Letting his people go: Yaakov Birnbaum’s legacy

It has been said that for many, their legacy in history comes after death, and, in the case of the late, great Yaakov Birnbaum, his legacy has come. This week’s column will consider several memorial essays devoted to the life’s work of Yaakov Birnbaum, who passed away on April 9 at age of 87, just short of 50 years from the time that he launched the first of many demonstrations against communist anti-Semitism.

We begin with a brief review from historian Dr. Adam Ferziger, who quotes one of today’s greatest biographers, Sir Martin Gilbert, who said this about Yaakov Birnbaum:

“As a cautious pedantic historian, I am naturally reluctant to call anyone the ‘Father’ of anything … but I have no hesitation whatever in describing Jacob Birnbaum as the Father of the Soviet Jewry movement.”

An headline for an editorial in the April 18 Intermountain Jewish News says it all:

“Millions who know not his name owe him an incalculable debt of gratitude.”

Birnbaum fathered a movement that liberated 3 million Jews from communist tyranny and spiritual destruction.

“Jacob Birnbaum was there for the cause, nothing else. For the pain in his gut that saw millions of Jews robbed of their identity and heritage — and forgotten by the rest of the Jewish people … Jacob Birnbaun, and his faithful assistant Glenn Richter, imagined the release of millions of Jews when other Jews didn’t even know that Soviet Jews were systematically stripped of their freedom to be Jewish. Birnbaum imagined a Jewish establishment utterly transformed and energized by his passion, when the few people who gathered thought he was just this side of daft. But he persevered. …

“Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have never heard his name owe an incalculable debt to this unadulterated, unwavering idealist, this blessed son of the Jewish people, Jacob Birnbaum.”

According to Gal Beckerman, in his tribute, “The Death of a Soviet Jewry Prophet,” quoting from Natan Sharansky, the most high-profile political prisoner in Birnbaum’s cause and now chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, reached for a biblical analogy to describe Birnbaum’s significance.