Refusenik authorities to significantly increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960 through 1970, only about 3,000 Soviet Jews had (legally) emigrated from the USSR; after the trial, in the period from 1971 to 1980 347,100 people received a visa to leave the USSR, 245,951 of them were Jews. Refuseniks included Jews who desired to emigrate on religious grounds, Jews seeking to immigrate to Israel for Zionist aspirations, and relatively secular Jews desiring to escape continuous state-sponsored antisemitism. A leading proponent and spokesman for the refusenik rights during the mid-1970s was Natan Sharansky. Sharansky's involvement with the Moscow Helsinki Group helped
Natan Ilyich Zabara and worked for the Russian newspaper "Tägliche Rundschau". He was arrested, along with many other Jews, during Stalin's last weeks of life, and spent four to five years in a Siberian gulag). When he was released, he moved to Kiev. Natan Ilyich Zabara Natan Ilyich Zabara (1908-1975) was a Jewish writer born in Rogachev, a shtetl located in the Zhytomyr area of Ukraine. He wrote in Yiddish and was a member of the Union of Ukrainian Writers (Soyuz Ukrainiski Pisatelei). In his youth, Zabara lived in Kharkiv and was an active member of the youth Zionist Movement. It was in