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.

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