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
Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem is endorsed by chief rabbi Yona Metzger, former USSR Prisoner of Zion and Knesset Member Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus (KCAC), Yuri Shtern, and the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Yigal Amedi and the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus. Other participants are Christian evangelists, authors and performers such as Joyce Meyer, The Newsboys , Bishop TD Jakes, Michael W. Smith, and Kenneth Copeland. The first globally publicized "link of prayer" for peace from Jerusalem was in June, 1993 organized by Dan Mazar's Jerusalem Christian Review, a Jerusalem-based archaeological journal. As opposed to the more exclusively Evangelical Christian event,