Boris Kochubiyevsky, First Prisoner of Zion in USSR, Passes Away
Boris Kochubiyevsky, the first Prisoner of Zion in the USSR after the Six-Day War and a pioneer of the Soviet Jewry movement, has passed away at the age of years.
Boris Kochubiyevsky, recognized as the first Prisoner of Zion in the Soviet Union following the Six-Day War, has passed away. A radio engineer from Kyiv, Kochubiyevsky was among the pioneers of the public struggle to pierce the Iron Curtain and secure the right of Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. He paid a heavy personal price for his activism, which included fighting to commemorate the victims of the Babyn Yar massacre, ultimately being sentenced to three years in a Soviet labor camp.
The Struggle for Babyn Yar
Kochubiyevsky's father was murdered in the Babyn Yar massacre in September 1941, where the Nazis murdered 33,771 of Kyiv's Jews within two days. For decades, the Soviet regime thwarted attempts to commemorate the Jewish victims at the site and deliberately obscured their identity. In 1968, when Soviet authorities held an official memorial ceremony at Babyn Yar without mentioning the word "Jews," Kochubiyevsky took the extraordinary step of stepping onto the stage to declare: "The victims were Jews. You cannot erase their identity."
Following the event, he wrote an open letter to Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, demanding permission to immigrate to Israel.
I am a Jew - I want to live in a Jewish state. This is my right. Just as it is the right of every Russian to live in Russia, I wish to live in Israel.
Imprisonment and Aliyah
The Soviet response was swift. Kochubiyevsky and his wife were fired from their jobs, and he was forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric facility before being tried for "slandering the Soviet regime" and sentenced to three years in a labor camp. Despite harassment and harsh conditions, he continued his struggle from behind bars.
In 1972, upon completing his sentence, Kochubiyevsky fulfilled his dream and made Aliyah to Israel. His arrival generated immense public interest, and days later he was invited as a guest of honor to the IDF Chief of Staff handover ceremony. In Israel, he worked as an engineer at Tadiran, raised three children, and made his home in Jerusalem, living a modest life away from the spotlight.
