It is historical fact that over one quarter of a million Jews left the Soviet Union between 1971 and 1979. This development, which today is known to all, was totally unexpected — indeed, would probably have seemed impossible to any student of Soviet affairs at the beginning of the 1970s. In order to understand the developments of the seventies, one must look to the early stages of the struggle for Soviet Jewish emigration which are much less well known.

The period begins with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, certainly the most important event in the postwar international arena for those Soviet Jews who had retained any Jewish consciousness or orientation after thirty years of Soviet rule, especially since Israeli and Zionist leaders saw Israel's right and obligation to serve as a haven for oppressed Jews the world over as its raison d'être. It ends with the outbreak of the Six Day War, when the Soviet Union — which had been the first country in the world to afford Israel de jure recognition — severed diplomatic relations with the Jewish state; the combination of these two events (the war and the cutting of relations) catapulted the Jewish national movement into a new stage of development and activity.

The main purpose of this book is to show how those Jews whose Judaism and Jewish leanings were reinvigorated, or even initially stimulated, by the establishment of the Jewish state, sought to give vent to their Jewishness within a closed and largely antagonistic environment.