SAR celebrates milestone with trailblazing Jewish activist

SAR marked its 57th anniversary with a visit from Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident whose imprisonment made him an international symbol of a fight for Jewish freedom during the Cold War.

Sharansky was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1977, shortly after applying for an exit visa to Israel and emerging as a spokesman for Jews seeking to leave the Soviet Union.

He was accused of treason and espionage, charges he vehemently denied but still served nine years in Soviet prisons and camps before being released as part of a Cold War prisoner exchange in 1986.

His visit to SAR on Feb 1. coincided with the 40th anniversary of that release.

On Feb. 1, Sharansky was honored before a crowd of about 1,200 people at SAR’s annual fundraiser, which raised roughly $4 million for the school. There, spoke on a panel with his daughter, educator and author Rachel Sharansky Danziger, and Rabbi Avi Weiss, a longtime activist and author who helped shape the American effort to free Soviet Jews.

Sharansky recallled his captivity not as distant history but as lived experience, drawing connections between his incarceration and the realities faced by hostages held in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Isolation, he noted, is used deliberately to convince them they have been long-forgotten.

“They’ll do everything to convince you that you’re abandoned, that you’re alone,” he said. “And you have to convince yourself that the Jewish world, Jewish people, the State of Israel—nobody abandoned you.”

Rachel Sharansky Danziger reflected on how her parents framed the struggle while she was growing up, emphasizing collective responsibility rather than individual triumph.

“My parents always shared it in plural terms,” she said. “Meaning it was never their victory. Itwas the Jewish people’s victory.”

For Rabbi Bini Krauss, principal of SAR Academy, the visit bridged global history with personal memory. A graduate of SAR in the early 1980s, he said the campaign to free Sharansky shaped his adolescence.

“I was an SAR student from 1981 to 1984,” Krauss said. “What I remember in the ’80s was that every year in the spring, everyone went down to the [United Nations]. Tens of thousands of people. And we would rally for Sharansky.”

On Feb. 2, Sharansky returned to SAR to meet students in both its lower academy and high school students.

Teachers said the visits were the result of weeks of preparation, with students learning about Sharansky’s life and Jewish life in the Soviet Union in age-appropriate ways.

“What was most gratifying for me was seeing the kids as young as five to 17, they all got it,” Krauss said. “They all learned this story. They all prepared for this visitor. And I could see when he spoke that they really got it.”

Later, he spoke to high school students in a question-and-answersession about growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union, where religious life was suppressed and antisemitism was embedded in state policy.

“We had no Jewish schools. We had no bar mitzvah. We had no brit milah,” Sharansky said. The only Jewish thing which we had was antisemitism.”

For much of his youth, he explained, Jewish identity was something to overcome rather than embrace. That began to change after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel’s victory reverberated unexpectedly inside the Soviet Union.

“You understand, you try to run away from your Jewishness,” he said. “For people around you, you are part of Israel.”
That realization pushed him toward underground study, activism and, eventually, open defiance of the state. Declaring a desire to emigrate to Israel, he said, carried immediate consequences.

“The moment you declare that you want to go to Israel, that you really don’t want to belong to this society, that’s the end of all your life which you were building,” Sharansky said.

For Krauss, watching students absorb that history brought decades full circle.

The visit carried both personal and educational weight. Decades ago he chanted Sharansky’s name at rallies. Now, he watches a new generation encounter that history face-to-face, shaped by both past and present.