Nadene Goldfoot
I made aliyah in September 1980 and lived in Haifa in an ulpan for the required 10 months required for teachers from other countries to become teachers in Israel. We attended a school program there learning conversational Hebrew and passing a 3 hour test in it, and also taking history classes about Israel, teaching Hebrew speakers, and visiting schools and how they fared teaching English as a foreign language which was an important requirement to master by high school.
My Hebrew teacher was Sarah, who spoke English very well. In fact, quite often she's stop and discuss things with us. At the time, my husband and I were just a few Americans in a class well over 40 with the majority being Russian teachers who spoke a modicum of English and had been English teachers in Russia. A few were from Canada and England. Any Americans were from the East Coast, and we were the only ones from the West.
Sarah had a pen-pal in Russia who was in prison, a Jew put there who was caught studying Hebrew. Sarah continued writing to him and somehow managed to teach Hebrew that way. His name was Natan Sharansky.
Natan Sharansky (Hebrew: נתן שרנסקי; Russian: Ната́н Щара́нский; Ukrainian: Натан Щаранський), born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky, is an Israeli politician, human rights activist, and author who, as a refusenik in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, spent nine years in Soviet prisons. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018. Sharansky currently serves as chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization. He took the name, Natan, after arriving in Israel.
I had forgotten much about Natan until one day, a lawyer friend of mine said to me, "Oh, I hate that Natan Sharansky!" Why, I asked? What do you know about him? Why should you hate him so much? He never could give me an answer, but I wondered about the sanity of some of my Americans. This lawyer knew absolutely nothing about Israel or Jews, but he hated Netanyahu and Sharansky, that I learned.
Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on 20 January 1948 in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union.
His father, Boris Sharansky, a journalist from a Zionist background who worked for an industrial journal, died in 1980, before Natan was freed.
His mother, Ida Milgrom, visited him in prison and stubbornly waged a nine-year battle for her son's release from Soviet prison and labor camps. She was permitted to follow her son to Israel six months after he left the Soviet Union.
He had been a special child. As a child, he was a chess prodigy. He performed in simultaneous and blindfold exhibitions, usually against adults. At the age of 15, he won the championship in his native Donetsk. Sharansky graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. When incarcerated in solitary confinement, he claims to have maintained his sanity by playing chess against himself in his mind. Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996.
Natan Sharansky and Avital Sharansky have two daughters, Rachel and Hannah. In the Soviet Union, his application to marry Avital was denied by the authorities. They were married in a friend's apartment, in a ceremony not recognized by the government, as the USSR only recognized civil marriage and not religious marriage.
This means that all Jewish marriages were denied in Russia
during this period.
Sharansky was denied an exit visa to Israel in 1973. The reason given for denial of the visa was that he had been given access, at some point in his career, to information vital to Soviet national security and could not now be allowed to leave. After becoming a refusenik, Sharansky became a human rights activist, working as a translator for dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, and spokesman for the Moscow Helsinki Group and a leader for the rights of refuseniks.
On 15 March 1977 Sharansky was arrested by the KGB, then headed by Yuri Andropov, on multiple charges, including high treason and spying for several Americans. The accusation stated that he passed to the West lists of over 1,300 refuseniks, many of whom were denied exit visas because of their knowledge of state secrets, which resulted in a publication by Robert C. Toth, "Russ Indirectly Reveal 'State Secrets': Clues in Denials of Jewish Visas". High treason carried the death penalty. The following year, in 1978, he was sentenced to 13 years of forced labor.That means he had this grueling punishment to bear until 1981.
Alan Dershowitz became one of Sharansky's lawyers when he was imprisoned by the Soviets. It was after his release that he made aliyah and eventually started his own political party, which won several seats in the 1996 election. He wound up in Israel's cabinet by 1996. I heard him speak at a synagogue in Portland, Oregon before 2009.
My husband was 42 when we entered Israel. He had been in
the air force in the states but had developed a serious
physical condition, sarcoid. We both went through 3 days of
training in shooting a gun he used in the air force, he said.
We also did something like Civil guard going out on patrol with
others in a van. I took my female German shepherd
with me, as husband and wife did this separately.
Sharansky was appointed Minister of Jerusalem Affairs.
From March 2003 – May 2005, he was Israel's Minister without Portfolio, responsible for Jerusalem's social and Jewish diaspora affairs.
Under this position, Sharansky chaired a secret committee that approved the confiscation of East Jerusalem property of West Bank Palestinians. This decision was reversed after an outcry from the Israeli left and the international community. We're not a shy people. When Israelis see a wrong, they speak out quickly. Sharansky was learning.
One must remember that his Russian background denied him any Jewish education, all religious services, all his Jewish culture that his parents had had. Even learning Hebrew with Sarah must have been extremely difficult under the condition he was under. Luckily he was bright.
Previously he served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, Minister of Housing and Construction since March 2001, Interior Minister of Israel (July 1999 – resigned in July 2000), Minister of Industry and Trade (1996–1999).
He resigned from the cabinet in April 2005 to protest plans to withdraw Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank.
He was re-elected to the Knesset in March 2006 as a member of the Likud Party. On 20 November 2006, he resigned from the Knesset.
In June 2009, Sharansky was elected to the Chair of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel by the Jewish Agency Board of Governors. In September 2009 Sharansky secured $6 million from the Genesis Philanthropy Group for educational activities in the former Soviet Union.
He is a founding member of One Jerusalem.
I decided that he was hated by my lawyer friend because he was connected to Likud and Netanyahu, and Netanyahu has been my idol; a man who is the best speaker I've ever heard, and isn't even American with a vocabulary that beats most of us, and the ability to debate intelligently. When we lived in Israel, Begin, Shamir and Peres were the Prime Ministers.
Years after his release, Sharansky stressed the need he maintained throughout his imprisonment to remain emotionally independent. He attributed his survival of the lengthy incarceration and the brutal conditions to his resistance to any sort of emotional surrender. Hence Sharansky's expression of the paradox that while an ordinary Russian, he was in fact a slave to the system; but that once he discovered his Jewish roots and was restricted for his allegiance to them, he was in reality a free man. Sharansky's memoirs of his years as a prisoner of Zion are described in his book . By Becoming a Jew which he was born into, he was no longer a slave to the system of the USSR.
Resource:
The Vanishing American Jew, by Alan M. Dershowitz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natan_Sharansky
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://blog.nli.org.il/en/sharansky-seder/
