Jacob Birnbaum

Jacob (Yaakov) Birnbaum (10 December 1926 – 9 April 2014) was the German founder of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and other human rights organizations. Because SSSJ was the first initiative to address the plight of Soviet Jewry, he is regarded as the father of the Movement to Free Soviet Jewry. His father was Solomon Birnbaum and grandfather Nathan Birnbaum.

Biography

Early life

Yaakov Birnbaum was born in Hamburg, Germany. Shortly after Nazis came to power in 1933 his father was attacked in the street. During the same period, six-year-old Yaakov was surrounded by neighboring German boys who swarmed into the garden and stuffed his mouth full of dirt. The family managed to reach England but Hitler's voice screaming "the accursed Jews" still dominated their lives. In 1938 and 1939 Yaakov went to school with refugee children who were brought out from Central Europe at the last moment in a Kindertransport organized by Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld. He later studied modern European history at the University of London.

During World War II the Birnbaums were well aware of the plight of European Jews under Nazi occupation and agonized over their inability to help out, especially relatives.

After the war

As the war ended in 1945, Birnbaum moved to France where from 1946 to 1951 he helped survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps - Jews from Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. He later worked to help North African Jews fleeing the Algerian Civil War.

Fight for Soviet Jewry

With his experience of Nazism and Soviet communism, Birnbaum felt that an all-out effort should be made by American Jewry to combat the Kremlin's oppression of Soviet Jews. He decided to create a national student movement to act as a spearhead to mobilize the grassroots to transform Washington into the protector and rescuer of Soviet Jewry. In 1964 he moved to New York City and on 27 April of that year he convened a New York metropolitan student meeting at Columbia University. The meeting was an emotional one. The theme was that the Holocaust should be taken as a warning and the civil rights movement as a model for grassroots action. Within four days some 1,000 students rallied in front of the Soviet U.N. Mission. He called the new group "Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry" (a play on the Marxist term "class struggle") and his first office operated out of his bedroom. In its recent timeline of 350 years of American Jewish history, the Center for Jewish History marked 1 May 1964 as the beginning of the public movement for Soviet Jewry.

External links

• JACOB BIRNBAUM and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry Part 1 & Part 2
• Dr. Jacob Birnbaum - RAJE 2012 Dinner video on YouTube