Goodman, Jerry

This collection documents the events surrounding Sepharad ’92, an event and an international Jewish committee to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Jewish expulsion from Spain as part of the Spanish Inquisition. The committee, headquartered in New York City, developed programs that sought to educate the public through a variety of approaches about the expulsion and the relocation of Spain’s Jewish population throughout the world. Such programs included educational curriculum, exhibitions, interfaith gatherings, concerts, and conferences.

The collection contains papers of Jerry Goodman, the founding director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the largest and most influential organization created by the American Jews to coordinate efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews, which survives today as NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia. The bulk of the collection covers the activities from the early 1970s through late 1980s. The collection includes some minutes of meetings, memoranda, correspondence, newsletters and publications of the NCSJ and its precursor, the American Jewish Committee on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ, 1964-1971). Among other materials are some posters and considerable number of photographs on Refuseniks and of the ASJM events in New York and the US, audio recordings on compact cassettes and reel-to-reels re-mastered into CD format, and VHS tapes. The collection also contains non-paper objects like pins, pendants, bracelets devoted to prisoners of conscience in the USSR, as well as a t-shirt, a scarf and a shopping bag.