Lev of Leningrad

Hosting Organization(s)

The Weitzman and JNF

Sunday, April 16th
1:30pm ET Doors | 2:00 pm ET Performance
Live at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History
General Admission Ticket: $18 | Member Ticket: $13

Join us at The Weitzman on April 16th for this special theatrical reading of Noah Schoenberg’s Lev of Leningrad. Lev Furman first came to the attention of a few Philadelphians in 1974, after he refused to withdraw his application for an exit visa from the Soviet Union. Twenty-four years later, the Furman’s landed in Philadelphia. The play takes you on a journey between past and present sharing the challenges faced by the Furman family as Lev and his wife, Marina, assimilate into modern day American culture after growing up in the USSR. Their extraordinary family saga, then and now, will make you laugh, cry and laugh again.

About the Show
Lev Furman became a refusenik in 1974 after the Leningrad Office of the Emigration Department of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (LOEDRSFSR, for short) denied Lev’s application for an exit visa. For the next fourteen years Lev resisted the not very secret Russian police (KGB) and Soviet bureaucrats while building a not so underground Jewish studies movement and demanding the right to emigrate.

Lev and his wife Marina – also a refusenik, originally from Kyiv, in Ukraine – were finally expelled in 1988. They landed in Philadelphia 10 years later.

Lev of Leningrad is their story, an extraordinary family saga of contradictions that Lev embraced while obeying law and conscience, both divine and humane, in Leningrad as a refusenik and in Philadelphia as a father.

One constant: Lev has never stopped fighting for freedom; just a few months ago, he refused to withdraw from the sauna at closing time.

**This program is presented by the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Partnership with the Jewish National Fund.

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