I thank the gentlelady for her support, and I thank Ms. Ros-Lehtinen for her support.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to join me in supporting House Resolution 137, a resolution to honor the life and six decades of public service of Jacob Birnbaum, known more familiarly as Jacob Birnbaum, especially his commitment freeing Soviet Jews from religious, cultural and communal extinction.
It is fitting that Jacob Birnbaum was born on December 10, which is also International Human Rights Day. This past December, Mr. Birnbaum celebrated his 80th birthday. It is time for this body to honor the life and work, the 60 years of public service of this remarkable human rights activist. I am very proud to call him a fellow New Yorker.
Jacob Birnbaum was born in Germany, and during World War II, his family fled the Nazis and settled in the United Kingdom. Throughout the war, the Birnbaum family knew the plight of Jews, especially their own relatives, under the Nazis. His personal experience with the horrors of evil sparked the activism of Jacob Birnbaum.
Beginning in 1946, following the end of the war, 19-year-old Jacob Birnbaum devoted several years to providing relief for younger survivors of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian systems. Through his work with young Polish Jews who managed to leave the USSR after the war, he became familiar with the iniquities of the Soviet system. These earlier experiences fueled his later passion to mobilize American Jewry in the drive to rescue Jews from oppression in the Soviet Union.
In the mid 1950s and early 1960s, he became involved in assisting people from the disintegrating Jewish communities of North Africa caught up in the struggles of the host countries for independence from France and in the persecution of the Jews of North Africa after the independence of Israel.
His activism did not end then. After traveling to the United States, he decided to create a national student organization to activate the grass roots of the American Jewish community. Settling in New York, in 1964, he set up his first student committee. Then he concentrated on building a student core at Yeshiva University. Mr. Birnbaum named the new organization the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, known familiarly as the SSSJ.
Finally, he called a national founding meeting at Columbia University on April 27, 1964, followed by a large student demonstration 4 days later on the Soviet holiday May Day in front of the Soviet United Nations Mission. The authoritative Center for Jewish History has listed the demonstration as the beginning of the public struggle for the freedom of Soviet Jews.
Many consider this action as the reason to consider Mr. Birnbaum the father of the movement to liberate Soviet Jewry. Indeed, the evidence supports this notion. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, under his direction, the Student Struggle continued working full time in response to the oppression of Soviet Jews.
As we know, the Bolshevik Resolution in Russia led to the imprisonment of Soviet Jews behind the Iron Curtain. Jewish culture, Jewish religion and Jewish communal life were forcibly extinguished under the Soviet regime, which also indulged in numerous anti-Semitic actions.
Even after Stalin's death, the Soviet kingdom of fear abated only slightly. The Cold War effectively continued to cut off the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe from their fellow Jews in the West, and almost all expressions of Jewish religion and culture continued to be prohibited.
Nevertheless, expressions of outrage began to accumulate in the early 1960s, with a few pioneers leading the way. Shortly after the initial organizing by Jacob Birnbaum, the major Jewish organizations met in Washington, D.C., and established the American Conference on Soviet Jewry. The SSSJ that Mr. Birnbaum had established functioned as its handbook said, to mobilize a tidal wave of public opinion.
After the mass arrests of young Jewish dissidents on June 15, 1970, and the death sentences handed down to them in the Leningrad trial of December 1970, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry was created.
The Greater New York Conference, under the direction of the then young activist Malcolm Hoenlein, initiated the profoundly important Solidarity Day marches, modeled after Jacob Birnbaum's Jericho, Redemption, and Exodus marches and rallies of the 1960s. Mr. Hoenlein is now the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Of great significance was the creation in 1970 of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a coalition of non-established regional groups, under the chairmanship of Dr. Louis Rosenblum, with whom Jacob Birnbaum worked for many years.
Mr. Hoenlein has publicly stated that he considers Mr. Birnbaum ``the father of the Soviet Jewry movement.'' Similar statements have been made by other major public figures such as Dr. Meir Rosenne, who worked closely with Mr. Birnbaum in the early formative period of 1964 to 1967. Dr. Rosenne later became Israel's Ambassador to France and then to the United States. Sir Martin Gilbert, the official British historian of Winston Churchill and his times, has made a similar statement.
In May, 1965, Mr. Birnbaum was the first person to testify before a congressional committee on the importance of utilizing economic leverage on the Kremlin to secure the liberation of Soviet Jews. When the late Senator Henry Jackson initiated the legislation which finally resulted in the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974, Mr. Birnbaum worked closely with the director of Senator Jackson's office, Dorothy Fosdick, and, of course, with his other aide, Richard Perle, who played a major role in the initiation and development of the legislation.
The idea of placing economic pressure on Communist states to increase emigration played a key role in softening up the Kremlin regimes to make possible the Soviet Jewry demand of ``Let My People Go.'' For the first time, there was legislation to put teeth into the previous congressional humanitarian resolutions.
From 1976 to 1986, Jacob Birnbaum conducted annual Most Favored Nation campaigns, based on Jackson-Vanik, to pressure various countries, including Romania, to increase emigration and to release prisoners. He testified annually before both Senate and House Committees.
In the latter 1970s, Mr. Birnbaum enlarged his Soviet Jewry strategy. He expanded the slogan ``Let My People Go'' by adding ``Let My People Know.'' Let them know their heritage. The Kremlin had pulverized Jewish religious, cultural and community life, and, in the 1960s, the Soviet Jewish resistance underground began to generate Jewish self-education, cultural, religious and Hebrew-speaking groups in the Soviet Union.
Mr. Birnbaum conducted numerous campaigns for their protection, enlisting the aid of many Christian religious denominations. These efforts reached a high point when he organized and led a delegation of the Synagogue Council of America to meet with the Deputy Secretary of State and the Department's Human Rights Director, Warren Zimmermann, in September 1985.
Mr. Birnbaum's vision was partially realized with Malcolm Hoenlein's Solidarity Rallies in New York, and, finally, by the great national rally in Washington on December 7, 1987, on the eve of President Gorbachev's meeting with President Reagan.
Finally, in 1990, the Kremlin conceded to all the pressure and permitted a mass emigration, which has now totaled more than 2 million people, about 1 million to Israel and 1 million elsewhere, mostly to the United States. This was no small accomplishment. And many people played a role in making it happen.
In addition to the courageous work of Mr. Birnbaum, tribute ought to be paid to the many pioneers and the other national organizations which fought so strenuously for the liberation of Soviet Jews:
Morris Abram, U.S. Human Rights Commissioner; Dr. Moshe Deeter, the scholar whose research fueled the early movement; former Justice Arthur Goldberg; the distinguished theologian, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Heschel; Senator Jacob Javits; NASA scientist Dr. Louis Rosenblum of the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism; and Elie Wiesel, whose book, ``The Jews of Silence'' was so influential.
Many organizations also played an important role, and I will name them in my extended remarks.
Following the collapse of the Soviet regime, Mr. Birnbaum spent a substantial part of the 1990s in combating anti-Semitic manifestations in former Soviet Central Asia, mostly in Uzbekistan, intervening through the State Department and enlisting Malcolm Hoenlein's aid in engaging the Uzbek Ambassador in Washington.
In his 81st year, Mr. Birnbaum continues to support groups engaged in the Jewish education of former Soviet Jews and their children. His dedication to his beliefs remains as strong as ever.
For all these reasons, Mr. Speaker, the House of Representatives ought to honor the life and six decades of public service of Jacob Birnbaum and especially his successful commitment to freeing Soviet Jews from religious, cultural, and communal extinction. He is a true hero.
I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, for moving this resolution quickly through his committee. I would also like to thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Watson) for managing the consideration of this resolution today, and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen) for her leadership on this.
Again, I urge all my colleagues to join me in passing this resolution to honor this work of this unique hero of this century.