In the early 1960s, 3 million Jews were living under the totalitarian jackboot of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They had little hope of living freely as Jews, or of leaving freely for somewhere else. And the world did not care about them. That began to change in 1963, when groups of plucky Jews, the first from Cleveland, began a movement to highlight their plight.

They chose to begin the battle by emphasizing the suffering of this trapped population, rather than seeking their freedom, since no one expected that was possible. After all, entire nations had been subsumed under the Soviet umbrella without the world acting to liberate them. The American government, for the most part, was uninterested. In 1973, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger told President Richard Nixon, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.”

Nonetheless, the cause became a passionate concern for the Jewish community in the United States. But the Soviets were dismissive of the effort. One of Anatoly Scharansky’s KGB interrogators mocked the protesters as “students and housewives.” Yet, within a blink of the historical eye, the movement of students and housewives lived to see a miracle, as the renamed Natan Sharansky and his fellow “refuseniks” departed for free lives in America and Israel.

The Vanderbilt sociologist Shaul Kelner offers a fascinating portrait of the way the Soviet Jewry movement did what it did in his new book, A Cold War Exodus. It is not a history of the Soviet Jewish escape from totalitarianism; rather, it focuses on the activist tactics used to drive attention to the cause. He describes the elements of that activism, among them the inclusion of Soviet Jewish woes in the ongoing story of Jewish life as told in the course of the year by religious holidays; the use of Jewish tourists to meet with refuseniks; boycotts of companies like Pepsi that did business with the USSR; and the “twinning” of refusenik children with American bar or bat mitzvahs to provide a constant reminder that Jews in the USSR were prohibited from practicing their faith.

Kelner notes how the twinning “helped define the texture of American Jewish synagogue life in the 1980s.” As he explains, twinning allowed synagogues to remake bar and bat mitzvahs, as well as the Sabbath services that featured these rites of passage, “into a Jewish American civics lesson.” In fact, he notes, there were so many more American Jewish kids coming of age than Soviet ones that the few Soviet kids actually reaching bar and bat mitzvah age had dozens of “twins,” while the American kids had to share theirs.

Kelner shows how the activists, successful as their efforts were, frequently did not know what they were
doing. They were trying new things and leaning in when they found approaches that worked. Even when a tactic “failed,” they kept going. With the boycott of Pepsi products, for example, they knew that their boycott would not hurt Pepsi’s bottom line, just as they knew that Pepsi was not going to lobby the Soviets to free their Jews. Nevertheless, they used it to their advantage. The effort could continue indefinitely, since Pepsi would always be there to serve as a rallying cry.

Another remarkable element to the movement was the degree to which it became an expression of Jewish identity. As Kelner writes, “For a brief historical moment, about the span of one generation, a social movement invented new ways of practicing and experiencing Jewishness in America.”

The Soviet Jewry movement’s dual purpose, both political and communal, had advantages as well as disadvantages. On the plus side, it created remarkable unity across the Jewish community, defying lines that typically separated Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, or Ashkenazi from Sephardi. The movement also transcended professional roles, as Jewish leaders, teachers, clergy, and activists all worked together and shared lessons to refine the protest tactics they were creating in real time.

At the same time, there was a disadvantage to linking identity with politics. By connecting Jewish identity so closely with the quest to free Soviet Jews, the effort papered over the degree to which the Jewish community was fraying in other ways—from assimilation, intermarriage, and the challenge of what is now referred to as “Jewish continuity.” As Kelner notes in his conclusion, “For 30 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…and then it all stopped.”

The American Jewish community is still coping with that abrupt end and searching for what comes next. The Soviet Jewry movement, as successful and important as it was, failed to learn the important lesson articulated by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver in 1943: “There are no substitutes in Jewish life for religion.” Activism is important, but to maintain Jewish continuity, the religion itself must always be the essential element.

Photo: Peter Keegan/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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