Soviet Jewry

Content type
Collection
Miriam Weiner

Miriam Weiner

Through her genealogical program Routes to Roots, Miriam Weiner helped Jews access historical records that had survived the Soviet suppression of information throughout Eastern Europe.

Rising Voices Fellow Maya Jodidio with her Aunt
May 1, 2017

Because There's More to Russian Jews than Borscht

Maya Jodidio

My aunt and I share so much more than our smile, passion for math and science, and college (go Barnard!). Our strongest and arguably our most important similarity lies in our shared sense of civic responsibility. Although I still have more to learn about social justice work, my aunt is the perfect model of a passionate, hard-working, and persevering activist.

Topics: Activism, Israel, Soviet Jewry, Medicine
Tina Grimberg headshot

Tina Grimberg

Denied the opportunity to explore her Jewish heritage as a child in Soviet Ukraine, Tina Grimberg has used her career in the rabbinate to ensure inclusivity in the Jewish community.

Tina Grimberg

Tina Grimberg

Tina Grimberg has focused her rabbinic career on empowering women and fighting domestic violence.
Alina Treiger

Alina Treiger

As the first woman rabbi to be ordained in Germany since the Holocaust, Alina Treiger has cultivated the kind of progressive Judaism that had been the pride of German Jews before World War II.
Tess and Judy Favish in Verba, Ukraine
November 19, 2015

Feiga's Choice: Tracing One Family's History of Resilience from South Africa to Ukraine

LeeAnn Dance

Tess Peacock comes from a long line of strong Jewish women. As a South African human rights attorney, she believes passionately in equality and dignity for all. It’s a value she learned from her mother, Judy Favish—a former anti-apartheid activist now on staff at the University of Cape Town where she works to ensure equal access to education for all.  Judy’s mother was a pioneering doctor working in the townships. Her father Mannie was an attorney known for his integrity, compassion, and pursuit of fairness. But it was his mother—Feiga Shamis—to whom Judy and Tess feel they owe their strength, resilience, and commitment to human rights.

Topics: Motherhood, Soviet Jewry
Marillyn Tallman

Marillyn Tallman

Marillyn Tallman helped Jews make new lives for themselves during some of the most monumental conflicts of the twentieth century.
Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit, January 12, 2003

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit risked her own safety to become one of the first female refuseniks to protest for the right to leave Soviet Russia.
Shannie Goldstein

Shannie Goldstein

Shannie Goldstein used her creativity to outsmart the KGB, bringing information to and from refuseniks in the Soviet Union.
Roz Garber, 2000

Roz Garber

Roz Garber evaded the KGB to bring hope to refuseniks in the USSR.
Pamela Cohen, 1997

Pamela Cohen

Called “the general of a fighting army” by jailed dissident Natan Sharansky, Pamela Cohen rescued countless refuseniks from Soviet Russia with her grassroots efforts.
Ruth Emmerman Peizer

Ruth Emmerman Peizer

Ruth Peizer’s love affair with Yiddish began when her parents, Riva and Abraham Immerman, sent their only child to Chicago’s Arbeiter Ring [Workmen’s Circle] school at age nine, and then to the Sholem Aleichem Institute where she graduated valedictorian at age 18. Since moving to (West) Seattle in 1949, Ruth has become Seattle’s preeminent Yiddish instructor, teaching at the University of Washington in the 1980s and through the Jewish Federation today. Ruth’s knowledge of Yiddish has impacted her entire life through Yiddish culture including her adoration of Yiddish theatre, literature and music. Yiddish has also opened many doors all over the world for Ruth and her husband, Dr. Samuel Peizer, from her sponsorship of Russian refusniks seeking asylum in Seattle to her sending humanitarian aid to the Baltics since 1992.

Regina Spektor, 2006

Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor is born

February 18, 1980

Regina Spektor gets "lost in the sounds."

March 23, 2011

Interview: Vlada Bilyak on young, Soviet identity in the US

Leora Jackson

I spend a lot of time thinking about Jewish identity: what it means to be Jewish, what kinds of obligations I have because I identify as a Jew (if any), and what kinds of factors moderate or mediate the ways in which Jewishness and Judaism can be understood. Because of this, I really enjoyed watching Vlada Bilyak’s documentary about Jewish identity for young people from the former Soviet Union.

Topics: Soviet Jewry, Film, Immigration, Spirituality and Religious Life
Donna E. Arzt

Donna E. Arzt, 1954 - 2008

In her a genetic disposition to the appeal of tikkun olam was evident, in the course of a life devoted to deploying the law in behalf of progressive causes of special concern to the Jewish people.
Alla Denisenko

Alla Denisenko, 1952 - 2008

Her major talent was opening hearts. Her compassion, understanding and generosity made her the most popular person at school, a magnet for teenagers who called her their second mother and were ready to share things they would never have told their parents.

"Sukkot in Connecticut," 1970s

Unit 3, Lesson 4 - Moving Inward: bringing liberation movements into the Jewish community

Act out, through tableaux vivants, the ways Jews took what they had learned from the Civil Rights Movement and other liberation movements and used these insights to change the Jewish community.

Founding of Women's American ORT

October 12, 1927

In a Brooklyn kitchen on October 12, 1927, Anna Boudin, Mrs.

Project Kesher Logo

Project Kesher

Project Kesher is a feminist Jewish organization empowering women in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Russian-speaking community in Israel to build a society in which inclusive Jewish life can flourish, and where women are the instruments of peaceful change.

ORT pin

Women's American ORT

Five years after the American chapter of the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) was founded in 1922, a women’s auxiliary group (WAO) was created. WAO aided displaced Europeans and focused on creating vocational schools across the world. In the later twentieth century, WAO expanded to help create medical services for students and provide recreational facilities, among other programs.

Liudmila Ulitskaia

Liudmila Ulitskaia is one of Russia’s most famous and celebrated modern writers, known for her voice of moral authority and dissidence against a politically repressive Russian state. Her contemporary realist prose and fiction combines traditional plot and narrative techniques with candid treatment of conventionally taboo subjects such as sexuality, politics, and disease.

Mollie Steimer

Mollie Steimer

Mollie Steimer earned nationwide attention for her refusal to compromise her anarchist beliefs during the widely publicized 1918 trial in which she was sentenced to prison under the Sedition Act. Later deported to Russia and then to Germany, Steimer continued her anarchist activities throughout her life.

Russian Immigrants in Israel

Approximately 350,000 Jewish women moved to Israel from the Former Soviet Union after 1989. Among the key issues they faced were occupational downgrading, sexuality and family life, sexual harassment, marital distress, and single-parent families.

Yiddish theater performers on stage in a play.

Romanian Yiddish Theater

Romania was a wellspring of the Yiddish theater, as there were Jewish theater troupes in the major Romanian cities and acting troupes traveled throughout the country performing dramas, comedies, musicals, and operettas. Women played a significant role in performing and shaping Romanian Yiddish theater and became known internationally for their work on the Yiddish stage.

Irma May

During the economic devastation of the 1920s, Irma May traveled throughout Eastern Europe to report directly on the crisis of antisemitism occurring in the region. While she disappeared from public record during the American Great Depression, May’s work over a decade helped avert disaster for Jewish communities throughout Europe.

Donate

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

donate now

Get JWA in your inbox

Read the latest from JWA from your inbox.

sign up now