My two friends from USSR and Russia

At a previous job, I worked with two Russian women. I’m changing their names. One will be Sylvia and the other Macey. Both were old enough to live under Soviet rule. Both came to the USA as adults.

Sylvia and her husband had been engineers in the USSR. However, they were unable to keep employment because they were refuseniks, Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate to the US for freedom to practice their religion but were repeatedly denied. They lived with lots of antisemitism; the kind pogroms came from.