Born in 1918 in Russia, he was a Zionist his whole life. In 1951 he has a meeting with one of the workers of the Israeli Embassy in Moscow, and from that time he has been under surveillance of KGB. He was arrested in 1953 in Leningrad and sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, which he served on the construction of Kuibyshev hydro-electrical station on Volga river. In 1956 he was pardoned, but only in 1976 was able to leave USSR for Israel.