DANIEL GORDIS
May 2, 2014
Yuli Kosharovsky died on the first day of Passover, the “season of our freedom.”
The man who had been the refusenik trapped behind the Iron Curtain for longer than anyone else, one of the most inspirational pillars of the former refusenik movement, died at the age of 72 when he fell from a tree he was trimming near his home in Beit Aryeh.
I first learned of Yuli Kosharovsky in 1982, when my wife and I were preparing to head to Russia to meet withrefuseniks. Kosharovsky was on the list of those we were to meet. His apartment, we were told, was a hotbed of “illegal” activity. Hebrew classes were conducted there, contacts were made, spirits were lifted. And his apartment was a veritable distribution center; we were told to leave the educational and religious materials we brought into the USSR with him, and he would get them wherever they needed to go.
Kosharovksy was arrested periodically, beaten occasionally. But he was also unstoppable; his life was the model of what happens when someone actually believes in something. He withstood the relentless pressure of the Soviets for a full 18 years, and when he was finally allowed to leave in 1989, immediately made Israel his home.
ArchitectGuy on Israel 