Other Collections

Ronya Schwaab was born in Gomel, Belarus, in 1909. She survived Polish pogroms and witnessed a massacre by the antisemitic tsarist gang the Black Hundred in 1920. Two years later, Ronya immigrated to New York with her mother and two sisters to join her father, whom she had not met before. In New York, she quickly learned English and became a public speaker, denouncing antisemitism and supporting President Roosevelt’s campaign. After a series of department store jobs during the Great Depression, she became an artists' model to support her dancing career. She appeared with Martha Graham and Anna Sokolow's dance companies. She married Eugene Schwaab and had three sons before divorcing him in the 1950s. After a trip to Israel, she grew very interested in helping Jewish communities, which led to her work on behalf of Soviet Jewry. She traveled to the USSR in the 1960s on fact-finding missions and to visit her family, whom the Soviet authorities only allowed her to see for three days. Throughout her trips, she was followed by the KGB. Nonetheless, she was able to gather much information about the actual living conditions of Jews there, and her testimony describes in-depth what she saw. She continued to remain active in Jewish community life later in life, working as a professional book reviewer and lecturer.