April 17, 2014    WASHINGTON, D.C.

Yuli Kosharovsky
 

Dear Friends,

We are sad to report that major Soviet Jewry activist and former refusenik Yuli Kosharovsky passed away on Tuesday, after a fall at his home in Jerusalem.

Yuli was a driving force in leading and keeping together Jewish activists. His zeal and love for the Jewish people kept Russian Jews spirits' from wilting under the unrelenting pressure of the Soviet Government.

NCSJ was fortunate to work with Yuli for more than thirty years, both in the Soviet Union and in Israel. Yuli was a mentor and personal friend of NCSJ President Sasha Smukler.

Yuli Kosharovsky was born in 1941. In the 1970s and 1980s he organized a Hebrew study groups in the USSR, and made aliyah in 1989. In the early 1990s in Israel he organized the "Democracy and aliyah" (YES) party. He was a member of the "Likud" party, and in 2003, became active in "Shinui." In recent years, he led the "Zionist majority" movement.

In 2009, Yuli completed the third volume in a series entitled We Are Jews Again: Reflections on the History of the Zionist Movement From the Soviet Union. For more information about Yuli Kosharovsky, and to read the first two books in the series, please visit his website at www.kosharovsky.com.

On behalf of the NCSJ Board of Governors, we express our sympathies to Yuli's family, and ask that they be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. May his memory be for a blessing.

Sincerely,

Stephen M. Greenberg Chairman		Alexander Smukler President		Mark B. Levin Executive Director

About NCSJ

NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia, founded in 1971, represents the organized American Jewish community in monitoring and advocating on behalf of the estimated 1.5 million Jews living in the 15 successor states of the former Soviet Union.