Mr. Speaker, with the approach of International Human Rights Day on December 10, I would like to take this opportunity to chronicle for the national record the life and work of a remarkable human rights activist, Jacob Birnbaum of New York. It is interesting to note that he was actually born on December 10, 1926. As December 10, 2006 will mark his 80th birthday, it is entirely appropriate that his work should be portrayed in the RECORD of the Congress of the United States.
Jacob Birnbaum's immediate family fled the Nazis and settled in the United Kingdom. In 1946, following the end of World War II, the 19-year-old Jacob Birnbaum devoted several years to providing relief for younger survivors of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian systems. From the young Polish Jews who managed to exit the USSR after the war, he became familiar with the iniquities of the Soviet system. This early experience fueled his later passion to mobilize American Jewry in the drive to rescue Jews from the oppression they faced 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 their host countries for independence from France.
Thereafter, traveling the United States, he decided to create a national student spearhead to activate the grassroots of American Jewry. Settling in New York in 1964, he set up his first student committee; then he concentrated on building a student core at Yeshiva University. Finally, he called a national founding meeting at Columbia University on April 27, 1964, followed by a large student demonstration four days later on the Soviet holiday May Day in front of the Soviet UN Mission. The authoritative Center for Jewish History has listed the demonstration as the beginning of the public struggle for Soviet Jewry. Mr. Birnbaum named the new organization Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ).
Throughout the rest of the 1960s, under his direction, the Student Struggle continued working full time in response to the oppression of Soviet Jewry.
As we know, the Bolshevik Revolution 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 manifestations. 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 co-religionists in the West.
Nevertheless, expressions of outrage began to accumulate in the early 1960s, with a few pioneers leading the way. In April, 1964 the major Jewish organizations met in Washington, DC and an American Conference on Soviet Jewry was established. The same month, Mr. Birnbaum created the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry for the purpose of fashioning a student spearhead to ``mobilize a tidal wave of public opinion.'' (First SSSJ Handbook)
After the mass arrests of young Jewish dissidents on June 15, 1970, and after the Leningrad Trial of December 1970 with its death sentences, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry was created. The Greater New York Conference, under the direction of the young activist Malcolm Hoenlein, initiated the profoundly important Solidarity Day marches, modeled after 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-Establishment regional groups, under the chairmanship of Dr. Louis Rosenblum, with whom Mr. Birnbaum had 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 1964-1967. 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, has made a similar statement.
In May, 1965, Mr. Birnbaum was the first to testify before a Congressional Committee on the importance of utilizing economic leverage on the Kremlin. When the late Senator Henry Jackson initiated the legislation which finally resulted in the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1975, Mr. Birnbaum worked closely with the director of Senator Jackson's office, Dorothy Fosdick, and, of course, 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 akey role in softening up the Kremlin regimes to make possible the Soviet Jewry demand to ``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 Romania to increase emigration and 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'' (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. 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 Gorbachev's meeting with President Reagan.
Finally, in 1990, the Kremlin conceded and permitted a mass emigration which now totals two million (one million to Israel and one 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 pioneers and the national organizations which fought so strenuously for the liberation of Soviet Jews.
The pioneers and the national organizations that Mr. Birnbaum asked me to publicly acknowledge for their support in this noble effort include:
Morris Abram, U.S. human rights commissioner; Dr. Moshe Deeter, the scholar whose research fueled the early movement; 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.
Furthermore, Mr. Birnbaum recalls the important roles played by colleagues in the following national organizations:
Agudath Israel of America; Center for Russian Jewry with Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, of which he is the founder and national director; Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations; Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, whose founding director was Malcolm Hoenlein; International League for the Repatriation of Russian Jews, founding chairman Morris Brafman; Senator Jacob Javits; Nehemiah Levanon, Israel Liaison Bureau for Soviet Jewry; the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement; National Conference on Soviet Jewry; Honorable Richard Maass, founding chairman; National Community Relations Advisory Council; Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, founding chairman Dr. Louis Rosenblum; and Ambassador Dr. Meir Rosenne.
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 via the State Department and enlisting Malcolm Hoenlein's aid in engaging the Uzbek Ambassador in Washington.
In his 80th year, Mr. Birnbaum continues to support groups engaged in the Jewish education of former Soviet Jews and their children.
For all of these reasons, the House of Representatives ought to honor the life and six decades of public service of Jacob Birnbaum and especially his commitment to freeing Soviet Jews from religious, cultural, and communal extinction. He is a true hero.