{"id":375903,"date":"2026-03-09T13:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T13:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/375903\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T13:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T13:32:11","slug":"explainer-who-were-the-35s-the-irish-housewives-and-mothers-who-took-on-the-might-of-the-soviet-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/375903\/","title":{"rendered":"Explainer: Who were the 35s, the Irish housewives and mothers who took on the might of the Soviet Union?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-91174671_secondary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom4 indo-1d70522a_marginleft0 indo-1d70522a_marginright0 indo-1d70522a_margintop4\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\" data-testid=\"title-summary\">At the height of the Cold War, a group of young women took extraordinary risks to help their fellow Jews\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Joyce Shaper and Estelle Menton, two of the Irish 35s\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2cc8f468-5d09-4c8a-90dc-0b5d9d831d94.jpg\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"100%\" data-testid=\"article-image\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_caption1 indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_secondary indo-66f0fec7_regular indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_marginleft0 indo-1d70522a_marginright0 indo-1d70522a_margintop3 indo-b48c4984_left\" style=\"color:var(--color-grey-60)\">Joyce Shaper and Estelle Menton, two of the Irish 35s<\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_primary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_margintop0 indo-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">In the summer of 1985, in a Moscow hotel room, Estelle Menton and Joyce Shaper urgently scribbled notes to one another in silence.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_primary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_margintop0 indo-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">They had been warned that the room would be bugged and they needed to make plans to slip the KGB minders who seemed to shadow their every move. Having agreed a plan, they tore up the notes and flushed them down the toilet before heading out into the Moscow night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the height of the Cold War, a group of young women took extraordinary risks to help their&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[9,10,52,18,13,14,6,19,17,71,11,12,15,16,6450,5,1181,550,7,8,551],"class_list":{"0":"post-375903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-dublin","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-latest-news","19":"tag-latestnews","20":"tag-main-news","21":"tag-mainnews","22":"tag-nato","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-rte","25":"tag-russia","26":"tag-top-stories","27":"tag-topstories","28":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116199472944772528","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}