World : Ex-Soviet Rights Activist Sharansky Chosen Israeli Ambassador to U.N.
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has chosen former Soviet prisoner and human rights activist Natan Sharansky to be Israel’s new ambassador to the United Nations, a senior government official said today.
News of the choice raised concern among some Israeli diplomats about the possibility of offending the Soviet Union at a time when relations with Moscow, broken off more than 20 years ago, are improving.
Sharansky, 41, served nine years of a 13-year sentence in Soviet prisons and labor camps on charges of spying. He was released Feb. 11, 1986, as part of an East-West prisoner exchange and flew immediately to Israel to join his wife, Avital.
He was arrested in 1977 after angering the Soviet authorities as an outspoken leader of the Jewish emigration movement.
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