Jacob Birnbaum

Jacob (Yaakov) Birnbaum (10 December 1926 – 9 April 2014, aged 87) was the German-born founder of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and other human rights organizations. Because the SSSJ, at the time of its founding, in 1964, was the first initiative to address the plight of Soviet Jewry, he is regarded as the father of the Movement to Free Soviet Jewry. His father was Solomon Birnbaum and grandfather Nathan Birnbaum.

Yaakov Birnbaum was born in Hamburg, Germany. His grandfather was Nathan Birnbaum, writer and Jewish nationalist who was the first person to coin the word "Zionism." His father was Solomon Birnbaum, a Yiddish scholar. Shortly after Nazis came to power in 1933 his father was attacked in the street. During the same period, six-year-old Yaakov was surrounded by neighboring German boys who swarmed into the garden and stuffed his mouth full of dirt. The family managed to reach England but Hitler's voice screaming "the accursed Jews" still dominated their lives. In 1938 and 1939 Yaakov went to school with refugee children who were brought out from Central Europe at the last moment in a Kindertransport organized by Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld. He later studied modern European history at the University of London.

During World War II the Birnbaums were well aware of the plight of European Jews under Nazi occupation and agonized over their inability to help out, especially relatives.

As the war ended in 1945, Birnbaum moved to France where from 1946 to 1951 he helped survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps - Jews from Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. He later worked to help North African Jews fleeing the Algerian Civil War.

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