Sandberg, Joel and Sandberg, Adele

The Papers of Joel and Adele Sandberg 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 one of the most influential movements of the American Jewish community in the 20 th 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.

Adele Sandberg (1944- ) was one of the founders of the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry (SFCSJ) in 1972. She developed its Adopt-a-Family program, which connected families in the U.S. with refusenik families in the USSR. At that time this Adopt-a-Family program for Soviet Jews was the largest in the country. In 1975, she spearheaded international support for the hunger strike of Vladimir and Masha Slepak in Moscow. From 1979 to 1988 she was a co-editor of a series of books which documented case histories of refuseniks, an essential resource for activists all over the world as well as the U.S. Congress.

Joel Sandberg M.D. (1943- ) was the second chairman of the SFCSJ. As head of the tourist briefing program, he briefed hundreds of tourists from South Florida who were traveling to the USSR, including Congressmen, public officials and community leaders. Dr. Sandberg, an ophthalmologist and Voluntary Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Miami's Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, directed the SFCSJ's physicians group for Soviet Jews and was the Southeast Regional Coordinator of the national Medical Mobilization for Soviet Jewry. Dr. Sandberg has been on the board of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews for 30 years and served as Vice-President and on the executive committee.

In May 1975, Adele and Joel traveled to outlying cities to visit Soviet Jews who rarely got to meet American activists. They were detained and interrogated in Kishinev, then expelled from the USSR. For many years, their home was a center of activity for Soviet Jewry. They were active in organizing protests and rallies, community education and community speaking, congressional education, campaigns for individual refusenik families and public relations for the cause.