Rav Tov began with a border that had opened only partway. Jews leaving the Soviet Union could reach the West, but many still needed a visa, a transit country, housing during months of waiting, medical care, schooling, language instruction, employment, and a government willing to receive them. Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum commissioned an organization that would carry the refugee through that entire distance.
Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman became Rav Tov's founding executive. Its offices and partners in Vienna, Rome, and other cities arranged travel and immigration papers, sustained families in transit, and helped them settle in the country they chose. By the early 1980s, federal refugee records described a wide network serving Jews from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
After the Iranian Revolution and during the Iran–Iraq War, Rav Tov helped Iranian Jews obtain Austrian visas, reach Vienna, seek asylum, join relatives, and place children in appropriate schools. The organization did not make Satmar affiliation the price of rescue. Its work expressed a wider obligation: when a Jewish family needed a road to safety, that road belonged to Klal Yisroel.