Passover Revisited: Philadelphia's Efforts to Aid Soviet Jews, 1963-1998 (review)

The 1960s to the 1990s witnessed the rescuing of about one and a half million Jews from the Soviet Union. In Passover Revisited: Philadelphia's Efforts to Aid Soviet Jews, 1963-1998, Andrew Harrison claims that the rescue was "[o]ne of the greatest liberation stories in the history of mankind" (p.63). This claim is followed by another: For while other cities, such as New York, might have had bigger demonstrations, bigger names, or more money, no other city, Harrison argues, was as effective as Philadelphia in securing the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate to a country of their choice.

The latter is a bold assertion, and similar studies for other cities must be written in order to test it. Yet Harrison supports his argument well, culling documentation, much of it primary source material from private and institutional archives, and conducting interviews with participants in the rescue. His conclusion is that Philadelphia's primacy in rescuing Soviet Jews was due to one trait: the ability to combine the energies and radical ideas of grassroots advocacy with the more conservative orientation of the Jewish establishment. This trait enabled Philadelphia to create "the most centralized, efficient advocacy program for Soviet Jews in the world" (p. 52).

Although Harrison includes myriad Philadelphia and national organizations in his narrative, he concentrates on one local agency, the Soviet Jewry Council (SJC), formed in 1974 and affiliated with the Philadelphia Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). Because of the untiring efforts of its lay and professional leaders the SJC was instrumental in combining the conservative methods of issuing press releases, denouncing antisemitism, and conducting quiet diplomacy with the more radical grassroots demonstrations, rallies, and staged protests.

In meticulous detail Harrison charts the SJC's channeling of volunteer and professional energies into systematic, structured, coherent activities that became models for other cities across the country. Some of its most effective programs were those which personalized the movement. For example, synagogues adopted Soviet families and youngsters of bar and bat mitzvah age "twinned" with Soviet youngsters. Many Philadelphians, after briefing by the Council, traveled to the Soviet Union for face-to-face visits with refusniks, those Jews who were denied the right to emigrate.

As it matured, the SJC built alliances with interfaith and interracial groups; mobilized bi-partisan political support on the local, state, and federal levels; and aligned itself with powerful politicians; becoming an influential force on the national and international scene.

Crammed as the book is with the day-to-day programming of the SJC and the tactics of local and national organizations, Harrison's account could easily have become bogged down in acronym and chronology or remained a story of narrow, local interest. Harrison himself must have recognized this for in his introduction he claims that his "case study" will increase one's understanding of "American Jewish communal strengths and weaknesses, Jewish internal leadership, and the exercise of Jewish political power" (p. 9). He also places his narrative in the context of broader historical, political, and social movements.

First Harrison perceives a link between Jewish non-activism during the Holocaust and Jewish activism in the Soviet Jewry movement. During the Holocaust the parents had been silent; now the children would speak. The parents had not organized; the children would organize. The parents had not understood the power of the media; the children would harangue the media, stomp the halls of Congress, direct the actions of politicians and world leaders. The children would be "silent no more" and assuage the guilt for the past.

Another stimulus was the Civil Rights movement. Jews who had taken part in the crusade for equality and the end of racism "interpreted the freeing of Soviet Jewry as another kind of Civil Rights crusade. Also towards the end of the 1960s after the Civil Rights movement became pro-Palestinian...