Records of the Houston Action for Soviet Jewry

The Records of the Houston Action for Soviet Jewry (HASJ) is one of the collections within the Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement (AASJM) at the American Jewish Historical Society. 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 one of the most influential movements 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.

The Houston Action for Soviet Jewry was founded by Rabbi Shaul Osadchey and several of the congregants from Congregation Brith Shalom in Bellaire, Houston, TX circa 1983. The aim of HASJ was to support Jews living in the Soviet Union and to aid their efforts to either express their religious rights within the Soviet Union or to be allowed to emigrate. In the beginning, their efforts focused almost entirely on aiding Jews within the USSR, but they soon began to work on emigration and resettlement efforts as well. HASJ was affiliated with the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews and, as such, shared some information and resources with Soviet Jewish aid organizations in other areas, including Chicago, the Bay Area, CA and Colorado. These included biographical profiles of refuseniks, those who had applied to emigrate but were not allowed to, as well as biographical profiles of prisoners of conscience, those who had been imprisoned for dissident beliefs. These organizations also shared publicity and programming materials for their events and projects.

Among the HASJ’s main programs were the Adopt-a-Family program, which connected families in the U.S. with refusenik families in the USSR and the Bar / Bat Mitzvah Twinning Program, in which members of various Houston synagogues preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah would be assigned a Soviet “twin” to symbolically share the experience with, as children in the Soviet Union were not able to participate in these religious ceremonies. HASJ also participated in sending books, religious materials, food, and medicine to the Soviet Union, worked to raise awareness of the situations of various refuseniks and prisoners of conscience among the greater Houston and Texas community, took part in several protests and rallies, including a March on Washington ahead of a 1987 summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and maintained a connection with the Jewish community of Baku, Azerbaijan, a sister city of Houston, including aiding that community in educational and social action programs. The HASJ helped several Jews emigrate to Houston and other cities in the United States.

After the fall of communism, the HASJ continued to support the Jews who remained in the former Soviet Union, providing those who chose to stay with Jewish religious and educational materials and community resources while continuing to help those who wanted to emigrate. They also helped Jews secure food and medicine, which were sometimes difficult to obtain in the instability that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.