Joint Distribution Committee: Soviet Jewry

Calgary Herald Dept: They came with all sorts of assumptions about the West, including one that the chotchkas they had scrounged so hard to buy would help finance their passage to the free world. Luckily, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and American Joint Distribution Committee workers, often American Jews barely out of their teens, were on hand to help navigate their passage to America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, according to Calgary Herald. David Bezmozgis, who was six when his family left Soviet Latvia, has written a fictionalized account of this heady, yet difficult exodus and in the 1970s, an exodus of Soviet Jews, their suitcases stuffed with Melodiya vinyl records and Khokhloma wooden handicrafts, began to stream through Vienna, heading for Rome. The Soviet Jewry movement was one of the largest immigration movements of the late 20th century with more than one million people leaving the U.S.S.R. As reported in the news.
@t american joint distribution committee, jewry movement