Silva Zalmanson was born in 1944 in Riga to a traditional Jewish family; she graduated in 1968 from the Riga Polytechnic University and started working as an engineer-designer in Riga. She applied several times and unsuccessfully for an exit visa to leave the USSR for Israel. Silva was the only woman among the group of 16 people, which planned to hijack an aircraft to escape to Israel. She was arrested, and tried at the 1st Leningrad trial of June 15th, 1970, where she was sentenced to 10 years high-security imprisonment in the Gulag. At the trial she justified her actions with the words from Biblical Psalm 137:6 “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”
Silva spent 4 years in a Gulag camp and was then released in a spy exchange in 1974. Since then she has lived in Israel, working as an engineer and in her free time painting portraits and still life.
From the books : “Challenging the Kremlin: The Soviet Jewish Movement for Freedom 1967−1990” by Edward Brahman and “Anti-Jewish processes in the Soviet Union (1969−1971)”. The editor and author of the commentary—A. Rozhansky. Vol 2.The above photo was taken when Silva Zalmanson spoke at a mass demonstration in Paris in 1978.
