His parents, Morris (Moishe) and Ida (Ita)(nee Gorodetsky) were from Zhitomir, near Kiev, in present day Ukraine.

They fled persecution under the Russian Tsar, and emigrated to Palestine in 1914, leaving there soon after to escape the Turks drafting Roodenko's father into WW1.

Morris Roodenko started with a push-cart on the Lower East Side, and eventually had a small dry goods shop.

Roodenko decided to become a vegetarian at a young age, and his entire family followed suit - mother, father, and younger sister.

However, at the university he became a pacifist and decided to stay in the United States: "aware of the conflict between my pacifism and my Zionism, and then ceased being a nationalist."

[4] He and conscientious objectors in six other federal prisons began a hunger strike on May 11, 1946, to draw attention to the plight of war resistors.

In his interview in 1974 for the Southern Oral History Program Collection he stated, "A great deal of talking and organizing - this is my major commitment now, not so much to the War Resisters League as an institution, but to the idea that the human species has two or three generations at most to learn to live with itself, and otherwise if we don't learn to deal with our conflicts in a non-lethal manner, we stand a very good chance of destroying ourselves, perhaps destroying all life on this planet.

4 riders were arrested in Chapel Hill, NC - Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, Joe Felmet and Andrew Johnson.

[7] On June 17, 2022, Judge Allen Baddour, with full consent of the State and Defense, dismissed the charges against the four Freedom Riders, with members of the exonerees' families in attendance.

Renee Price, chair of the Orange County Board of Commissioners, learned that the charges against these men arrested in Chapel Hill, in what many Civil Rights historians consider the first Freedom Ride, had never been dropped.

She reached out to Orange County Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour, whose office researched the incident and legal cases.

So we’re doing this today to right a wrong, in public and on the record because these offenses, these events happened all over the country and very little documented evidence of the court process exists.

I do not want to erase history, but we must shine a light on it.” Along with Judge Baddour and Renee Price, speakers included Woodrena Baker-Harrell, Public Defender, Orange & Chatham Counties; Jim Woodall, District Attorney, Orange & Chatham Counties; Chief Chris Blue, Chapel Hill Police Dept.

Additionally, the program looks at the contributions of the participants beyond the Journey, including the March on Washington and scores of nonviolent actions that have changed the racial landscape of America.

In 1983, discussing the difficulties of political activism with a reporter from the New York Times, Roodenko memorably stated that "if it were easy, any schmo could be a pacifist.