The Soviet Jewry movement: from The Jews of Silence to the Washington mall
It began with students picketing the Soviet embassy. It ended with a quarter of a million people on the mall and the right to leave.
In 1965 Elie Wiesel travelled to the USSR and wrote The Jews of Silence, a title aimed not at Soviet Jews but at American ones: it is not they who are silent, it is we. That same year the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry appeared, then the Conference on Soviet Jewry, then Meir Kahane's harsher Jewish Defense League, whose methods most communities rejected.
The turning point was the Leningrad hijacking affair of 1970: an attempt to seize an aircraft was tried as treason and two defendants were sentenced to death. The world outcry forced the sentences to be commuted. From then the refuseniks were counted, and their names—Sharansky, Slepak, Nudel—became household words in America.
In 1974 Congress passed the Jackson–Vanik amendment, tying most-favoured-nation trade status to a country's allowing its citizens to emigrate. It was the first time American trade policy was made to turn directly on human rights abroad.
On 6 December 1987, on the eve of Gorbachev's visit to Washington, some two hundred and fifty thousand people gathered on the National Mall—the largest Jewish demonstration in American history. Three years later emigration opened completely: between 1989 and 2000 more than 1.6 million Jews left the USSR and its successor states, most of them for Israel.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Jackson–Vanik amendment to the Trade Act, 1974/75 — trade status tied to the right to emigrate
- District of Columbia police reports on the march of 6 December 1987 — some 250,000 participants — the largest Jewish demonstration in the US
Basis: documents and evidence.