January 3 1975 – 20 Tevet 5735
President Gerald Ford signed the Trade Reform Act, which contained the Jackson-Vanik- Mills Amendment. The amendment, widely regarded as an achievement of the humanitarian campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry, required any nation that wanted “most favored nation status” to grant its citizens the right to immigrate to the country of their choice, in an attempt to exert pressure on the Soviet Union to allow Jews to leave the USSR. The amendment didn’t succeed in lifting the Iron Curtain, but a small trickle did begin, possibly as a result of the campaign. More than a decade later, that trickle turned to a flood and close to a million Russian Jews and their wider families left the USSR for the State of Israel – many going on to settle elsewhere, particularly in the United States.
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