He was born in 1934 in Kiev in a family, which followed Jewish traditions. His father, who fell at the WWII in 1942, knew Hebrew, all his family members spoke and read Yiddish and celebrated Jewish holidays, his grandmother followed rules of kashrut up to the end of her life. All of Kim’s childhood friends were from families which tend to adhere to Jewish tradition, and thus a Jewish environment, as well as all the manifestations of growing public and state anti-Semitism gradually formed his Jewish identity. Therefore, the insight came to him in 1967, easily and naturally. In 1969 he resigned from his classified work, in 1972 applied for the exit visa to leave for Israel and was refused immediately. After that Kim and his family took an active part in the struggle for free emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel. Kim began to communicate with other refuseniks in Kiev and other cities, including Moscow and Leningrad. A particularly close relationship he had with former prisoners of Zion Vladimir Kislik and Leo Elbert. Kim held in his apartment a seminar on Jewish history and an ulpan to study Hebrew. During the period from 1973 to 1979 many relatives of Kim left for Israel; in 1976 he sent to Israel his wife and daughter, who by that time graduated from the high-school (in Israel over time, she got married and gave birth to Kim’s two granddaughters). After the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan the flow of emigration from the USSR to Israel practically stopped, and Kim wrote an open letter to the U.S. Senate, in which he did not choose diplomatic expressions. He was arrested in March 1981, almost simultaneously with Kislik. Kim was charged in “tuneyadstvo” (a parasitic way of living), but during the investigation he was threatened by changing the charge in the more serious crime “anti-Soviet propaganda”. In May on the trial Kim gave the disqualification to all the judges, and when the disqualification was not satisfied, he refused to participate in the process. He was sentenced to one year in the Gulag, which he served in the camp ITK−301/59 in the Vinnitsa region. He was released in March 1982, but was allowed to leave only in 1988, when they started to let the refuseniks go (his mother died 3 months before obtaining the permission to go). In August 1988 Kim arrived to Israel. He lives currently in Kiryat Yam.
Information provided by Kim Friedman.
