Jacob Birnbaum Way (Manhattan)
Present name:Cabrini Boulevard
Location:Between 186th Street and 187th Street
Honoree: Jacob Birnbaum (1926-2014) is considered the father of the Movement to Free Soviet Jewry. He was born in Hamburg, Germany. After Hitler came to power in 1933, his family moved to London. He worked with survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps, and with North African Jews who had fled the civil war in Algeria. He moved to New York in 1964 and soon started his campaign to help Soviet Jews. He orchestrated student demonstrations at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations beginning in 1964. His grass-roots movement contributed to legislation that eventually helped liberalize Moscow’s emigration policies, an issue that President Ronald Reagan personally raised wih Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. As a result, more than 1.5 million Soviet Jews were allowed to move to Israel and elsewhere. (Rodriguez)
LL:2015/15