Victor Borden Papers

The Papers of Victor Borden represent one collection housed within the Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement (AASJM). These papers reflect the effort, beginning in the 1960s through the late 1980s, of thousands of American Jews of all denominations and political orientations to stop the persecution and discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union. The American Soviet Jewry Movement (ASJM) is considered to be the most influential Movement of the American Jewish community in the 20th century. The beginnings of the organized American Soviet Jewry Movement became a model for efforts to aid Soviet Jews in other countries, among them Great Britain, Canada, and France. The movement can be traced to the early 1960s, when the first organizations were created to address the specific problem of the persecution and isolation of Soviet Jews by the government of the Soviet Union.

Dr. Victor Borden was an activist in the Soviet Jewry movement and member of the Medical Advisory Committee of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and was on the board of directors of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. Dr. Borden educated the Reform congregation, Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter, NJ (of which he was a president), on the plight of Soviet Jews. He influenced the congregation to adopt the family of a Refusenik Hebrew teacher in Moscow, Mark Lvovsky.

In 1985 Dr. Borden and his wife Francine visited the U.S.S.R. in order to meet Refusenik families. In 1987 Dr. Borden led a mission of seven Jewish doctors from New Jersey and Tennessee, traveling under the guise of tourists to provide medical consultations and evaluations to over 150 members of the Soviet Jewish Refusenik community. After the trip Dr. Borden widely publicized the urgent need of the ailing Refuseniks to be permitted to leave the Soviet Union for treatment. In 1988 Dr. Borden was among seven people arrested for demonstrating outside of the Soviet Consulate in New York in protest of the Soviet government's denial of a medical visa to Refusenik cancer patient, Georgi Samoilovich.¹ After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., Dr. Borden continued his support for Jewish communities in the former Soviet states.