Lawrence I. Lerner Papers

The Papers of Lawrence I. Lerner 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.

Lawrence I. Lerner is an attorney admitted to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Mr. Lerner served as a member of the President's Advisory Committee on Domestic Policy Review of Industrial Innovation from 1978-1979. While specializing in intellectual property laws, Mr. Lerner also applied his expertise to cases concerning the rule of law affecting social justice, such as racial discrimination, fair housing and employment in his home state of New Jersey. Starting in 1979, he became concerned with the dire situation of Jews in the Soviet Union. Mr. Lerner repeatedly traveled to the Soviet Union to visit Refuseniks and participated in filing legal pleas for Prisoners of Conscience based on international treaties and the Soviet Constitution. After an unsuccessful run for the House of Representatives in 1996, Mr. Lerner retired from the practice of law and became the President of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union (UCJFSU), formerly known as Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a national umbrella organization for approximately fifty grassroots Soviet Jewry movement agencies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the UCJFSU continued to fight Antisemitism and xenophobia and to promote human rights and the rule of law in the former Soviet states. UCJFSU coordinates over fifty organizations that monitor human rights in the F.S.U.