Natan Sharansky His wife had become religiously observant during his detention, but he did not follow her on this path. Due to his age and poor health, he was exempted from the standard mandatory three years' military service, but had to undergo three weeks of military training and do a stint in the Civil Guard. In 1988, he wrote "Fear No Evil", his memoirs of his time as a prisoner, and founded the Zionist Forum, an organization of Soviet immigrant Jewish activists dedicated to helping new Israelis and educating the public about integration issues, known in Israel as "klita" (lit. "absorption"). Sharansky
Natan Sharansky Natan Sharansky Natan Sharansky (, , ; born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky (, ) on 20 January 1948) is an Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who, as a refusenik in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, spent nine years in Soviet prisons. He has served as Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency since June 2009, to be replaced in August 2018 by Isaac Herzog. Sharansky was born in Donetsk (then called Stalino), Soviet Union on 20 January 1948 to a Jewish family. He graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics