially, but not only, in the liberal denominations. “When the Soviet Jewry movement ended, Jewish Americans took brief victory laps but then found themselves confronting a void,” he writes. “A sustaining culture had disappeared.” Kelner ends his book with a flourish:

For thirty years, activists in the campaign to free Soviet Jews sparked and sustained a total mobilization of America’s Jewish community—thousands of institutions, millions of individuals. . . . Engaging Jews at work and at worship, at learning and at leisure, at home and abroad . . . shaping what a generation heard and understood about the meanings, opportunities, and obligations of being Jewish and American . . . in the midst of the Cold War.

And then it all stopped.

Although I was part of the Soviet Jewry movement—I wrote the how-to guide to visiting the Soviet Union for the Jewish Catalog not long after being kicked out of Moscow—it was not until I read Kelner’s brilliant social history that I understood that the end of the Cold War also marked the end of an era for American Jewry.

I read A Cold War Exodus in the dark days of spring and early summer 2025, when I, and almost every American Jew I know, was focused on the war in Gaza and the antisemitism at home on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum (we still are). Over Shabbat lunches, I found myself talking about Kelner’s book. The Soviet Union is ancient history—even if the Soviet lie that “Zionism is racism” is very much with us—but American Jews found themselves consciously and unconsciously adopting the symbols and tactics of the Soviet Jewry movement, not only solidarity rallies but jewelry (IDF dog tags, in particular) and empty chairs at the Seder table. Needless to say, Simchat Torah once again has an added, and more terrible, meaning. However meaningful and necessary such actions are, they are not the same and will not play the same role in uniting American Jewry.

I cannot help but long for a time when we were bound together by a struggle for something and not against it.