Premier Shimon Peres sent a special message to Ida Nudel on the occasion of her 55th birthday in which he vowed that “we shall neither rest nor be silent until we have brought her home.”
Nudel, an aliya activist known as the “guardian angel” of the Soviet Jewry movement, lives in enforced isolation in Bendery, Soviet Moldavia. She served four years of Siberian exile for publicly campaigning for Jewish emigration rights. She herself first applied to emigrate in 1971 to be reunited with her sister, Ilana Fridman, in Israel.
Peres’ message was read at a festive gathering in Malchei Israel Square in Tel Aviv Wednesday night organized by the Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry. It said, in part: “Ida Nudel today serves as a source of inspiration, the focus of the people’s love. She is daily testimony to the fact that no regime of oppression can imprison the spirit of freedom that beats in our people, nor has any totalitarian machine the strength to diminish the longings for our historic homeland.”
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