"Foot Soldiers" For a Dream

I was sent the article, To the Foot Soldiers of the Soviet Jewry Movement by Connie and Joseph Smukler.

In some ways I can relate to it, but in other ways, not at all. The writer refers to what was done by what my peers called the "activists" but in the article "foot soldiers" twenty to thirty years ago. That's when Save Soviet Jewry demonstrations were mainstream, acceptable activities by the Jewish establishment.

Forty years ago, when we were very involved and active members of SSSJ, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, it was something new, revolutionary, daring and unacceptable by most Jewish organizations. Now in retropsect, you can say that we were the vanguard, but then it was more a matter of being young and idealistic and looking for a cause which was Jewish, rather than American or international. It seemed wrong to concentrate our energies on Black civil rights, when our fellow Jews had neither civil rights nor religious freedom in the USSR.

The "Sixties" were a special time. We dreamed the impossible dream, and that's why just months after our aliyah to Israel we were joined by masses of Soviet Jews and then again, just twenty years later when even more, until the numbers totaled over a million. In the mid-1960's when the banging of Krushtchev's shoe still echoed in the news, who would have believed that thirty years later, the USSR would only be a very short chapter in World History and most of Soviet Jewry would have immigrated to freedom?




These pictures of our "Third Seder" Demonstration for Soviet Jewry are from Betarim in North America. Yes, I appear (as does my husband) in these pictures.