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Five of the Leningrad ‘hijackers’ on their way to Israel after their release Photo: Beit Hatefutsoth , JRep

OVER TWO DECADES HAVE passed since Anatoly Sharansky, after nine years in a Soviet Gulag penal colony, walked to freedom across Glienicke Bridge that connects Potsdam, in what was then Communist-controlled East Germany, to West Berlin, dressed in a borrowed coat several sizes too large and still defiant – zigzagging precisely because he had been ordered to walk straight.Exchanged on February 11, 1986 for a pair of Soviet spies, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, he was handed over to the American ambassador to West Germany. He was presented with an Israeli passport with his Hebrew name, Natan, and arrived in Israel to a hero’s welcome and reunion with his wife, Avital.Now 60, Sharansky has been a politician, cabinet minister, and an adviser to prime ministers (and for several years in the early 1990s a columnist for The Jerusalem Report). Today he is head of the Strategic Studies Institute at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center as well as president of Beth Hatefusoth, the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. His 2004 book, “A Case for Democracy,” in which he argued that security and peace could only be achieved between democracies, was praised by U.S. President George Bush, who said Sharansky’s thinking confirmed his beliefs and was “part of my presidential DNA.”But perhaps above all, the Sharanskys have remained the iconic Avital and Anatoly of the struggle for the rights of Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 80s. A one-time member and spokesman of the Helsinki Human Rights Monitoring Group in Moscow, Sharansky made repression of Jewish activists in the Soviet Union widely known to the West. He and Avital were active in the emerging Soviet Jewish consciousness movement, and had applied in 1973 for exit visas to come to Israel. Avital’s application was granted, and they married in 1974, one day before the visa expired and she left for Israel. Anatoly was denied a visa for trumped up “security reasons,” and thus became a “refusenik” – a term coined by British Soviet Jewry activist Michael Sherbourne referring to a Soviet Jew who was denied an emigration visa.Working with dissident leader Andre Sakharov and the refusenik movement in Moscow, Sharansky was a thorn in the side of the authorities. In March 1977 he was arrested and in July 1978 convicted on charges of treason and spying for the United States and sentenced to 13 years of forced labor. But inside prison, even more than outside, he focused world attention on human rights violations.It was Avital who deserved much of the credit for marshaling kings, presidents, housewives and students to pressure the Soviet Union to free her husband, the diminutive computer scientist who emerged triumphant from his ordeal with his sense of humor still intact. “Sorry I am late,” are said to have been his first words to Avital when the pair were reunited in Israel.In January, 2008, standing beneath his daughter’s wedding canopy in Jerusalem, Sharansky remembered his own wedding to Avital, in a one-room Moscow apartment in July 1974. Being in Jerusalem was “just a dream then,” he recalled, telling the guests that when Rachel was born, a year after he and Avital were reunited, his late mother, Ida Milgrom “wanted to send her photograph to the world but first to our enemies,” his Soviet captors.Many of the guests, including veteran and newer Russian immigrants, Israelis, and visitors from abroad, reflected on just how intertwined are the personal and collective memories of Soviet Jewry and those who supported their struggle. Sharansky’s release was “a defining moment for many,” which changed world Jewry, summed up Rabbi Shlomo (Steven) Riskin, a co-founder in the early 1960s of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (popularly known by its initials, SSSJ) in New York and, today, chief rabbi of the settlement of Efrat in the Eztion settlement bloc in the West Bank.MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE those days of struggle. Today, nearly one million Russian-speaking immigrants live in Israel (although a third of them are not Jewish according to Orthodox Jewish law). Daily flights connect Tel Aviv to cities in the former Soviet Union. The Perm 36 Labor Camp in Siberia where Sharansky was imprisoned is now a museum and the “Soviet Jewish national movement,” as the struggle is referred to by scholars, is studied in universities and is the subject of scholarly books.But now that the struggle has been won, former activists, historians and educators are concerned that one of the most important and dramatic episodes in Jewish history is being overshadowed. A newly established Public Committee for the 40th Anniversary of the Soviet Jewish Struggle for Aliya, a group of Soviet immigrants chaired by Sharansky, wants to ensure that the valor of a generation of Soviet Jews and their Western activist supporters will not be forgotten. In recent months, the group has sponsored several events, including an exhibit entitled, “Jews of Struggle: the Jewish National Movement in the U.S.S.R. 1967-1989″ at Beth Hatefutsoth and a three-day international conference (”Awakening and Struggle”) at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. It also sponsored the world premier of “Refuseniks,” the two-hour documentary by 34-year-old independent Los Angeles filmmaker Laura Bialis, screened at the Ninth Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival last October.Veteran refusenik, Aba Taratuta, 73, a mathematician and leading Leningrad activist denied (with wife Ida) an exit visa for 15 years, came up with the idea for the exhibit. By 2000, Taratuta, who immigrated in January 1988, and now lives in Haifa, had become troubled that the era had passed with little recognition. With a shoestring budget, he founded the Remember and Save Association, dedicated to preserving cultural material from the movement, such as photos, archival films, Free Soviet Jewry paraphernalia from the protest movement in the West and refusenik art. Storing artifacts in his home and garage, Taratuta approached Beth Hatefutsoth curator Rachel Schnold two years ago, proposing an exhibit. Schnold quickly agreed. Taratuta says he was happy to have Sharansky’s high-profile group take charge of the exhibit as part of a wider celebration.

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