36 Facts About Natan Sharansky

Natan Sharansky is a Soviet dissident and later Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s.

Natan Sharansky served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018.

Natan Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on 20 January 1948 in the city of Stalino in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union.

Natan Sharansky was permitted to follow her son to Israel six months after he left the Soviet Union.

Natan Sharansky attended physics and mathematics high school No 17 in Donetsk.

Natan Sharansky performed in simultaneous and blindfold exhibitions, usually against adults.

Natan Sharansky graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Natan Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996.

Natan Sharansky lived near Sokolniki Park, on Kolodezniy Pereulok in Moscow.

Natan Sharansky took his current Hebrew name in 1986 when he was freed from Soviet incarceration as part of a prisoner exchange and received an Israeli passport with his new name.

Natan Sharansky is married to Avital Sharansky and has two daughters, Rachel and Hannah.

Natan Sharansky was denied an exit visa to Israel in 1973.

On 15 March 1977 Natan Sharansky was arrested by the KGB, then headed by Yuri Andropov, on multiple charges, including high treason and spying for several Americans.

Natan Sharansky spent time in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison, followed by Vladimir and Chistopol prisons, where for part of the time he was placed in solitary confinement.

Natan Sharansky's health deteriorated, to the point of endangering his life.

Natan Sharansky appeared in a March 1990 edition of National Geographic magazine.

Natan Sharansky remarked in the article that after viewing images of the prisoner's faces, he could discern that the protocol of oppression was still at work.

Natan Sharansky commented with irony that conditions had improved slightly: the stark cell now featured a thin bench bolted to the middle of the floor.

Natan Sharansky said that if that bench had existed when he was there, he could have slept on it, albeit uncomfortably.

Natan Sharansky was the first political prisoner released by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The men were released in two stages, with Sharansky freed first then whisked away, accompanied by the United States Ambassador to West Germany, Richard R Burt.

Natan Sharansky served as a contributing editor to The Jerusalem Report and as a board member of Peace Watch.

Natan Sharansky resigned from the Knesset and was replaced by Edelstein.

The merger went through on 10 March 2003, and Natan Sharansky was appointed Minister of Jerusalem Affairs.

Under this position, Natan Sharansky chaired a secret committee that approved the confiscation of East Jerusalem property of West Bank Palestinians.

Natan Sharansky resigned from the cabinet in April 2005 to protest plans to withdraw Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank.

Natan Sharansky was re-elected to the Knesset in March 2006 as a member of the Likud Party.

In 2019 Natan Sharansky became the Chairman for the Institute for the study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

Since 2007, Natan Sharansky has been chairman of the board of Beit Hatefutsot, the Jewish diaspora museum.

In June 2009, Natan Sharansky was elected to the chair of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel by the Jewish Agency Board of Governors.

In 1997, Natan Sharansky was the focus of a 2.5-hour-long episode of Chaim SheKa'ele, the Israeli version of This Is Your Life.

In 2005, Natan Sharansky participated in They Chose Freedom, a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement, and in 2008 he was featured in Laura Bialis' documentary Refusenik.

Natan Sharansky was number eleven on the list of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2005 in the "Scientists and thinkers" category.

Natan Sharansky won the 2018 Israel Prize for his lifetime achievements and special contributions to the State of Israel in the fields of Immigration and Absorption.

Natan Sharansky's book Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, is a defense of the value of national and religious identity in building democracy.

Natan Sharansky called the Russian invasion of Ukraine the greatest threat to the free world since World War II and said that Israel must stand firmly with the Ukrainian people.