The Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement

The Holocaust motivated and the Civil Rights Movement empowered American Jewry to create a movement to protect the rights of Soviet Jews.

Steven Bayme, P.h.D,Visiting associate professor of history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. 

Interview with Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, from the documentary Refusenik

“He read the desperate letters from Europe, so he knew what was happening to the Jews there. He tried to do what he could, but his helplessness seared itself into my soul.” - Jacob Birnbaum, on his father, who worked for the British government’s national censor, in the Uncommon Languages Department

The Civil Rights Movement

Excerpt from PBS documentary The Jewish Americans. CORE is the acronym for the Congress on Racial Equality

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, center, an early advocate for Soviet Jewry, with Dr. Martin Luther King in a 1968 antiwar protest.

Source: The Jewish Americans. Photos 2 and 3 are of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Click to pause.

"This systematic attempt to spiritually liquidate the Jewish people of the Soviet Union must not take place, and men of good will must not allow it to take place. We must see that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. An injustice towards any individual is a threat to the justice of any other individual, and I cannot stand idly by in America, I cannot stand idly by as an American Negro, and not be concerned about what happens to my brothers and sisters who happen to be Jews in Soviet Russia, for their problem is my problem" - Dr. Martin Luther King, 1963, speaking at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations 47th Biennial Banquet 

"If we are ready to go to jail in order to destroy the blight of racial bigotry, if we are ready to march off to Washington in order to demonstrate our identification with those who are deprived of equal rights, should we not be ready to go to jail in order to end the martyrdom of our Russian brethren? To arrange sit-ins, protests, days of fasting and prayer, public demonstrations to which every Russian leader will not remain indifferent? The voice of our brother's agony is crying out to us! How can we have peace of mind or live with our conscience?" - Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1963