“In the Soviet Union, the important thing was to overcome the fear.” That is what former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky told me over tea in a Jerusalem cafe.
In the totalitarian, atheist Soviet Union, Jewish identity was forcibly submerged. “The only Jewish thing that was in my life,” Sharansky says, “was anti-Semitism!” That was until 1967. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, Sharansky says, changed the way the Soviets viewed Jews, and changed the way Soviet Jews viewed themselves. They were now, to friend and foe alike, part of something larger than themselves, connected to the Jewish state and to Jews the world over. With this knowledge, Soviet Jewish dissidents were no longer afraid and had the courage to confront the Evil Empire.
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