In 1929, Stalin’s efforts to collectivize agriculture were in full swing, and the Soviet Union suffered some of the severest famines and grain shortages of its history. These economic conditions, combined with the Bolsheviks’ repression of religion, made it doubly difficult for Jews to obtain matzah for Passover. Having fled the USSR the previous year, and thus well aware of the circumstances there, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, rebbe of the Lubavitch Ḥasidim, enlisted a number of prominent rabbis and communal leaders in a plan to send matzah to Soviet Jews. Dovid Margolin tells of their efforts:

Last week, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an influential academic organization, announced that Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University would receive one of its annual awards, citing her “courage, persistence, political foresight, and concern for human rights . . . in her scholarship, teaching, [and] public advocacy” as well as her efforts to “advance the agenda for social change in Palestine, the United States, and internationally.” Those efforts, notes Jonathan Marks, include supporting the exclusion of the Jewish campus group Hillel from a university-wide event, and lambasting the school’s president for apologizing for that exclusion: