This group, however, barely functioned without an allocated budget or permanent staff till the Leningrad trial of December 1970 finally shocked the Jewish leadership into the establishment in September 1971 of two officially funded groups — the National Coalition Supporting Soviet Jewry and the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry. The latter was built on the New York infrastructure constructed by Birnbaum in the 1960s on the basis of a number of local and metropolitan groups instituted by him, a Bronx Council, an invigorated Queens Council, a Brooklyn Coalition, and a New York Youth Conference, a New York Coordinating Committee, followed by a New York Conference, now assisted by a staffer at the American Jewish Committee, more committed to the cause than most establishment organizations.