Bert Silver Papers

The Papers of Bert Silver is 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.

Mr. Silver served as president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, worked on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and chaired the commission on international affairs of the American Jewish Congress in Washington, D.C.

Bert Silver organized a multitude of vigils and demonstrations in Washington, D.C. He urged United States government officials and congressmen to join in the efforts of the Soviet Jewry movement.

As an Assistant Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mr. Silver assisted an influential civil rights attorney, the Honorable Frankie Muse Freeman in creating an article on Soviet Jewry for the Commission's publication Civil Rights Digest. The article served as the basis for several speeches Mrs. Freeman delivered on the subject of Soviet Jewry.

In 1980 Bert Silver represented American Jewry in a three-faith delegation to the U.S.S.R. The delegation also included Lutheran pastor Rev. John Steinbruck and Roman Catholic Priest Father Eugene Brake. The delegation met with the Soviet Jewish Refuseniks in Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad, and Pentecostals taking refuge in the American embassy in Moscow.