But dutch508, sir, you're mentioning a different era.
The immediate post-World War II refugees were a different sort of people than many of the 1970s "refugees."
Ukraine had a very large population of Jews, next only to Poland, in numbers.
Jews in Ukraine, or generally the Russian empire prior to 1917 did not enjoy the best of life, but they tended to stick with Judaism.
But the repression by the socialists, beginning circa 1920, encouraged many of them to deny their forefathers.
Of course, this did not save them when the Germans came in 1941, who ferreted them out and killed them alongside their avowed and practicing Jewish brothers.
The horrors of the second world war eminently justified anyone getting to America (or elsewhere), whether of Jewish derivation or not.
And then Stalin after 1945 turned on the Jews--and again, the secularized, or those who cast off their Judaism, were murdered alongside their avowed and practicing Jewish brothers.
During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, exit visas from the Soviet Union became somewhat available to those wishing to emigrate to Israel. This was when Soviets who wouldn't know a Torah if it smacked them in the face, suddenly re-discovered their "Judaism." Many of these were not the downtrodden of socialism; they tended to be "middle class," in the sense that one could describe a "middle class" in the Soviet Union (a definition that has no parallel with our "middle class").
There were hundreds of thousands of honest authentic Jews who had endured persecution, as Jews, for more than 50 years, eligible for these exit visas, but because such visas were limited, many were shoved out by these "new" Jews.
Under such exit-visa program, one was to fly from the Soviet Union to Vienna, Austria, and thence to Tel Aviv, Israel. "New" Jews tended to fly from the Soviet Union to Vienna.....where they immediately exchanged their airline tickets for New York City instead.
Sometimes there were complications--as in the case of the Zbigniew primitive--and one had to go to Israel first anyway, but once in Israel, a free and open and democratic society, such complications were lesser, and one then flew from Tel Aviv to New York City. (It's obvious that the Zbigniew primitive--who might be of Polish, not Soviet, origin, but it's the same thing--spent perhaps a couple of years in Israel before coming here.)
It's good to be highly skeptical of a former Soviet "Jew" who came to the United States as a "refugee" during the 1970s; not of all of them, but of many of them. Honest authentic Jews did as required, going to Israel and staying in Israel.
What the Zbigniew primitive seems to have wiped from his memory is that once the Incompetent One (1977-1981) took office, the Soviets clamped down on the Jewish exit-visa program, letting hardly anyone leave. The Zbigniew primitive owes his existence in the United States to those who are probably villains to him, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
