Late activist who helped Soviet Jews honored

Fifty years ago, the seeds of the refusenik movement in the former Soviet Union and the centuries of anti-Semitism it sought to defy lit a spark in a Denver woman named Lillian Butler Hoffman.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Hoffman devoted much of her life to pressuring governments to open the floodgates that helped 1.5 million Jews emigrate from the country.

On Sunday in East Hampton, Hoffman's life was celebrated at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, where 200 people came to hear the grassroots leader's family, friends, benefactors and fans describe the passion and zeal she brought to a movement she helped create.

Hoffman, who died in 1996 at age 83, was the daughter of Russian immigrants and the wife of a wealthy liquor industry retailer.

"She could have done anything else with her life," said Glenn Richter, who as a Queens College student cofounded the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in 1964 and worked with Hoffman. "She wanted to change American society."

She lobbied tirelessly for the cause, recalled her daughter, Sheila Hoffman Bialek, a Sagaponack resident.

"I remember years of lobbying Congress with mom, meeting several presidents and countless senators and congressmen over a span of decades," Bialek said. "She was relentless."

Among her major accomplishments was to encourage passage in 1972 of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to a Soviet trade agreement, linking trade with the emigration of Jews for the first time. While the floodgates opened briefly, it would not be until the late 1980s before all barriers to emigration ended.

"She was not tired for many, many, many years," said Yasha Gorodetsky, a mathematician and former refusenik who was helped by Hoffman. "Not everyone wanted to take part. She spent her life in constant motion."

Gal Beckerman, a journalist and author of a soon-to-be published book, "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone," on Soviet Jewry, said Hoffman was among the first of a wave of U.S. activists for the cause and among the most fervent.

As Soviet Jews began to revive a Jewish underground in the 1960s, "Here in the U.S., there was an awareness of the terrible state Soviet Jewry had fallen into," he said.

Their fear that Soviet Jews might be wiped out combined with concerns that they and others had not done enough.

"American Jews felt very much like they hadn't done enough for European Jewry during World War II," Beckerman said. "This helped cleanse that stain."

Hoffman visited the Soviet Union eight times and traveled the world for the campaign.

"Mom's life proved that it takes only a few activists to make a difference," Bialek said. "Fighting extremism is the way to assure that Jews remain free, and can live in peace in Israel and around the world."