The prolonged struggle to secure the rights for Jews in the Soviet Union to live as Jews and to reside where they desire is a powerful and inspirational tale. Between 1963 and 1991, this grassroots effort involved thousands of individuals and organizations in North America, and beyond, in this struggle. As a result of this triumphant effort, ultimately, 1.6 million Jews were able to leave the former Soviet Union by the turn of the 21st century.
And yet this tale was untold and largely forgotten.
In 2022, the Soviet Jewry Movement Archives Project (SJMAP) was founded to preserve and share these stories. SJMAP’s founders, who also compose the founding executive committee, are former leaders of the grassroots Soviet Jewry movement in North America and Jewish organizational veterans.
Designed to serve as a nexus, SJMAP brings together the archival repositories of this history so that future generations can learn and be inspired. SJMAP builds this network by working with former activists and their descendants to guide personal collections to appropriate archives and with archives to do what is necessary to make their collections part of SJMAP’s virtual hub. This wealth of history, as it is collected and showcased, will become a springboard for SJMAP educational endeavors to further embed these stories into the historical narrative.