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Alla Levy, with her husband and two sons, was the first of the families from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to be resettled in the United States by Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry. She recalls the highs and lows of their life in the Soviet Union where she and her husband, both well-educated and economically stable, experienced increasing discrimination against Jews. She began to realize that for their sons, educational and economic opportunities would be limited. The family began to try to find ways to obtain visas to leave, and she talks about their experiences in the context of the ongoing political events in the world. She also discusses the experiences of family members and other Jews from Dushanbe during and after World War II, at home, at the front and in concentration camps. With help from BASJ her family arrived in the United States. She details the familiy's initial difficulties in finding a place for themselves here, their adjustments to new careers, new friends, interactions with government agencies, new cultural expectations, and finally, being able to participate openly in Judaism. She talks about how the BASJ helped in supporting their efforts through this difficult, but ultimately triumphant, process. In her words, "This is my home now, and I consider myself American".

Phoebe Norton, former Executive Director of the Mental Health Center of Boulder and Broomfield Counties, talks about her experiences leading up to her role as Executive Director. She discusses the gross maltreatment she saw in psychiatric hospitals during her first years working in the field of mental illness, and the development over the years of greater understanding and programming to serve persons with mental illness. She describes the progression of mental health services and new programming that developed during her tenure as Executive Direcotor, including programs that have helped people with mental illness who are in prisons and people dealing with substance abuse problems.

In this interview Judge Murray Richtel recalls leading a group of lawyers and judges on a trip to the USSR in 1986. He remembers the subtext of that trip being for him to contact Soviet Jews and learn first hand about the dimensions of the refusenik situation. He describes some of the people he met, both Jews and Soviet officials, and his own growing feeling that something had to be done to help the refuseniks and how this resulted in the founding, with several others, of Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry (BASJ). Parallel with this founding of BASJ was the community action specifically to help Naum Meiman, a distinguished mathematician and refusenik, to leave the Soviet Union. Judge Richtel also talks about the specific interactions of BASJ and the Boulder/Dushanbe Sister City Project.