Former refusenik Natan Sharansky was inducted into the Israel Defense force Monday, little more than two years since his arrival in Israel, after spending nearly a decade in Soviet prisons and labor camps.
Sharansky spent his first day in the army learning how to dismantle a rifle. The 40-year-old Soviet Jewry activist will undergo a shortened basic training period and then be posted to the reserves.
Dressed in ill-fitting fatigues, Sharansky told a television interviewer Monday night that he would not shirk military duty, even though he has been offered a job as a lecturer in the IDF education corps.
Sharansky, probably the most famous refusenik and advocate of Jewish emigration rights, served nine years in the Soviet Gulag on charges of spying for the United States. He was released in February 1986 in a U.S.-Soviet spy exchange.
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