17 January 2006
The Russian-born Israeli lawmaker Yuri Shtern has died of cancer at the age of 58. In the 1970s he was a lecturer of Economics at Moscow University. A "refusenik", he became active in promoting the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel. Shtern made aliyah in 1981 and became one of the Israel’s most prominent immigrant politicians. He was a founding member of fellow refusenik Natan Sharansky’s Yisrael B’Aliyah Party, but later switched to the more right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu. “Yuri was a man of culture and letters with a deep awareness of Israel’s heritage and of Jewish tradition,” Israel's prime minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement. “His uncompromising political views were alongside his extraordinary cultural and social sensitivity.” Yuri Shtern is survived by his wife and two children.
