Women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a certain amount of equality with men especially in the areas of education and employment. Day care existed for all children by age two, though not for the convenience of the mothers, but to maximize their service to the state. Equality was an expedient rather than an individual choice. Although women were less likely than men to be sentenced to lengthy imprisonment for staging protests, they were often punished with short prison terms, and, like the men, were subject to physical abuse.

I was in a group of thirty women in Moscow living on the edge of despair.

For many years our families were known as refuseniks - people to whom the KGB refused to grant emigration visas.

What awaited us: firings, blackballing, accusations of parasitism and forced exile - all in an attempt to crush our spirits.

It was not uncommon for school children to be harassed for their parents’ actions. Children were called names and even attacked and beaten by their schoolmates.

We were the “fifth column,” enemies*.

Written and televised Soviet propaganda sparked the flames of anti-Semitism and encouraged hostility not only against those who wished to leave the Soviet Union, but against all Jews, each of whom was regarded as a potential traitor entangled in a “mesh of Zionism” – a phrase then fashionable in the press.

It was nothing to throw a refusenik in prison, slapped with any random charge. One man, for example – a refusenik who had no family or friends to speak of – was accused of attacking somebody on the street for no reason. (Actually he had been the victim of such an attack, set up by the KGB.) Later, upon the testimony of a witness who committed perjury, the refusenik was accused of being a hooligan and put into prison, where he was brutally beaten and crippled.

We lived in constant anticipation of provocation. “Electronic bugging” and the “stalking” of individuals were expected. Many of our phones, for various reasons, were disconnected. People could not call their elderly parents or summon an ambulance for a child who suddenly fell ill. Under these circumstances, action became our only option, even if it meant living on the razor’s edge.

Those who submitted an emigration form in this horrible decade took a leap into uncertainty, not knowing what awaited them.

People who secretly sympathized with us called us courageous. But was it courage that motivated us? Or was it a feeling of inescapable despair and absolute inability to go on living in the Soviet Union? In truth, it was despair that drove some of us to consider leaving our important professional work and comfortable lives and attempt to obtain exit visas. We knew that we had little or no power to influence the government to grant our requests. But we had to try! Our despair was much greater than our fear.

During these years of life “in refusal,” many friends and close relatives ran from us afraid of being considered “guilty by association.”

People whom we formerly trusted betrayed us.

Brothers and sisters stopped seeing each other. Families fell apart.

But new relationships were born among people united by the same goals and ideals, and sharing the same fate. And so it happened that amongst these people, leaders emerged around whom the others gathered.

One such leader was Ida Nudel.

This small, fragile woman possessed such spiritual strength, strong character, courage and will, that neither prison, nor torture by the KGB, nor Siberian exile, nor isolation in Moldavia (where she finally was able to settle) could break her.

Ida was honest, straightforward, and courageous in the defendant’s seat in court, in the prison cell and in the cold barracks of the Siberian outpost of Krivosheino. She somehow kept her pride and dignity through all her suffering. This helped her not only to survive, but also to gain the respect of her fellow male prisoners, dangerous criminals with whom she lived inside prison walls.

Ida was in “refusal” from 1971 until 1987. She gave nearly eighteen years of her life to the struggle against the Soviet powers, signing declarations, participating in protests, defending Jewish “prisoners of conscience”, and supporting their families both morally and financially.

When at last, she succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union and coming to Israel, she was already far from being a young woman. Her health was failing, and only her large, striking eyes were still full of the joy of life and hope for the future.

It was to Ida that our group of thirty desperate women turned when we decided that we could no longer wait passively for the decision of our judges.