The table at Natan and Avital Sharansky’s home in Jerusalem’s Old Katamon neighborhood will have been finely set, with the food plentiful, the questions flowing and the responses following. This story is not about their Passover seder, though.
Rather, it deals with the annual dinner they hold — this year on the evening of February 19 — to mark a similar holiday of an exodus. It’s always on the second day of the Hebrew month of Adar, the date in 1986 when Natan, then known as Anatoly, was freed after nine years’ confinement in the Soviet Union’s prison system. He’d been convicted of treason and spying for the United States, crimes the regime fabricated to punish Sharansky for applying to emigrate to Israel and for advocating freedom for Soviet Jews. The idea was to deter others like him.
As is the couple’s custom, only the closest family members will be coming: their daughters, their sons-in-law and their eight grandchildren, ranging in age from three to sixteen.
Sharansky, in an interview at his Jerusalem office, called it a seudat shikhrur (liberation meal). His elder daughter Rachel, in a phone interview, termed it a seudat hodaya (meal of gratitude). While the dinners lack religious components, aside from Natan’s wearing a kippah on one of his two occasions each year, they are rooted in the Jewish tradition of giving thanks for surviving a calamity. It’s what some Holocaust survivors have done on the anniversary dates of their liberation. So have Israel Defense Forces soldiers back from battle and hostages freed from Hamas captivity.
The tradition dates to the tabernacle, when individuals offered God thanksgiving sacrifices after surviving life-threatening situations. Commentators explained that the offerings were shared with others. “Sharansky is certainly walking in the footsteps of that practice,” Yisrael Motzen, rabbi of Baltimore’s Ner Tamid Greenspring Valley Synagogue, said of the family’s custom.
Marking four decades of freedom “is another reminder that we’re already old,” Sharansky said with a smile.
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“What was I thinking when we finally saw each other? What did I say, and what did Avital whisper to me? Strange as it may seem, I do not know. I recall only that my head was dizzy and my knees grew weak, as it seemed that at any moment the two of us would leave the ground and start floating up in the air,” Sharansky wrote near the end of his 1988 memoir, Fear No Evil, of the moment he and his wife met for the first time in 12 years, just hours before flying from West Germany to Israel the day of his release on a bridge in Berlin.
Sharansky has been plenty active during his years living in Israel — at age 78, that’s more than half of his life. A research scientist in the Soviet Union, he served in the Knesset for eight years, after establishing a political party centered on integrating immigrants from the former U.S.S.R.; headed four government ministries; and ran nonprofit organizations, including such bedrocks as the Jewish Agency and the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. In retirement, he chairs three bodies: an institute at the Jewish Agency that he founded to train Israeli emissaries posted to Jewish communities abroad and two organizations that combat antisemitism.
His papers reside at the NLI, and more are on their way, he said in the interview.
Sharansky continues to travel and lecture widely. American Jews he meets in Israel or the United States sometimes stop him to ask for a picture and relate their experiences as volunteers in the free-Soviet-Jewry movement. He said he’ll often ask whether they’ve told their children about that period, which ran from the mid-1960s to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
They generally answer “no,” he said.
But neglecting to pass along that history — of the international mobilization to demand religious freedom and freedom of emigration for Jews of the Soviet Union — is a pity and “reminds me how important it is what we do in our family” at the annual dinner, he said.
“We believe it’s important so people can feel the strength of the Jewish people and get confidence,” Sharansky said.
He stepped over to a shelf and returned with a framed photograph of his family taken 10 years ago, when Natan and Avital brought their children and grandchildren to Moscow for a visit. She had left the Soviet Union the day after their marriage in 1974, and began lobbying relentlessly for her husband’s release.
“The children insisted: ‘We need to learn about our roots,’” Sharansky said of the trip. Behind them in the photograph looms the headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet secret-police agency. It’s a building officials warned Sharansky he’d never leave.
The family also visited the place where Natan and Avital first met, outside the city’s main synagogue. They saw where the couple and their compatriots demonstrated for freedom, the sites of strategy meetings and the building exit where Sharansky was arrested in 1977.
The ritual dinner evokes the seder, Sharansky said, with its themes of relating to the next generations a vital personal and national experience of liberation and spurring young attendees to take interest enough to ask questions to learn more.
“For us, it was as natural as to sit together and discuss the escape from Egypt,” said Rachel Sharansky Danziger of her and her sister Hanna’s experiencing their parents’ seudah. “It’s a powerful way of passing down the story.”
When her parents are no longer able to, she said, she’ll lead the seudah.
The message Sharansky said he hopes Israeli youth take from his experiences is “how strong we are together.”
“We could never have done it without the Jews of Israel, the United States,” he said of the public campaign to release him and others denied emigration, known as refuseniks and Prisoners of Zion.
Sharansky thinks that the tide is shifting on American campuses, that Jewish students intimidated by anti-Israel protestors are becoming confident about their support of Israel.
He sees a connection to his ordeal.
“Now, we are at the beginning of the turning of this process,” he said. “There are a few — it always starts with a few — who say, ‘We will not be afraid anymore. We are Zionists.’
“So, I am optimistic.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler may be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.
