Spotlight on Soviet Jewry: Absorption in the USA - Challenge and Prospect

Publication Date: December 1975

Publisher: Jewish Communal Service Association of North America

Author(s): Gaynor I. Jacobson

Research Area: Population and demographics

Keywords: Acculturation; Immigration; Cultural Sensitivity

Type: Report

Coverage: United States Soviet Union

Abstract:

This article reviews the history of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. It also provides an historical perspective of the acculturation process of Soviet Jewry. The author argues that Soviet Jews who chose to emigrate did so for a number of reasons: in order to legitimize the efforts of those dissidents before them; to provide a future for their children; for religious reasons; or to escape the impoverished repression of the Soviet Union. According to the author, it was this emigrating mass of poor Soviet Jews that helped create the eighty-eight Jewish communities that exist in the United States today.

In Journal of Jewish Communal Service, 52:2