Washington Committee for Soviet Jewry Records

The Washington Committee for Soviet Jewry records 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 20^th 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 Washington Committee for Soviet Jewry (WCSJ) was a grassroots volunteer membership organization founded in 1968. The organization was renamed the Greater Washington Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and disbanded in 2001. The goal of the WCSJ was to help Jews emigrate from the Soviet Union and the Former Soviet Union regions, to aid Jews in the U.S.S.R. and the Former Soviet Union and to activate the Washington Community on behalf of Soviet Jewry. The Greater Washington Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry was dedicated to ensuring that Jews in the countries of the Former Soviet Union could lead lives in which their physical and spiritual needs were met. During the thirty-three years of its existence, the WCSJ took on a multitude of initiatives designed to raise awareness of the plight of Soviet Jewry. The Bar Mitzvah twinning program, Adopt-A-Refusenik Family, the Pepsi Boycott, and the Daily Vigil across the street from the Soviet Embassy, were some of the many activities that the WCSJ organized or participated in. Travelers to the USSR were recruited and instructed to carry out direct help to the families of the Refuseniks. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Committee continued to support those Jews who remained in the Former Soviet Union by supplying them with food packages, medicine, Judaic teaching materials and other essentials.