Sylva Zalmanson

Sylva Zalmanson (Russian: Сильва Залмансон, Hebrew: סילווה זלמנסון; born Siberia, 1944) is a Soviet-born Jewish Prisoner of Zion, human rights activist, artist and engineer who settled in Israel in 1974.

Sylva Zalmanson was most memorable with the stringing and hunting effect, not heard since the publication of Anne Frank's diary of a young girlBorn in Siberia in 1944 to a middle-class Jewish family from Riga.

Repeatedly requesting and being denied an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, Zalmanson and her husband Eduard Kuznetsov became members of a group of activists in a Zionist underground cell which came up with a plan to escape.

[citation needed] During the time Zalmanson and the other Zionist activists were imprisoned, and as a result of the diplomatic pressure put on the Soviet authorities, hundreds of thousands of Jews received visas to leave.

[1] On 22 August 1974, Sylva got an early release, due to a secret prisoners exchange between the Soviet government and the Israeli government who caught a Soviet spy, Yuri Linov who was exchanged for Sylva Zalmanson and Heinrich Shefter, a Bulgarian Jew, UN employee who was arrested by the Bulgarian Security Service and sentenced to death for espionage, apparently solely for the purpose of extorting Linov's release.

In Israel, Sylva worked as an engineer in the aerial industry but continued her non-stop activity for the release of her family and friends, including a 16-day hunger strike in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1976, refusing to eat to the point of losing consciousness.