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Soviet Jewry protest leaders in San Francisco secretly recruited help from Jews for Jesus, FBI file says
(JTA) – Organizers of protests on behalf of Soviet Jewry in San Francisco in the early 1970s might have bolstered crowds by secretly recruiting participants from Jews for Jesus.
The explosive revelation that Jewish leaders turned to a Christian missionary group for help appears in a 1973 FBI memo that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently obtained through a freedom of information request.
The FBI file details an apparent relationship between Martin Rosen, the founder of Jews for Jesus, and Joel Brooks and Harold Light, two prominent San Francisco Jewish leaders at the fore of local efforts in the movement to get Soviet authorities to end restrictions on the emigration of the country’s Jewish population. The relationship outlined in the declassified memo has not appeared in scholarship on the Soviet Jewry movement, nor is it known to activists of the movement who were interviewed by JTA. Light, Brooks and Rosen are deceased.
If the FBI’s intelligence is accurate, a successful and cherished social movement that unified much of the global Jewish community in common purpose for decades relied at least to some extent in San Francisco on the support of a group, rejected by nearly all of that community, whose mission is to proselytize to Jews.
“The first thing I thought of was, I’m reading something from ‘The Twilight Zone’ — in my many years in the Soviet Jewry movement, I don’t know if I’ve seen a document as strange as this,” said Morey Schapira, who served in leadership positions in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews, and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. “The idea of working with a slimy group like Jews for Jesus, it’s beyond my comprehension.”
The public can request any FBI files that may exist pertaining to deceased individuals. An FBI memo relating Rosen arrived last November in response to one of about 50 freedom of information requests on prominent figures in recent Jewish history submitted by JTA almost two years ago. Most of JTA’s requests are still pending. TO DOWNLOAD THE FBI FILE, CLICK HERE.
Dated May 24, 1973, and written by an FBI informant whose name was redacted by staff at the U.S. National Archive, the memo focuses on Brooks, who was the Northern California director of the American Jewish Congress for about 30 years starting in 1967.
“[Brooks] has heavily utilized the services of the young Jews in the Jews for Jesus group,” the informant wrote. “[He] has used these services to turn out people in his Soviet Jewry demonstrations.”
The informant also cites Brooks as saying that Light, leader of the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jewry, used members of Jews for Jesus in a “hush-hush way” to distribute leaflets and participate in demonstrations.
The memo spells out why such an arrangement would be best kept out of the public eye.
“All of this, of course, is secret, because organized Jewish groups, and the various rabbinical councils have proclaimed that Jews for Jesus are no longer Jews but have become apostates, and should not be palled around with, nor buried in Jewish cemeteries,” the informant writes.
Martin “Moishe” Rosen, founder of Jews for Jesus in 1975. (Denver Post via Getty Images)
The upside for Rosen was obvious: His group would gain a foothold in a popular Jewish movement, offering a potential avenue toward legitimacy and a pool of possible recruits. In his 1974 memoir, titled “Jews for Jesus,” Rosen openly discussed being accepted into the movement by Jewish organizers, but he did so without naming Brooks, Light or any others.
He wrote that Jews for Jesus were invited because of their reputation as the “best qualified, best disciplined demonstrators in the San Francisco community. We’ve had more experience than other Jewish groups and are familiar with the applicable laws and regulations.”
Rosen’s group committed to not use the demonstrations as an opportunity to evangelize and didn’t bring any Christian literature or wear outfits that would identify them, according to the memoir.
“Many Jews for Jesus believe in the freedom of Soviet Jewry just as strongly as any other Jews, and we want to be as effective as possible when we demonstrate to support that cause,” Rosen wrote.
To Schapira, who led the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews for years and knew both Brooks and Light, however, it’s unclear why the Soviet Jewry movement would have wanted or needed Jews for Jesus. Schapira didn’t recall it ever being especially difficult to turn out demonstrators organically. There didn’t seem to be a need to resort to secret deals.
“If you look at the picture of the rallies in those days, they even had people like [American folk music legend] Joan Baez,” Schapira said. “They developed a relationship with her and she would come to the rally and bring her guitar and sing songs for freedom.”
He added, “If we needed an instant rally, we were a grassroots organization and we could produce 10 or 12 people, which might be enough to send a message to the Russians and get some publicity in the local papers.”
At least a few people in the Bay Area’s Jewish community caught wind of the secret relationship between Brooks and Jews for Jesus at the time, according to the memo.
Stephanie Rodgers was a coordinator of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist right-wing Jewish group that was under heavy FBI surveillance. Founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL applied its often violent tactics to resist Jews for Jesus’ public campaign to convert Jews. Rodgers visited Brooks’ office ahead of a planned demonstration in front of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco and asked about his connection to Rosen and Jews for Jesus, according to the memo.
After Brooks explained how they had been useful, Rodgers “smiled and was very pleasant on the surface,” the memo says. But at the demonstration, Rodgers and a group of other JDL activists showed up even though they said they would stay away, and they found Rosen in the crowd and proceeded to attack him and “kicked him in the groin.”
JDL regularly disrupted Jews for Jesus events; the organization would ultimately claim responsibility for firebombing a bus operated by Jews for Jesus in Brooklyn and abducting an adherent. In the Bay Area, where both groups were active, tensions were particularly high; the Jewish Defense League would sue the local Jews for Jesus chapter over what it charged was the group’s misuse of the JDL’s name and imagery.
Brooks, meanwhile, had more affable ties with Jews for Jesus. It’s unclear how or when Rosen and Brooks developed a relationship, but Brooks noted in a July 25, 1972, letter he wrote to the office of the American Jewish Congress in New York that their ties had started “some time ago.” The letter is found in the records of the Northern California branch of the American Jewish Congress, which are archived at the University of California Berkeley’s library.
A prominent advocacy group in its heyday, the American Jewish Congress — not to be confused with the American Jewish Committee — took a more liberal political stance than that of Jewish establishment groups on many issues.
Brooks had learned that his organization’s national headquarters wanted to undertake a study of Jews for Jesus and he wished to provide insight. He was under no illusion about the group’s objective: “The sole aim of these men is to enlist new converts to Christianity,” Brooks wrote in the letter.
“Through contact with Rosen I have developed a great deal of insight into how his organization operates, their source of funding, budget, etc. which I wish to share with you,” he added.
Then as now, members of Jews for Jesus and other Messianic groups felt unfairly rejected by the Jewish world, arguing that their Christian beliefs should have a place in the community.
In the early 1970s, when Jews for Jesus’ conversion drive was prominent and well funded, Brooks was perceived as more lenient, according to the foreword to the 2017 book “Converging Destinies: Jews, Christians, and the Mission of God.”
“Brooks tried to keep some of us connected to the Jewish community and Jewish life,” Calvin J. Smith wrote in the foreword. “I remember going with another Jew for Jesus to a Jewish consciousness raising session he held at a home in Marin County in the early 1970s.”
Glenn Richter was one of the founders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and operates as a walking encyclopedia of the movement.
Protestors dressed as prisoners behind bars, alongside a man holding a placard reading “Solidarity with Soviet Jews,” stand together with members of New York’s Jewish community as they take to the streets during the Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry demonstration in protest at the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jewish people, in New York City, April 18, 1975. (Images Press/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
He said the movement did collaborate with many Christians outside of Jews for Jesus. For example, he said there were Scandinavians, who, on weekend trips to Leningrad (today St. Petersburg), brought in Jewish material that was banned in the Soviet Union. Others set up safe houses in Finland in expectation of fleeing Soviet Jews. And the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews raised millions of dollars from evangelicals to help transport Soviet Jews to Israel.
“Of course, among these goodhearted souls are those who have conversion of Jews in mind, but I suspect most have wanted to fulfill their prophecy of ingathering Jews to Israel so that a Christian messiah could return,” Richter said.
In his eyes, Jews for Jesus represented a red line.
“Our Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry office on Manhattan’s West 72nd Street was down the block from a church with a Jewish Messianic constituency, and we would never, ever, try to work with them,” Richter said.
Andrew Esensten contributed research to this story.
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A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall
(JTA) — When David Freedman discovered a long-forgotten photo album in his parents’ Montreal basement last year, he found nearly 100 pages of century-old photographs from his grandfather’s year in British Mandate Palestine, capturing Jerusalem street scenes, market stalls and holy sites.
The photographs were not only century-old and in near-perfect condition, but included figures who would later become central to Jewish medical and political history, among them Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem ophthalmologist Abraham Ticho, malaria researcher Israel Kligler, future British prime minister Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine.
David Freedman said he knew he had “struck gold” when he found the album, which had been untouched for decades. “I realized in disbelief I was looking at extraordinary images of Jerusalem,” he said.
Though Freedman said the album showed his grandfather’s “passion for skillful, impromptu photography,” it was images of a site that epitomizes endurance that are having the broadest impact.
Freedman’s pictures of the Western Wall has inspired a public appeal by the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum, which is asking people to look through old albums and attics for photographs, postcards and other visual material that could help expand the historical record of Judaism’s holiest site.
The request comes ahead of a major exhibition opening in 2027 marking 60 years since the 1967 Six-Day War brought the wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, under Jewish control for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Although the Western Wall is now one of the most photographed sites in the world, museum curators say the visual record of earlier decades remains surprisingly fragmented, with many of the most intimate images likely still tucked away in private collections and family albums.
“The Western Wall, the Kotel, in its simplest form, is a structure of ancient stones. Yet its true meaning has never resided in the stones alone — it has been shaped and elevated by the countless individuals who have stood before it over the centuries,” Eilat Lieber, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement.
Next year’s exhibition, titled “Eyes on the Wall” and curated by Shimon Lev and Yael Brandt, will be the first large-scale exhibition dedicated entirely to the Western Wall, the museum said, and will trace its transformation over nearly 2,000 years. It will be one of the major exhibitions staged by the Tower of David Museum since it reopened in 2023 after a $50 million renovation of its ancient citadel complex.
The wall, the exposed section of an ancient retaining wall around the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Jewish temples, has long been Judaism’s most sacred places of prayer and pilgrimage. From 1948 until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Jews were barred from going there.
Among its most iconic images was David Rubinger’s photograph of three Israeli paratroopers standing at the wall shortly after its capture, looking upward in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The picture was taken 59 years ago this week.
Abraham Orkin Freedman, a Canadian physician and Zionist activist, took his photographs before the site was so contested. He arrived in Palestine in July 1920, just as Britain was replacing military rule with a civil administration, and stayed until 1922, serving during that period as managing director of Hadassah Hospital. His grandson David, also a doctor, said the album’s timing gives it much of its historical value, with photographs that capture people in the streets, as well as the terrain and buildings of Jerusalem during the nascent years of the British Mandate.
Among the images Freedman uncovered, the one that struck him most was a photograph of women praying side by side with men at the oldest part of the Western Wall, a scene far removed from the gender-separated prayer sections at the site today. The question of mixed-gender prayer at the Wall remains politically charged, with a recent High Court order to advance the egalitarian section followed by Knesset moves to strengthen Chief Rabbinate control over prayer at the site.
After recognizing the album’s significance, Freedman met with his family who decided collectively to give it to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum for safekeeping, research and public access. Freedman said the family was proud the album had found “a new home, not many meters from where my grandfather once stood.”
Lev said he hoped the appeal would bring more discoveries like Freedman’s into public view, expanding the visual record of the Western Wall beyond official archives.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,” Lev said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Israel boycott battle intensifies at Venice Art Biennale, testing tradition of inclusion
The anti-Israel protests that disrupted the opening of the Venice Art Biennale continue to escalate, with more than 100 artists and curators declaring last week that they will bring legal action against Biennale authorities if their names are not removed from consideration for what in normal times are coveted awards for best artist and best national exhibition.
It’s just the latest battle between activists seeking to shut down Israel’s art exhibition in Venice and the Biennale’s administration who are committed to keeping it open.
Chaos erupted in the streets on the third day of the biennale’s opening last month as demonstrators engulfed the Via Garibaldi chanting Palestinian liberation slogans during their march toward an art exhibit hosted by Israel, held back by Italian police in riot gear. The demonstration was organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), a coalition of artists and art industry workers campaigning to ban Israel from participating in the world’s most prestigious art show.
ANGA’s agenda is reverberating throughout the Biennale, which is structured around a main international show that this year is hosting 110 invited artists, 100 national exhibitions and 31 official art shows. Many of the artists now threatening legal action first signed a letter this past March demanding that the directors of the Biennale exclude Israel’s exhibition from the show.
Just before the exhibition opened, the Venice Biennale’s five-member international jury — which oversees the prestigious Golden Lion for best artist and best national pavilion — announced that, in keeping with the spirit of the main international exhibition curated by the late Cameroonian art impresario Koyo Kouoh, who appointed them, it would “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court” — namely, Russia and Israel.
Belu-Simion Fainaru, representing the Israeli pavilion, reportedly responded by threatening that if he were excluded from consideration for the awards, he would sue the Biennale in the European Court of Human rights on grounds of antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination. Facing potential legal liability, all five jurors took the unprecedented step of quitting. The Biennale administration then announced that the juried awards would be replaced with Visitor Lions Awards, a popular vote by visitors to the show.
It’s that substitute award that the ANGA-allied artists are now renouncing.
There also have been attempts from the other end of the political spectrum to silence artists representing South Africa and Australia because of alleged anti-Israeli biases. Indeed, the 2026 Biennale, which opened on May 9 and runs through November 26, has become a referendum on artistic freedom of expression and on the place in the cultural sphere of the movement to boycott Israel. “Boycott the Genocide Pavilion,” the brochure ANGA demonstrators handed out at their demonstration stated, “For decades, the Venice Biennale has handed Israel an international stage to culturewash its occupation of Palestine,” and stated that in doing so Biennale authorities are helping to “normalize the ongoing decimation of an entire population.”
The president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, has refused to cede ground. “Closing the door to some means making openness to others more fragile,” he argued in an impassioned speech announcing the opening of the Biennale’s 61st International Exhibition, adding, “if the Biennale began selecting not works but affiliations, not visions but passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: a place where the world meets, especially when the world is torn apart.”
Serene space
When I stepped into the Israeli exhibition, it seemed to be an invitation to leave behind the fractious world outside. The transcendent artwork, inspired by Paul Celan’s poetry, consists of a large rectangular pool in a tranquil space where the only interruption is the soothing sound of dripping water.
Given Israel’s destructive bombing campaigns, first in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, presenting Fainaru and his serene artwork to represent the country is a fraught choice. Fainaru lives in Haifa, one of Israel’s most culturally diverse cities, and is a professor at Haifa University, where he told me the rector is Palestinian and more than 50% of his students are Arabs. Fainaru said that his art is about bringing people together and “collective consciousness,” and he argued it should be viewed outside of the political prism that has roiled the Biennale in recent years. “This environment is becoming more and more about boycott, censorship, limitation of freedom, exclusion,” he said, adding “that’s changing the meaning and role of art.”
Some observers who study censorship say the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale have always functioned as cultural diplomacy and in many instances are a form of “artwashing,” a term that refers to the ways that governments and corporations utilize art exhibits to obscure or gloss over unethical policies.
“Clearly they are an attempt to make a country look better, but on the other hand there is something in the art that exceeds the national ambitions,” Svetlana Mintcheva, former director of programs at the U.S,-based National Coalition Against Censorship, said in a phone interview, adding: “It’s counterproductive to censor because it then homogenizes everyone in that particular country as holding particular ideas and that’s not the case.”
The censorship campaign against Israel and Russia took place against the backdrop of the main international exhibition “In Minor Keys,” which emphasizes anti-colonialist themes and the utility of art as a means of reconnecting to local and indigenous practices. The leitmotif of the show, which primarily emphasizes art from the African diaspora, chimes with ANGA’s agenda to give voice to a Palestinian culture that the group claims has been sidelined by Israel’s “colonial expansion.”
Some artworks in the international exhibition address the Palestinian displacement and trauma, while none deal with Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre or Israel’s wounds.
Gazan artist Mohammed Joha, who signed a March 26 ANGA petition calling for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion, is exhibiting No Shelter, which the artist made while witnessing the conflict in Gaza. The work consists of collages made from discarded paper, fabric and cardboard intended to call attention to the cycles of destruction and rebuilding that Palestinians endure. Haitian artist Manuel Mathieu’s Genocide portrays a dark sea alongside what looks like pummeled charred flesh. British Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted includes a rotating dais with a live olive tree, a symbol of Palestinian resilience.
And Kouoh and her team gave pride of place in her show to artists who have been victims of Israel’s conflicts. The very first exhibit to greet visitors at the entrance of the massive Arsenale, a brick linear hall serves as the main exhibition space, which t originally was part of Venice’s Renaissance-era ship building complex, features the poem “If I must Die,” by Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer, which he posted to social media in late 2023, about a month before he was killed along with several of his family members by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. The poem, which has become a rallying cry for Palestinian activists, sits below a canvas portraying a disembodied face with penetrating eyes against a fractured background by Issa Samb, a Senegalese artist known for his anti-colonial themes.
The subsequent exhibition at the Arsenale is a monumental multi-media installation titled Khalil by Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, a former refugee from the 1976 Lebanese Civil war. Sabsabi is also representing Australia at its national pavilion in the nearby Giardini fairground.
Khalil, which was originally intended to be displayed at the Australian Pavilion, was intended as a meditation on Sufi mysticism. It consists of digital projections on a canvas painted in acrylic with swirling shapes, accompanied by sonorous background music and the piped in scent of Oud, which is used in Middle Eastern perfumery.
But Kouoh’s invitation to Sabsabi to exhibit at the Arsenale, which she extended after he was temporarily disinvited from showing the work at the Australian Pavilion, appears to have as much to do with his notoriety as it does his artistic merit. Sabsabi’s commission to exhibit at the Australian Pavilion was canceled after conservative Australian members of parliament and right-wing newspapers denounced him as promoting antisemitism and terrorism over work he had produced in the past, notably YOU, a 2007 multimedia piece that portrays multiple images of former leader Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where the You is on permanent display, originally described the artwork on its website as “obscuring Nasrallah’s face with beams of light that shine from his eyes and mouth, suggestive of a divine illumination.” But last year, after Sabsabi was dropped from representing the Australian Pavilion, the MCA engaged in an act of self-censorship by removing the section of text deifying Nasrallah and updating the description of the artwork to inform viewers that: “The Australian Government listed the entirety of Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist organization in 2021.”
Meanwhile, subsequent larger furor in the international arts community over Sabsabi’s being censored led to an independent review, which resulted in the reinstatement of his invitation to show at the Australian Pavilion, greatly raising his profile.
Another controversial figure is Gabrielle Goliath, the video and performance artist invited to represent South Africa, was the only artist to be officially banned. Elegy, the work she had planned to show, is a performative piece about gender and LGBT violence that has also addressed the killing and displacement of Palestinian women. But Goliath’s commission was canceled and the South African pavilion shuttered by the country’s culture minister Gayton McKenzie, a vocal supporter of Israel, who reportedly deemed Elegy “highly divisive in nature and relates to an ongoing international conflict that is widely polarizing.”
After an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing the South African government of unlawfully revoking her commission, Goliath was relegated to presenting Elegy in a rented church in Venice. This version of the work she exhibited there features eight “funereal screens,” with women singing and commemorating female victims of violence, including a murdered South African student and the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in 2023.
The closing of the South African pavilion didn’t stifle Goliath’s voice and, as with Sabsabi, the controversy over her being canceled may have given her a larger platform. After Venice, Elegy will be traveling to London before moving onto Milan.
It’s difficult to imagine Fainaru’s message of “collective consciousness” finding a similar welcome in arts venues throughout Europe and the United States.
Recent events in Venice and elsewhere suggest that the cultural boycott campaign is gaining momentum, putting freedom of expression under increasing strain. And it’s not just principles that are at stake. Closing Israel’s exhibition in Venice and further marginalizing Israeli artists works at cross-purposes with efforts to achieve mutual understanding and peace in the Mideast. “The price of cultural boycotts is quite high, says Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship, “because you limit any kind of exchange and you limit understanding of dissent within a country like Israel.”
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