Barry Marks Papers

The Papers of Barry Marks 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.

A spiritual leader of Temple Israel of Springfield, IL, Rabbi Barry Marks is a founder of the Greater Springfield Interfaith Association, which has promoted social justice and racial and religious harmony since the mid-1970s. He is an advocate and volunteer for numerous other local organizations serving children, the sick and the disadvantaged. Rabbi Barry Marks became involved in the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1960s, when he was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and continued his activism during the following decades. ¹