Born in 1947 in Odessa. As a result of rampant anti-Semitism, he began from his youth to study the Jewish problem, and later as a grown-up man became a Zionist activist. In 1975 he started conducting seminars on a wide Jewish topics, history of the State of Israel and history of Zionism. He wrote letters and held hunger strikes of protest against the infringement of the human rights to the Jews in the Soviet Union, regularly listened to the broadcasts of “Voice of Israel” and shared the news and reports with other people. In 1981 he was arrested, charged with the anti-Soviet Zionist propaganda and sentenced to 3 years of imprisonment in the Gulag. He served his sentence in prisons and camps of Kishinev, Odessa, Kharkiv, Kazan, Sverdlovsk, Kizil and others. He was released in 1984 and immediately requested permission to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, but his request was granted only in 1987, and he finally went to Israel.
