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 becoming a refusenik, Sharansky became a human rights activist, working as a translator for dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, and spokesman for the Moscow Helsinki Group and a leader for the rights of refuseniks. On 15 March 1977 Sharansky was arrested on multiple charges including high treason and spying for Americans. The accusation stipulated that he passed to the West lists of over 1,300 "refuseniks", many of whom were denied exit visas because of their knowledge of state secrets, which resulted in a publication by Robert C. Toth, "Russ Indirectly Reveal 'State Secrets': Clues in Denials of Jewish Visas".