About the project
The Soviet Jewry Center was created to help the wave of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who settled in Jerusalem in the early 1990s.The center provided immigrants with a stage on which to perform, offered free cultural activities and helped them find work in the arts. The center, located on a prominent corner in Mekor Baruch, housed a cafeteria, a lending library, a graphics center and an auditorium. It offered concerts, a Yiddush society, a film club, lectures, children’s story hours, tours of Jerusalem and a popular nightclub event broadcast by Israel Radio’s Russian language service. At its peak, the center served 1,400 of the city’s 38,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union on any given day. The project was one in a group of projects undertaken to address issues faced by the thousands of new immigrants form the former Soviet Union who arrived in Jerusalem in the early 1990s.
