Women of the Wall The site was inaugurated in 2004. Until recently, it was illegal for them to do so under Israeli law. In December 2012, following pressure from non-Orthodox US Jews, Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, was asked by the Prime Minister to find a solution to the dispute. In response to the detentions at the wall in February 2013, Sharansky said "When I listen to the very partial presentation, I am fully with them — when I listen to the other side, I have to accept that they also have logic. We do have to find a
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