NGO Monitor on eliminating human rights monitoring of Israel entirely and smearing anyone who supports this vital activity". The 2013 Menachem Begin Prize was awarded to NGO Monitor, "a leading organization defending the State of Israel and the Jewish people." The Begin Prize is awarded for “extraordinary act(s) for the benefit of the State of Israel and/or the Jewish People.” Natan Sharansky said, “NGO Monitor is the leading organization defending the State of Israel and the Jewish people.” Leonard Fein, writing for "The Forward" in 2005, said that NGO Monitor is "an organization that believes that the best way to defend Israel
Yelena Bonner Although Bonner had joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1964 while she was working as a physician, only a few years later she was becoming active in the Soviet human rights movement. Her resolve towards dissidence was strengthened in August 1968 after Soviet bloc tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in order to crush the Prague Spring movement. That event strengthened her belief that the system could not be reformed from within. At the Kaluga trial in 1970, Bonner and Sakharov met Natan Sharansky and began working together to defend Jews sentenced to death for attempting an escape from the USSR in