Carol S. Kekst Papers

The Papers of Carol S. Kekst 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 educator in infant development, Carol Shapiro Kekst, became involved in the Soviet Jewry movement when she lived in Philadelphia during the 1970s, via the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. In the mid-1970s, she took a trip to the Soviet Union where she visited prominent Soviet Jewish Refusenik activists, Vladimir Slepak, Ida Nudel, Anatoly Sharansky, and her own Russian Jewish cousin, Refusenik Lev Gendin.

At the end of the 1970s Dr. Kekst moved to New York City and took a position of an Instructor in Pediatrics at the Downstate Medical Center of State University of New York (SUNY), Brooklyn. She became a vice-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS), an organization dedicated to protecting the human rights and scientific freedom of scientists around the world.

CCS was concerned with the situation of the Jewish scientist in the USSR. The Soviet state openly discriminated against Jews in every field of science, barring or severely limiting education and employment opportunities. Those Jewish scientists who stated their intent to emigrate from the USSR were routinely denied exit visas. They were fired from their jobs and blacklisted in every professional field, having to resort to menial labor for sustenance and in order to avoid imprisonment for parasitism—being unemployed in the Soviet state. Their families were socially ostracized, threatened and assaulted. CCS monitored the Antisemitic tendencies in the Soviet sciences and kept track of individual victimized Soviet Jewish scientists. It kept U.S. elected officials informed on the systematic breaches of international human rights laws and the Soviet constitution by the government of the USSR. CCS gathered hundreds of signatures from American scientists who supported a national moratorium on scientific contacts with the Soviet Union.

As a representative of SUNY in the CCS, Carol Kekst was instrumental in staging a scientists' boycott of a cooperative project between the State University of New York and Moscow State University that was initiated in 1976.