I remember marching as a teenager in NY every year with hundreds of thousands of other Jews down to Dag Hammerskjold Plaza across from the U.N. to protest on behalf of Soviet Jewry. I was never completely satisfied until I saw Mayor Ed Koch give the crowd a big "thumbs up".

The Jerusalem Post has a very interesting article about how this movement which helped set free so many people was started by one young man with a vision 40 years ago. Just the mention of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) brought back memories.

Essay: Lessons from a movement

During the last few weeks, the Jewish world has begun to take notice of the 40th anniversary of the founding of an American Soviet Jewry movement. That movement, the most successful protest campaign in Jewish history, was initiated by Yaakov Birnbaum on April 29, 1964, with a meeting at Columbia University that launched the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ). In the early years of the movement, it was SSSJ that ran the only full-time Soviet Jewry office and generated a level of activity that surpassed that of the entire Jewish establishment.