The amendment linked U.S. trade relations with non-market economies such as the Soviet Union to these countries' restrictions on the freedom of emigration and other human rights.
"[6] By giving the Soviet Union an economic incentive to allow free emigration, it led, particularly after the Yom Kippur War, to a gradual increase in permission to leave the USSR.
It began as a study group led by three of the founding members of Beth Israel – The West Temple in 1963: Louis Rosenblum, Herbert Caron, and Abe Silverstein.
Although the Cleveland council was still active in 1985, by the late 1970s the Jewish Community Federation had taken over the major local organizing effort for Soviet Jewry.
In 1969, the Jewish Defense League began a series of protests and vigils while employing militant activism in order to publicize the persecution of Soviet Jewry.
Behind the scenes, the clandestine Israeli Soviet Jewry office, Nativ (known as the Lishka), supported the ACSJ and NCSJ, it had helped create.
[12][13] Once Jews began to be allowed to emigrate, tensions also arose between Israel and the American side of the movement over the drop-out phenomenon.
Drop-outs were Jews who left the Soviet Union on an exit visa to Israel but changed their destination (primarily to the United States) once they reached the half-way station in Vienna.
Israel, which needed Soviet Jews to offset demographic trends in the country to maintain a Jewish majority, wanted to stop people from dropping out.