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Refuseniks' Rough Road to Israel

(Washington Post) Anne Applebaum - In When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry," Gal Beckerman retells two stories: that of the Soviet Jews who made their religion and their desire to emigrate to Israel into a protest movement, and that of the American Jews who championed their cause. For years, American Jews pounded away at the advocates of realpolitik who wanted U.S.-Soviet relations to focus on arms and trade, not human rights. In 1974, they won passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, legislation that linked Soviet trade deals to Jewish emigration. Sponsored by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a non-Jewish politician who had made this issue his own, it forced the White House to establish links between human rights violations and wider diplomatic issues. After the amendment passed, U.S.-Soviet relations were never the same. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the movement disappeared, a happy victim of its own success. In the subsequent decade, some 1 million Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel.
2010-11-26 08:46:57
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