This Jewish Women’s Archive podcast transcript features Rachel Sharansky Danziger reflecting on how her parents, Natan and Avital Sharansky, transmitted their Soviet Jewry liberation story and how that shaped her understanding of Passover, freedom, and storytelling. The episode frames the Sharanskys’ experience as a modern Exodus: Natan was arrested in 1977 for activism, spent nine years in Soviet prison, and was reunited with Avital in Israel after a global campaign. Rachel recalls an annual family celebration of her father’s liberation, structured like a seder, where she and her sister asked questions about their parents’ meeting under KGB surveillance, separation after marriage, prison, solitary confinement, and Avital’s activism. A central story is Natan’s refusal to be humiliated during a KGB strip search, teaching Rachel that freedom begins with the refusal to let others define one’s dignity. Rachel compares her parents’ fragmented, question-driven storytelling to the Passover Haggadah, which does not simply narrate Exodus but invites each generation to enter the story in the first person. She concludes that inherited stories transform people only when listeners can ask authentic questions, claim the story on their own terms, and focus not on victimhood but on moral victories, gratitude, solidarity, and rising up.
Be the first to know about new collections, events and educational resources.
