Community Formation among Jews from the Former Soviet Union in the United States

In the mid-1970s Jews from the Soviet Union began settling in the United States. Twenty years later, the community numbers close to 325,000. ¹ When we consider the amount of effort and money expended on getting Jews out of the former USSR, it is rather surprising to observe how few resources have been devoted to assessing this group’s experience of adjustment to the United States — especially in the realm of communal adaptation. One reason, perhaps, that relatively little discussion has been devoted to the subject is the unique and unanticipated pattern of adaptation of Soviet Jews, which is a source of embarrassment to the two groups of experts, Jewish communal personnel and scholars of immigration, who failed to predict it.