In the autumn of 1972, in a small office on Chicago’s North Side, a forty-eight-year-old Catholic nun from the School Sisters of Notre Dame named Sister Margaret Ellen Traxler sat down at her typewriter and began founding an organization for which there was no clear precedent in the recorded history of the American Catholic Church.She called it the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry. Its purpose, as Sister Margaret described in the press releases she wrote, was to unite American Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in a coordinated lobbying campaign on behalf of the roughly two million Jews in the Soviet Union. Under Leonid Brezhnev’s government, they were denied the right to emigrate.
The choice of a Catholic nun from rural Minnesota—with no Jewish ancestry, no prior connection to the Soviet Union, and no obvious institutional mandate—to lead this effort was, by her own later account, the result of a decision she made in Selma, Alabama, on the morning of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.Standing by the roadside with other Catholic clergy, she watched the marchers pass and reflected on what it truly meant for a religious woman to bear witness—to use her habit, her vows, and her public presence to offer visible support to people whose very right to exist had been criminalized by the state. She concluded that such witness was only meaningful if it extended, without exception, to every group whose fundamental rights were denied.She returned to her order, requested release from her teaching duties, and received it.
Over the following years, she launched a series of pioneering organizational efforts that defined the rest of her life’s work.The National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry became the most ambitious of them all. It required Sister Margaret—a nun in a religious order whose constitution had never envisioned interreligious advocacy—to secure the cooperation of major American Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the Synagogue Council of America, without ever being seen as attempting to convert their members. She also had to navigate the concerns of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference, some of whom were uneasy with a religious sister in such a visible leadership role, and to engage Protestant denominations that were beginning to develop the theological foundations for Jewish-Christian dialogue.She succeeded on every front.In the years that followed, the Task Force organized rallies in more than forty American cities in support of the Soviet refusenik movement. It coordinated with the international campaign for
Soviet Jewish emigration and worked with members of Congress from both parties. Their efforts helped lead to the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974, which linked U.S. trade relations with the Soviet Union to its emigration policies. By the time the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration were lifted, Sister Margaret’s Task Force had, by its own accounting, helped more than 260,000 Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel, the United States, and other countries.In recognition of her work, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir personally awarded her the State of Israel Medal and sent a handwritten note of thanks. Sister Margaret kept both in a small wooden box in her room at St. Patrick’s parish convent on Chicago’s Far Southeast Side for the next twenty-eight years.
She never spoke publicly about either. Throughout that same period, she continued running the homeless shelter she had founded for women on Chicago’s South Side, visiting women in Illinois state prisons, and fighting internal battles within her own Catholic Church over women’s roles—battles that, in 1984, brought the Vatican to the doorstep of her religious order.She was not removed. She continued her work. She died on February 12, 2002, at the motherhouse of her order in Mankato, Minnesota, at the age of seventy-seven.
