Letters, money, and matzo were smuggled into the former Soviet Union between the 1960s and the 1980s in an effort to support oppressed Jews and help their efforts to leave. About 1.5 million Jews left the Soviet Union during that time, many when Boris Yeltsin was president.

An effort has now been launched to gather the nation’s most comprehensive collection of materials documenting the campaign to rescue Soviet Jews.

The American Jewish Historical Society is hosting a reception tomorrow at the Neue Galerie to celebrate the launch of the Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement, located at the Center for Jewish History. The AJHS already has more than a quarter of a million documents relating to the movement. More than five times that amount is expected to be added, as well as an oral history component.

The movement brought together a diverse coalition for global human rights. “It worked. They got out,” the director of development at the American Jewish Historical Society, Cathy Krugman, said.

A founder of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, Rabbi David Hill, said the movement drew Catholics, Jews, and Protestants and was one of the great moments for human rights. The movement, he said, made it official that discrimination in any part of the world would be part of the right of Americans to object.

The Soviet Jewry Movement crossed party lines. It burst into public awareness through its most notable addition to the English language — “Refusenik” — a word that came from the Russian otkaznik, meaning one refused permission to leave.

“There is a danger that the collective grass-roots effort will simply slip into the dustbin of history,” the chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society, Kenneth Bialkin, an owner of The New York Sun, said.

The founding director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, Jerry Goodman, said many people continue to call the Soviet Jewry Movement a seminal event in American Jewish history and in American history, and certainly for Jews in the former Soviet Union. It is important, he said, that future generations understand what happened. Enough time has passed that one can have an objective look at the movement, he said.

The archive will contain documents from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and the more decentralized Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, as well as others from a myriad of groups involved. While members of the far-flung movement agreed on the basic goal of getting Jews to freely emigrate from the former Soviet Union, they argued over just about everything else, including methods and means, such as whether one should one break the law and handcuff oneself to the Soviet Embassy, and whether the Jews should go to Israel or America.

Mr. Goodman recalled how Jewish visitors to the Soviet Union were encouraged to carry a Hebrew newspaper such as Ha’aretz or in the summer to wear a T-shirt with the star of David to help identify themselves to Jews in need of help. Mr. Bialkin said the title of Elie Wiesel’s book “The Jews of Silence” did not refer to Jews in the Soviet Union but to those who failed to speak out and fight for them.

The height of the movement came on a cold December day in 1987, when a quarter of a million people descended on Washington when President Gorbachev was meeting with President Reagan. The crowd will be smaller tomorrow at the launch, when a 10-minute film clip from “Refusenik,” a documentary being made by Laura Bialis, will be shown.