Irwin H. Krasna Papers

The Papers of Dr. Irwin H. Krasna 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.

The papers of Dr. Krasna detail the conditions of the Soviet Jews in the early 1970s and provide rare evidence of the Israeli establishment’s secret mission to help them, with assistance from the American Jewish community.

Dr. Irwin H. Krasna, a pediatric surgeon and his twin brother, Dr. Alvin I. Krasna, a Professor of Biochemistry at Columbia University, took a trip to the Soviet Union in September-October 1971 to offer support to the Refuseniks and other Soviet Jews. They traveled as emissaries of Arye Kroll, a prominent Israeli Zionist and representative of Lishkat Hakesher (commonly known as Nativ), the Israeli liaison Bureau that carried out clandestine activities to establish contact with Jews in Eastern Europe during the Cold War to encourage them to immigrate to Israel.