Fifty Years After the Refusenik Movement: How Post-Soviet Jews Have Proven Triumphant

In 1971, William Korey, a scholar of Russian history, a prolific author, and a senior leader of B’nai B’rith International, published a piece about the Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration in the first edition of a small publication out of London, Soviet Jewish Affairs, the precursor to East European Jewish Affairs. The early 1970s were a breaking point in the Soviet Union’s attitude to Israel and Jewish emigration after the Soviet Union cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 1967 as a result of the June Six-Day War. In 1970, only 1,000 Soviet Jews left the country for Israel, with only 25,000 emigrating from 1948–1970. And in 1971, Steven Roth of the World Jewish Congress’ Institute of Jewish Affairs launched Soviet Jewish Affairs. In December 1971, New York Times Moscow correspondent Hendrick Smith noted that “the well-organized Jewish emigration movement here [in the Soviet Union]” “the influence of world public opinion” encouraged the Soviet Union to allow Jewish emigration (although he noted that emigration was primarily from Soviet Georgia and the Baltics). In late 1970, a Soviet court sentenced two Jews to death (the sentence was commuted to 15 years in response to international pressure) for their unsuccessful attempt to commandeer a civilian aircraft to escape, and Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League placed pipe bombs in Aeroflot and Intourist offices in New York City as part of their campaign to force the Soviet Union to open up Jewish emigration. In 1971, 15,000 left and by the end of the 1970s, 250,000 had left the Soviet Union. For nearly three decades, Korey played a central role in using international law and human rights to allow Soviet Jews the right to emigrate. Korey, then, wrote as an expert in his essay on the legal and moral aspects of “the right to leave” for Soviet Jews in that inaugural issue of Soviet Jewish Affairs. As a legal historian, Korey goes back through the birth of human rights in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what Eleanor Roosevelt called the “Magna Carta of Mankind.” (Korey claims U Thant, secretary general of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971, coined this phrase. It wasn’t.) Then he charts human rights laws through the 1950s and 60s, in which he says, “Next to the right to life, the right to leave one’s country is probably the most important of human rights” (Korey, 5). After creating a list of Cold-War era Soviet repatriation agreements with Poland and Greece, Korey calls on the Soviet Union to let Soviet Jews emigrate. The final line calls on the Soviet Union to “let my people go.” As the first article in the first issue in the journal, this was a call on