8 | OCTOBER 21 • 2021 

analysis

Ida Nudel: An Inspiration 
for Future Generations
T

he heroes of our generation are 
slipping away. And unless you 
were among the fortunate few to 
have gone to meet them in the former 
Soviet Union during the decades from 
1970s to the 1990s, you probably don’t 
know about those Jewish 
heroes and heroines whose 
actions defined moral 
courage and stamina 
in the face of relentless 
government persecution.
But for those Americans 
who did travel to the 
USSR, meeting with Jewish 
refuseniks, who were refused 
the right to emigrate, had a profound 
impact on them. Just ask anyone who ever 
met Ida Nudel.
With her death in Jerusalem just before 
Yom Kippur at age 90, another mega-
symbol of the Soviet Jewish emigration 
movement has left us.
Instead of allowing Ida’s life to lapse 
into forgetfulness, we must learn from her 
because what she did in Moscow serves as 
a model for generations.
Ida was a tiny woman who stood tall 
against the Kremlin and the fearsome 
KGB security apparatus empowered to 
persecute and intimidate by any means 
Jews intent on leaving the USSR.
What she did during her struggle for 
a visa to emigrate makes her a symbol of 
resistance for the ages.
While fighting for her own visa, she 
championed the desperate situation of 
refuseniks who had been arrested and 
sentenced to prison and forced labor 
camps for their emigration activity.

A ‘GUARDIAN ANGEL’
For the prisoners of Zion, she was their 
“Guardian Angel,” their “Mama.”
Her efforts for them were often at 
personal risk. She went on a hunger strike 
to protest an arrest. She collected goods 
for parcels she sent to prisoners filled with 

goods we sent with Western tourists. 
The packages she sent passed 
inspection of prison guards and included 
items like children’s gummy vitamins 
(which appeared to be candy), white 
chocolate, warm underwear and the 3-D 
postcards the guards favored. She wrote 
to them and their families, advocated 
on their behalf to Soviet officials and 
American congressmen who came to 
Moscow to meet with refuseniks and 
dissidents. Never did she let those 
prisoners of Zion feel they were alone.
Finally, eight long years after she first 
applied to emigrate, in 1978, still denied 
the right to leave, she hung a sign in her 
apartment reading “KGB, give me my 
visa to Israel.” She was dragged away and, 
like some of the Jewish prisoners she 
was defending, sentenced to four years 
of exile in the brutal reaches of Siberia. 
The only woman in the barracks, she was 
condemned to reside with the crudest, 
roughest of Russian lowlife convicts, 
sleeping with a knife under her pillow.
Never did we at the Union of Councils 
for Soviet Jews let Ida Nudel think she 
was alone.
We enlisted women’s groups and 

congressional wives in her struggle. 
We took her cause to the White House, 
U.S. State Department and Congress. 
We designated International Woman’s 
Day as Ida Nudel Day and sent her 
flowers by way of protest to the Soviet 
embassy. When a refusenik who visited 
her in Siberia brought back the report 
that she was suffering in the Siberian 
winter, I sent a tourist to Moscow with 
my new sheepskin coat in his suitcase. 
It went from Chicago to Moscow, and 
from Moscow, it traveled thousands of 
kilometers to Ida in the frozen steppes of 
Siberia.
After 16 years of struggle, Ida Nudel 
was finally given permission to leave 
in 1987. She was one of the celebrity 
refuseniks that Mikhail Gorbachev gave 
as a gesture before his upcoming summit 
with Ronald Reagan. Undersecretary 
of State for Human Rights and 
Humanitarian Affairs Ambassador 
Richard Schifter’s eyes filled with tears 
when she called from Jerusalem to tell 
him, “I’m home.”
A refusenik pariah under relentless 
KGB surveillance and intimidation, this 
tiny woman exerted her moral freedom by 
taking responsibility for doing good in a 
country governed by evil. In doing so, she 
earned the love and respect of the Soviet 
Jewish Prisoners of Zion, as well as high-
powered names such as U.S. Secretary of 
State George Shultz, actress Jane Fonda, 
billionaire Armand Hammer and, of 
course, those of us in the West and Israel 
who met her and worked on her behalf.
May the courageous moral freedom 
to exert responsibility even when 
surrounded by evil be the legacy that 
Ida Nudel bequeaths to all of us and our 
children. 

Pamela Braun Cohen was the national president of 

the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ). She is 

the author of “Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of 

Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union.”

Pamela 
Braun 
Cohen
JNS

PURELY COMMENTARY

Ida Nudel 
arriving in 
Israel in 
1987.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/ISRAEL GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE/JTA

