The theme of “Let Our People Go” will highlight a novel educational effort at Brooklyn College in behalf of both Jews behind the Iron Curtain and those in Arab lands. During this pre-Passover period, leaders of the Hillel Foundations and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry will fan out over the campus, according to Rabbi Frank Fischer of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation, to distribute over a thousand sealed plastic bags each containing a “matzoh of redemption.” The recipients will be urged to take them home and share this special matzoh at the family Seder not only as a symbol of freedom but as a pledge of solidarity and determination not to rest until the heavy doors of the Soviet Union are pushed open for Jews to leave voluntarily. The matzoh campaign is directed not only at students, according to Noah Perlman, chairman of the SSSJ chapter, but the entire community especially through the traditional family unit which still gets together for the Passover Seder observance. “There must be no generational gap in this issue of survival for the largest section of our people outside of the U.S.A.,” he stated, “and no battle fatigue in this struggle for freedom. The lesson of the holocaust and Israel reborn is not lost on young people who see in very contemporary terms the ancient words of the Haggadah every individual must see himself as if he personally were executing from Egypt.” The matzot will be accompanied by a leaflet prepared by the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry with liturgical selections to be recited at the eating of this “matzoh of hope.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
