The impishly smiling man in the middle of the photo below is of course, Natan Sharansky, the 64-year-old chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Most of the Jewish and wider world born at least into the 1960s, know him very well. In the late ’70s and through the next decade, he became the avatar of the struggle for freedom by the Jews of the Soviet Union. In those days he was known as Anatoly. 

After he stepped onto the soil of Israel, finally after a cruel incarceration of some nine years, he became Natan. His life is well chronicled, including by his own hand in an autobiography called Fear No Evil and by the incomparable historian Sir Martin Gilbert in a book called Sharansky: Hero of Our Time. 

The very mention of the name Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky was synonymous with bravery, resolve, resilience and true audacity of spirit. His parting speech to his judges and imprisoners at the kangaroo Soviet Court before heading back to jail in 1978 on the contrived, phoney charges of espionage is a modern classic of soaring inspiration, to the point, unrepentant, elegantly defiant to the very last against the sadistic, brutal system of totalitarian KGB government.

The man in the photo to Sharansky’s left is Joel Sussman.