Lillian Foreman Papers

The Papers of Lillian Foreman 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.

San Francisco-based Lillian Foreman was an activist in the American Soviet Jewry Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. She was active in the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews (BACSJ) and served as the Council’s president in the 1980s. Lillian Foreman participated in numerous rallies and demonstrations in the Bay Area to raise awareness to the plight of Soviet Jews. She built an extensive filing system documenting thousands of Refuseniks that became a resource for BACSJ and other Soviet Jewry organizations in the United States. Foreman helped connect Jewish families in the US and USSR with special project such as Adopt-A-Family and Bar/Bat Mitzvah Twinning. She visited the Soviet Union in the 1970s and met with many Refuseniks and Prisoners of Conscience, including Ida Nudel and Leonid Slepak.