Avital Sharansky Avital Sharansky Avital Sharansky (born Natalia Stieglitz (, ) in Ukraine, 1950; married name also Shcharansky) is a former activist and public figure in the Soviet Jewry Movement who fought for the release of her husband, Natan Sharansky, from Soviet imprisonment. Avital and Nathan Sharansky met in October 1973. Shortly after meeting, Nathan Sharansky's exit visa was denied, and he became an active refusenik. Avital applied for a visa to Israel, and the couple began to discuss marriage. They married in 1974, one day and a half before Avital's exit visa expired. The day after their wedding, Avital left for
Natan Sharansky High treason carried the death penalty. The following year, in 1978, he was sentenced to 13 years of forced labor. Sharansky spent time in the Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, followed by Vladimir and Chistopol prisons, where for part of the time he was placed in solitary confinement. His health deteriorated, to the point of endangering his life. Later he was detained in Perm 35, a post-Stalin-Gulag-type so-called "strict regimen colony" in Perm Oblast. He kept himself sane during solitary confinement by playing chess with himself, in his head. Sharansky appeared in a March 1990 edition of "National Geographic" magazine. The