Alan M. Kohn Papers

The Papers of Alan M. Kohn 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 M. Kohn worked as an emergency preparedness operations officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and served as a president of Temple Beth Sholom, the Conservative Synagogue of Brevard County, Florida.

On July 15, 1975 Mr. Kohn led local support of the Rally for Soviet Jewry outside of the John F. Kennedy Space Center. The occasion for the rally was the launch of the Apollo spacecraft manned with three astronauts for a rendezvous with the Soviet Soyuz manned spacecraft on the Apollo-Soyuz Space Mission. The launch was attended by a Soviet ambassador in the U.S. The purpose of the rally for Soviet Jewry was to raise public awareness of the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union and to demand their freedom. The agencies involved in the organization of the rally were the Soviet Jewry Committee of the Miami Jewish Community Council and the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry. The rally succeeded in attracting international attention and its organizers received letters of thanks from the Soviet Jewry movement activists in the Soviet Union and in Israel.