Rachel Braun Papers

The Papers of Rachel Braun 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.

In January of 1979 an undergraduate student at Gratz college, Rachel Braun (then known by her maiden name Rachel Avi Eisenberg of West Hartford, CT), took a tour of the Soviet Union under the guise of a tourist. The real purpose of the trip was to secretly meet Soviet Jews, deliver messages and material aid for Refuseniks and Soviet Jewish Prisoners of Conscience, and to collect information and requests for future visitors from the West. On this trip she was accompanied by a La Salle college student, Carol Polin. The trip was co-sponsored by the Jewish Campus Activities Board run by the Jewish Center of Atlantic Beach, and by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ). During the trip the young women visited Leningrad and Moscow, meeting the Fradnik, Zelinger, Volovsky, Prestin, Abramovich and Yakir families, Natalia Khassina, and other Refuseniks.