Michael Greene Papers

The Papers of Michael Greene 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.

Michael Greene was a president of the Long Island Chapter Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). He wrote music and lyrics performed at his synagogue, and at local events of the ZOA and other Jewish organizations. Two of his songs were used at the Bar and Bat Mitzvah twinning ceremonies of which Jewish American teenagers were paired with their Soviet Jewish peers, who were officially forbidden from having the ceremony in the USSR, in order to celebrate their Bar/Bat Mitzvah in absentia. He presented recordings of the two songs, along with the lyrics, to the Long Island Committee for Soviet Jewry and were subsequently taken to the Soviet Union by the members of the Committee to be presented to the Refuseniks.