The American Jewish Historical Society has established the Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement at its headquarters at the Center for Jewish History, located at 15 W. 16th St. in Manhattan.

“It is fair to say that the American effort to free Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 1980s was perhaps the most significant accomplishment of the American Jewish community — it certainly was one of the most important,” the director of research at AJHS, Michael Feldberg, said. “Not only will the historic achievement be preserved, but future generations will be able to understand how that effort was organized simultaneously at the national and community level.”

Between the early 1960s and 1989, Jewish and non-Jewish organizations alike pressured the former Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate freely. They picketed embassies, sent appeals, marched on Washington, and confronted Soviet visitors abroad, including the Bolshoi Ballet, catapulting the word “refuseniks” (those denied visas to leave the Soviet Union and facing job loss and harassment) into public consciousness. Along with government policies and legislation such as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which denied most-favored nation status to countries restricting emigration, the movement helped to undermine the former Soviet Union economically and erode the moral authority of the regime.

“There is a common belief,” the founding executive director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, Jerry Goodman, said, “that the Soviet Jewry movement, which helped expose the underbelly of the Soviet Union especially in regard to how it treats its own citizens, made others around the world see the flaws and weaknesses in Soviet society.” He said mobilization of public opinion in the West on behalf of Soviet Jews helped isolate the Soviet leadership. “Every time they went some place, there was protest. They couldn’t escape it.”

“The Soviet Jewry Movement represents a watershed in Jewish self-confidence and pride in the U.S., after generations of being reluctant to draw attention to their political presence,” Mr. Feldberg said. “For a generation, American Jews were aware that their efforts to rescue their fellow Jews from the Nazis fell short. The Soviet Jewry Movement presented an opportunity to redeem that frustration.”

The AJHS already holds more than a quarter of a million documents relating to the movement.

“If you line the boxes up from end to end, it would be about the length of a football field,” Mr. Feldberg said. They will be getting more than five times that amount, including approximately a thousand boxes from the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, which are now stored in Colorado.

Mr. Goodman said the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement was a unique experience in American diplomatic history and in the American Jewish communal experience. Mr. Feldberg noted, for example, that the Orthodox movement took a leading role in a secular and political dimension of American Jewish life.

Mr. Feldberg said the story of this movement was already slipping from memory. AJHS has begun an oral history component and they intend to digitize part of their holdings to make the material more widely available. Mr. Goodman said it was important that this chapter of American history be recorded “especially at a time when we see a lack of progress in the Middle East and other areas.”

“It showed that a determined group of idealists could move American foreign policy on the basis of principle. Most stories in Jewish history have sad endings,” Mr. Feldberg said. “This was one that had a happy ending: they got out.”