Estelle Newman Papers

The Papers of Estelle Newman represent one collection housed within the Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement (AASJM). These papers reflect the effort, beginning in the 1960s through the late 1980s, of thousands of American Jews of all denominations and political orientations to stop the persecution and discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union. The American Soviet Jewry Movement (ASJM) is considered to be the most influential Movement of the American Jewish community in the 20th century. The beginnings of the organized American Soviet Jewry Movement became a model for efforts to aid Soviet Jews in other countries, among them Great Britain, Canada, and France. The movement can be traced to the early 1960s, when the first organizations were created to address the specific problem of the persecution and isolation of Soviet Jews by the government of the Soviet Union.

An upper-middle class Jewish family from Long Island, Malcolm and Estelle Newman and their teenage daughter Alissa, decided to participate in the Soviet Jewry movement by visiting the Soviet Union and delivering moral support and material aid to the Soviet Jewish Refusenik families in the USSR. They got in touch with the Long Island Soviet Jewry Committee to receive addresses of Refuseniks and instructions on the best strategies of contacting them without attracting the attention of Soviet authorities. In July of 1983 the Newmans visited or attempted to visit members of Jewish communities in Moscow, Leningrad, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Siberia. The journey was documented in hundreds of photographs that include pictures of Refuseniks in their homes, scenes of Jewish life in the communities visited and street scenes in the Soviet Republics and a detailed trip report.