Born in 1952 in Kharkov, the Ukraine, he became a Zionist in response to anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union . In 1974 he applied for an exit visa but was refused and expelled from the Polytechnic Institute. He refused to be drafted into the Soviet Army, fought for emigration to Israel, participated in many demonstrations of protest and was involved in propaganda and agitation for the state of Israel. He was arrested in 1975 and sentenced to 2 years in the Gulag. Served his sentence in Moscow, Krasnodar, Sverdlovsk prisons, in a Sverdlovsk general labor camp, in a worker’s settlement Vysokogorny of the Khabarovsk region and in a chemical factory in a settlement Bielorechensk of the Krasnodar region. He was released in 1977, and in 1979 his dream of repatriation to Israel came true.
