Natan Sharansky to be the first Israeli awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom
December 12, 2006

The Embassy of Israel is proud to honor Natan Sharansky for being the first Israeli to be awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom. Along with the Congressional Gold Medal he was awarded 20 years ago, Natan Sharansky has now received both of America’s highest civilian honors. In fact, only three other non-Americans enjoy a similar distinction: John Paul II, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.

Photo: Knesset

Natan Sharansky was an internationally renowned prisoner of Zion who served nine years in the Soviet Gulag for his activism on behalf of both Soviet Jewry and the wider struggle for human rights in the USSR. After being released from prison, he worked to help free the Jews who remained behind the iron curtain. After the USSR collapsed, he founded the Zionist Forum to help integrate into Israeli society the waves of new immigrants flooding into the Jewish state, and in 1996, he founded the Yisrael Baliyah party to better achieve that goal. He served in four Israeli governments, under three Prime Ministers, as Minister of Industry and Trade, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Housing and Minister of Diaspora Affair and Jerusalem. He also served as Israel’s deputy Prime Minister. In 2006, Natan Sharansky resigned from the Knesset to head a strategic research institute at the Shalem Center.

In 1987, he wrote Fear No Evil, a deeply moving prison memoir and in 2004 co-authored The Case For Democracy, a highly influential book on the importance of the advance of freedom to international peace and security. Both books were bestsellers that were translated into over a dozen languages. His lives in Jerusalem with his wife Avital and their two daughters, Rachel and Chana.