Some History
In the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
frustrated by centuries of religious and ethnic oppression under
successive Russian and Soviet governments,
many Jews living in the Soviet
Union sought to leave the country
in order to gain
freedom and a chance to live openly as Jews.
The risks were many: becoming an official persona non grata,
inability to get a job or an education, even imprisonment.
The Soviet
government's response to the efforts of Jews to emigrate was an
organized and efficient program of personal and group harassment of those
who applied to emigrate through official channels.
Applying for a permission to emigrate was a process that could take years.
If an exit visa was denied, the person and his whole family
faced continuing persecution for as long
as they were forced to remain in the USSR.
Men, women, and children who were refused permission to emigrate were
called refuseniks.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Western Jewish organizations
focused tremendous efforts on supporting the refuseniks and their
right to emigrate from the Soviet Union.
It became common for Jewish communities and Jewish schools and colleges
in the United States and Europe to "adopt" refusenik families,
writing and telephoning them, sending visitors,
making their voices heard in demonstrations and petitions.
At many Bar and Bat Mitzvah
celebrations, a young American Jew would "twin" himself or herself
with a child of Bar or Bat Mitzvah age in the Soviet Union. |
