Jacob (Yaakov) Birnbaum, born in Hamburg, Germany, was the grandson of Nathan Birnbaum, the Jewish writer and nationalist who coined the term 'Zionism,' and son of Solomon Asher Birnbaum, a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew paleography. His family fled Nazi Germany in 1933, and he was raised in England, attending a school for refugee children in 1938-1939 organized by Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld via Kindertransport. He studied modern European history at the University of London. After World War II, from 1945 he moved to France and between 1946 and 1951 assisted survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps from Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, later helping North African Jews fleeing the Algerian Civil War. He arrived in New York from Manchester, England, in 1963. Inspired by the civil rights movement and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Birnbaum founded the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) on April 27, 1964, at Columbia University, with the first rally on May 1, 1964, drawing about 1,000 students in front of the Soviet UN Mission. In 1965, he co-founded the Center for Soviet Jewry with Irving Greenberg and Mel Stein. His efforts sparked the broader Movement to Free Soviet Jewry, contributing to policy changes that allowed over 1.5 million Jews to emigrate from the USSR. 'Jacob was the first to start the struggle... which made modern Exodus real.' – Natan Sharansky. Birnbaum led an ascetic life in Washington Heights, New York City, for over 50 years, even washing his clothes in the bathtub to save funds for activism. He was married to Freda Beatrice Bluestone, who survived him, and donated SSSJ papers to Yeshiva University in 1993. In 2007, U.S. House passed Resolution HR137 honoring his service, and on October 18, 2015, a portion of Cabrini Boulevard in Washington Heights was renamed for him.