OUR COMMUNITY
A screenshot, from the 2007 documentary Refusenik by Laura Bialis, which chronicles the 30-year international movement to free Soviet Jews.
Remembering Our Local Heroes How grassroots efforts, secret trips and rallies paved the way for Soviet Jewish freedom. COURTESY OF JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MICHIGAN
ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
COURTESY OF JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MICHIGAN
Photos taken at the JCC during the Freedom Run for Soviet Jewry on September 25, 1983.
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SEPTEMBER 16 • 2021
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n the early 1970s, a slow trickle of Soviet Jewish refugees resettled in Metro Detroit. They gave up life in the USSR to pursue religious freedom and better opportunities for their families. What started as a few hundred immigrants steadily began to pick up speed. By the late 1980s and particularly the mid1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trickle turned into a wave and thousands of Soviet Jewish refugees left the Iron Curtain for good. It’s estimated that by the time the mass emigration finally slowed down, some 2 million Jews escaped the Soviet Union to start new lives in the United States, Israel, Canada and Australia, among other countries. For those resettled in Metro Detroit, their opportunities were possible thanks to a group of dedicated volunteers unwaveringly committed to the Soviet Jewry cause. Everyday individuals like Metro Detroit-based Jewish community members Jeannie
Weiner and Beverly Yost worked relentlessly around the clock to advocate on behalf of Soviet Jewry. GETTING THE WORD OUT In the early years of the Soviet Jewish exodus, the Soviet Jewish struggles still weren’t publicized. “It wasn’t something that was widely known or thought about in those years,” explains Yost, who at the time worked for the Jewish Community Council. There, she focused on international concerns, which led to cause of Soviet Jewry eventually Beverly entering her life. Yost “It was an issue that had really developed after the 1967 Six-Day War,” she said, “when Soviet Jews wanted to get out of the Soviet Union and get to Israel.” In the early days of the movement, an organization separate from the Jewish Community Council known as the Detroit Committee for
