Historical Organizations of the Soviet Jewry Movement

The National Conference on Soviet Jewry was established in June 1971 following the reorganization of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ, 1964-1971). The National Conference on Soviet Jewry served as a coordinating agency for major national Jewish organizations and local community groups in the United States. The NCSJ acted on behalf of Soviet Jewry through public education and social action, which aimed to stimulate all segments of the community to maintain interest in the problems of Soviet Jews. To this end, the NCSJ also published reports, memoranda, and pamphlets and sponsored special programs, organized public meetings, projects, and forums.

The NCSJ was devised to be an umbrella organization; a structure representing the effort of the main Jewish communal organizations to aid Soviet Jews and to attract the attention of the U.S. government to the plight of Jews in the USSR. Its main functions included development of planning and strategy on behalf of Soviet Jews, coordination of the work of all constituent members of NCSJ and assignment of particular tasks and the collection and distribution of information on Soviet Jews, refuseniks and prisoners of conscience (POC) and Soviet policies towards them.

NCSJ determined its objectives through a consensus of a Board of Governors, which met 3-4 times a year. The Board of Governors consisted of representatives from all member agencies, as well as twenty-five representatives and twenty-five alternates from local communities. The Board of Governors annually elected the Executive Committee and officers of NCSJ.

The plenum of the National Conference included all members of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry as well as the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and stipulated a number of representatives of welfare funds and community relations councils designated jointly by the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC) and the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds.

With the establishment of NCSJ in 1971, Jerry Goodman was appointed executive director of the NCSJ (replaced by Mark Levin in 1987), and Richard Maass was elected its chairman (subsequent chairmen were Theodore (Ted) Man and Morris Abram).

In one of its leaflets, the NCSJ described itself as, “an autonomous body working to develop programs designed to be helpful in relieving the problems of Soviet Jews: to aid Soviet Jews who seek their right to leave for Israel and elsewhere; to combat rising anti-Semitism in the USSR; to help Jews live in the Soviet Union with the rights, privileges and freedoms accorded other religious and national minority groups; [and] to help protect the civil and personal rights of Jews within the USSR.” At the peak of its activities, the NCSJ included about fifty national organizations, among them the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Public Affairs Committee, American Zionist Federation, American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith and B’nai B’rith-Women, Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization; the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, and, on the local level, hundreds of Jewish communal organizations.

The NCSJ created a network of support groups, which engaged a broad range of Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, and included doctors, lawyers, and Congressional spouses. It used contacts with U.S. Presidents, members of the administration, and members of the U.S. Congress and Senate to put pressure on the Soviet authorities to allow the increase of the number of Jews attempting to emigrate from the USSR and to ameliorate the condition of Soviet Jews. 

From the beginning, NCSJ leaders cultivated ties with power brokers in Washington, D.C. to further their cause: influential entrepreneurs Armand Hammer and Donald Kendall, prominent lawyers Telford Taylor and Alan Dershowitz, entertainers Joanne Woodland, Jack Gilford and Jane Fonda as well as writers and intellectuals such as Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin.

When Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Congressman Charles Vanik introduced legislation linking trade benefits (Most-Favored-Nation status) and credits to the emigration policies of foreign states, a new chapter in the Soviet Jewry movement’s activities began. The campaign in support of the Jackson-Vanik bill began in 1972 and culminated in the signing of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of the United States, which was passed in 1974 and enacted in January 1975.

In 1984-1985, with a virtual halt in emigration from the Soviet Union, the NCSJ recognized the need for significant changes and admitted that the organization’s most important goal, that of “maximizing the involvement of all segments of the Jewish and general communities,” in the U.S. had not been achieved. It made steps to enhance its image as “the address for the Soviet Jewry advocacy efforts, guidelines, programs, materials,” focusing on work with the national agency members and local federations “to create an integrated and cooperative approach.” The involvement of local communities, mostly symbolic so far, was invigorated by attracting local leaders and local communities to participate in decision-making and regular information briefings. The primary purposes of the NCSJ were reformulated as follows:

“To enable Jews to leave the Soviet Union in accordance with international law; to help those Jews who choose to remain in the Soviet Union live as Jews with the same rights accorded every other nationality and religious minority, and to assure that the plight of Soviet Jewry is kept in the forefront of deliberations of our Government, as well as the public and private sectors.”

Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ)

GNYCSJ was the largest of the local organizations under the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. It was founded in 1971 in New York City by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York. The GNYCSJ served as the coordinating body for Soviet Jewry activities among more than 85 constituent Jewish organizations and community groups across the New York metropolitan area, with affiliates in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish communities.

The GNYCSJ conducted vigils, demonstrations, meetings, lectures, concerts, press conferences, and memorial services. Solidarity Sundays for Soviet Jewry, the GNYCSJ’s influential series of annual mass demonstrations in New York City, attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees and served as a model for similar demonstrations on behalf of Soviet Jews nationwide, culminating in the milestone Freedom Sunday national march in Washington, D.C. on December 6, 1987, co-organized by the GNYCSJ. It was attended by 250,000 people and is often referred to as the largest Jewish rally ever held in the United States. The breadth and complexity of its programming allowed the GNYCSJ to keep the Soviet Jewry issue in the public eye.

A major objective of the GNYCSJ was to collect, evaluate, and disseminate information on developments in the Soviet Union, individual cases of Refuseniks and Prisoners of Conscience, and the Jewish activist movement. Many of the GNYCSJ information-gathering activities had an explicit goal of testing Soviet adherence to the humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki Accords and of collecting evidence of Soviet abuses of those provisions. Most of the information came from the Americans traveling to the Soviet Union as tourists with the intent to visit Soviet Jews. Thousands of such travelers were briefed and debriefed by GNYSCJ.

The organization worked closely with federal, state, and local government officials, helping to put the Soviet Jewry issue on the agenda of Soviet-American relations during the 1970s and 1980s. The GNYCSJ collaborated particularly closely with politicians from the Greater New York area, including New York Senators Daniel P. Moynihan and Alfonse D’Amato, Governors of New York and New Jersey Mario Cuomo and Thomas Kean, and New York City Mayor Edward Koch. Informed and inspired by the GNYCSJ, they introduced resolutions, inserted statements in the Congressional Record, organized special orders, issued press releases, and participated in demonstrations, vigils, and news conferences on behalf of Soviet Jewry. The GNYCSJ coordinated the Congressional Adopt-A-Prisoner program in which each metropolitan area member of Congress had undertaken a wide variety of activities on behalf of a specific Jewish prisoner in Soviet labor camps.

The GNYCSJ coordinated publicity tours in the New York area by former Soviet Jews who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union, or were relatives of Refuseniks trapped in the Soviet state, and assisted in a program to send packages with basic necessities to the Refuseniks who had lost their jobs as a result of their applications to emigrate. The organization prepared educational materials in Russian for Soviet Jews who were interested in Jewish learning. It worked with the Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded international radio station broadcasting in the Soviet Union, lobbying to secure a higher amount of radio programming for Soviet Jews. Its Operation Write-On and Project Yachad were letter-writing programs designed to link American and Soviet Jewish communities.

In the mid-1980s, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry was renamed the Greater New York Coalition for Soviet Jewry. The organization wound down its activities during the final years of the Soviet Union, when restrictions on emigration for Soviet Jews were lifted under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of Perestroika—the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.