Pinchas Mordechai Teitz Papers

The Papers of Pinchas Mordechai Teitz (1908-1995) 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.

Rabbi Pinchas Mordechai Teitz, a descendant of a line of rabbis stretching back twenty generations, was born in Subat, Latvia in 1908 and moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1933. Rabbi Teitz was a prominent religious leader, educator, broadcaster, and a tireless advocate of the Soviet Jewry. Starting in 1964 he made 22 trips to the USSR. Avoiding publicity of his travels and with careful diplomacy Rabbi Teitz was able to secure tacit approval of Soviet authorities for his more obvious activities in protecting Jewish life in the USSR. He was unfairly criticized for his cooperation with the leadership of the oppressive regime by the members of the Western Jewish establishment, who were unaware that many of Rabbi’s activities were done in secret from the Soviet officials, and without their approval. During each of his visits Rabbi Teitz strived to see as many Russian Jews as possible, conducted classes on Torah, arranged secret circumcisions, and gathered information on the Refuseniks that could be useful in helping them to emigrate.

Rabbi Teitz established MOHIR (Mifal Hatzloas Yehudei Russia—“an enterprise for saving Jews of Russia”), which was a publishing house for religious books in Hebrew, with modern Russian translation. Thousands of copies of MOHIR publications were sent to the Soviet Union and given out to Russian Jewish immigrants in the United States. Rabbi Teitz arranged large shipments of religious literature and supplies to the Soviet Jewish communities. He worked on preservation of the historic Jewish cemeteries in the Soviet Union and funded the creation of monuments on the graves of the prominent Jewish scholars and Rabbis, which to this day attract tours of their followers from all over the world.

Rabbi Teitz’s biography, Learn Torah, Love Torah, Live Torah (KTAV, 2001), authored by his daughter Dr. Rivkah Blau, contains a chapter dedicated to his work on behalf of Soviet Jews.