Authors

Tatsiana Astrouskaya¹;  ¹ Herder Institute , Germany

Discussion

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union opened the emigration to Israel for its Jewish citizens. Nevertheless, emigration was a prolonged and challenging process, which often included lengthy periods of uncertainty and the need to assert the right to emigrate.  When it came to the open confrontation with the Soviet authorities, men were often at the forefront. They wrote petitions, visited responsible officials during the special reception hours, manifested, went on hunger strikes, telephoned correspondents and activists abroad, gave interviews, and, finally, wrote memoirs. In these memoirs, women habitually appear as accompaniers, though devoted and supportive, of the men’s struggle for emigration. 

Also, the Soviet media and propaganda materials tended to represent women not as active participants of the movement but as ignorant victims or unwitting accomplices of the “Zionist aggression.” 

 Despite fifty years of the Soviet women’s emancipation project, the traditional distribution of roles within the family became one of the effects of Jewish migration; arguably, this effect was more substantial outside the known emigration centers, such as Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga.  

 This paper aims to overcome a specific “double blindness” of the previous research on Soviet Jewish emigration. It intends to look closer into the women’s emigration experiences on the periphery of the Soviet Union as represented in both men’s and women’s