Yuri Shtern z"l

I have just been informed of the passing of MK Yuri Shtern of a brain tumor at the age of 58.

Yuri was a dear friend of mine for 23 years, starting from the days in the early 80's when he used to come to New York to campaign on behalf of freedom for Prisoners of Zion like Anatoly Sharansky, Ida Nudel, Iosif Begun and so many others. Quick witted, fluent in English charming and charismatic, Yuri was a natural spokesman for a cause then at its lowest ebb. Yuri's natural ebullience and optimism in the face of relentlessly grim news from the Soviet Union, helped to buck up supporters of the movement in the U.S. Together with Lynn Singer, the late head of the Long Island Committee for Soviet Jewry, Yuriu helped set up my first trip to the Soviet Union in July 1985, when I visited Sharansky's brother Leonid, Prof. Alexander Lerner and others, including Yuri's sister who lived in an immense apartment complex on the southern reaches of Moscow it took me hours to find. Later, after visiting refusenik Lev Shapiro in Leningrad, a companion and I were set upon by two KGB thugs who roughed us up and scared me to within an inch of my life. But by that time, I was already hooked on the cause of Soviet Jewry, a world first opened to me by Yuri Shtern and ended up making three more visits to refuseniks during the 80's before becoming an on-the-ground correspondent in Moscow from 1990-1992.

In the years after the collpse of the USSR, Yuri entered politics, first with Sharansky in Yisrael b'Aliyah and eventually rising to the Number 2 position in Yisrael Beiteinu behind Avigdor Lieberman. Yuri and I had obviously always had very different takes on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but that had seemed less relevant when we had a common cause of saving Soviet Jews. Overt the past decade or so, we had several animated discussions on the theme, but never lost our original feeling of mutual affection. Yuri was always incredibly warm and seemed animated by the principle of ahavat yisrael--i.e. you dont dismiss or demonize a fellow Jew even when you disagree profoundly on an issue of life and death for our people. The tributes to Yuri from Dalia Itzhik and Ehud Olmert in todays Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com as an immensely decent and cultiavted man who happened to have hard-line views, are right on target.

I last saw Yuri last October at a conference on the Russian community in Israel, that drew many of Israel's leading Russian politicans and academics to Bar-Ilan University. It was shocking to see him gaunt and bald from chemotherapy (see above photo with Yuli Edelshtein) but his effervesent spirit was alive and well. After giving his speech at about noon, he stayed for the end of the day, taking part in all of the discussions and expressing encouragement to several young sociologists who had just written their theses on the state of Russian Jewry in Israel. Yuri must have been exhausted (he was then in the middle of the intensive negotiations that soon led to Olmert taking Lieberman into his cabinet), but he still had time and energy for the conference and to express words of warmth and friendship to me. Throughout his long illness he behaved with consummate grace and dignity, never giving way to self-pity, and always staying in the fray.

There are many lessons for me in Yuri's life, but the main one is never to forget that the measure of a person's worth is not his or her political views, but as Martin Luther King would put it, the content of his character. Yuri was a mensch's mensch. I will miss him deeply.