Rabbi David Goldstein and Shannie Goldstein Papers

The Papers of Rabbi David Goldstein and Shannie Goldstein 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 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.

Rabbi David S. Goldstein was born in Princeton, New Jersey, attended Miami University of Ohio and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), where he was ordained a rabbi and received the degree of Ph. D. from St. Mary’s Seminary and University of Baltimore, in consortium with the Baltimore Hebrew University. Rabbi Goldstein served as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy stationed in Japan. He is an Adjunct Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University and is a Rabbi Emeritus of the historic Touro Synagogue in New Orleans. As a board member of National Conference for Soviet Jewry and a Chairman of the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans Rabbi Goldstein worked to liberate Jews in the U.S.S.R. He and his wife visited Soviet Union three times to meet with the Refuseniks and support clandestine Jewish and Hebrew studies suppressed by the Soviet regime.

Shannie Goldstein was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. She is an adjunct professor of Hebrew language at Tulane University and a licensed clinical social worker in private practice. She became active in the Soviet Jewry movement in the early 1970s by assisting Soviet Jewish immigrants to settle in Baltimore. On her trips to the Soviet Union with Mrs. Goldstein smuggled in Hebrew-language materials to distribute among the Refuseniks she and her husband had met there. She devised ways to bring back to U.S. valuable information on Jews in the Soviet Union and to attract media attention to their plight.