Wampold, Babette

The Papers of Babette Wampold 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 Movements 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.

Babette Wampold, activist, art collector, and author, lived in Montgomery, Alabama with her husband Charles, a lawyer, and their three children. She wrote about Jewish immigration in the American South and was active in the leadership of the Alabama Council to Save Soviet Jews (ACTSSJ). The Wampold’s art collection was an exhibit at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 2006 entitled Adventures in Collecting Art: American Paintings from the Collections of Charles and Babette Wampold and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts .