Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry
After the Eichmann trial in 1961 (witnessed by Birnbaum in Jerusalem) people had become increasingly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, so the Columbia meeting proved emotional and there was a call for action.
In 1964, this commenced with the dispatch of information kits to student summer camps nationally in May, a week-long interfaith fast in June, and a massive rally in October with the participation of President Lyndon Johnson's representative Mayer Feldman, New York Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, and Mayor John Lindsay on the Lower East Side, the original area of East European Jewish settlement.
In December 1965, for the festival of Hanukkah, Birnbaum ordered a quantity of metal piping and personally supervised the all-night building of a huge candelabra for a Freedom Lights Menorah March through Central Park.
Though from the beginning Birnbaum directed SSSJ on a strictly responsible non-violent policy of moderate activism, "along the lines of aggressive civil rights organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,"[1] the Jewish establishment was intensely hostile.
Founding students included Sandy Frucher, Hillel Goldberg, Arthur Green, Dennis Prager, Glenn Richter, Benjamin Silverberg, James Torczyner, and Sanford Zwickler.
Originally Birnbaum's fastest typist, he assumed the bulk of SSSJ's administrative routines, and became well known for his small "rapid response" demonstrations, his informative press releases, and together with Allan Miller, the compilation of massive lists of prisoners of conscience and refuseniks.
Malcolm Hoenlein, a Birnbaum disciple, was the founding director of the Greater New York Conference and initiated in 1972 the Solidarity Sunday marches and rallies modeled on SSSJ's 1960s events.
He had in fact testified in Congress on this concept as early as May 1965, was in close contact with Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office regarding the Jackson-Vanik Amendment signed into law almost ten years later in January 1975.
[2] Birnbaum testified in Congress some eighteen times between 1976 and 1986 in relation to the Amendment's application to emigration from Romania and achieved the release of six long-time prisoners, a rescue which elicited an enthusiastic letter of congratulations from the State Department.
In September 1985, he organized and led a mixed delegation of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbis under the auspices of the inter-denominational Synagogue Council of America to meet with the Deputy Secretary of State.
He worked in cooperation with the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, was frequently in contact with the Central Asian desk of the State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent and, in the later 1990s, also with Malcolm Hoenlein, by now Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents.
For the occasion of his 80th birthday, December 10, 2006 (Human Rights Day), the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR137 in 2007 "Honoring the life and six decades of public service of Jacob Birnbaum and especially his commitment to freeing Soviet Jews from religious, cultural, and communal extinction.
