Alan L. Cohen Papers

The Papers of Rabbi Alan L. Cohen 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.

Alan Cohen's rabbinic career spanned nearly four decades of congregational work. For nineteen years, he was the Rabbi for Congregation Beth Shalom (Kansas City, Missouri) and also worked in the non-profit sector of Jewish communal service as the director of Interreligious Affairs of the Jewish Community Relations Bureau of the American Jewish Committee, a position in which he developed partnering opportunities with clergy of many faiths.

Alan Cohen took two trips to the Former Soviet Union. On the first trip that occurred in April of 1989, Rabbi Cohen and his colleague from South Florida, Rabbi Ed Farber, visited Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga. The rabbis met with many Refuseniks and brought them a number of religious items. They attended a protest demonstration that a group of Refuseniks organized in front of the Moscow Kremlin. In 1993, Rabbi Cohen returned to Russia with a UJA Rabbinic Cabinet Mission.