Shcharansky’s Wife, Mother Fought for His Release : 2 Women Never Let World Forget

“Those two women, in my view, are the reason the world never forgot Anatoly Shcharansky,” said Prof. Irwin Cotler of McGill University as the jet bearing the former Soviet prisoner landed in Israel on Tuesday.

The professor, who is Shcharansky’s Canadian lawyer, was referring to the dissident’s wife, Avital, reunited with him after 12 years, and his mother, Ida Milgrom, who is still in Moscow.

They waged a battle for his freedom in their own ways in very different environments, Avital in her tireless travels through the Western capitals to enlist support and Milgrom in harassing Soviet authorities to ease her youngest son’s living conditions in prison.

“Avital fought like a lioness,” said Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at the emotional reception for Anatoly on his arrival.

“No place was too far away for her . . . no opportunity too small for her . . . to continue her fight,” he said.

And Cotler recalled how Shcharansky’s mother, now 77, rode 500 miles in bitter Russian winters to visit her imprisoned son, and how once, when she was refused entry as punishment for him, she returned to the prison gate each morning for 10 days--in vain--to demand entry.

A decade ago in Moscow, Shcharansky was certain that Avital would be waiting for him in Israel when he finally left the Soviet Union.

“I know she’ll be loyal, that she’ll always be there,” he had said as he fumed at being refused permission to emigrate.

Not long afterward, however, rather than receiving his visa, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. After almost 12 years of separation, when he finally reached Jerusalem on Tuesday, she was with him.

She had become a familiar international figure in her own right, a tall, thin woman with a hauntingly sad face under the cloth head covering that is traditional for an Orthodox Jewish married woman.

Gentle and soft-spoken, her classical beauty has been likened to the biblical descriptions of Miriam at the well. But beneath the exterior was a tough, intense and unremitting determination to get “Tolya” free.

Avital Shcharansky, born Natalia Stieglitz in the Ukraine 35 years ago, had left Anatoly one day after their marriage July 4, 1974, for Israel. He had insisted that she leave, expecting that he would also be granted an emigration visa. His words to her then, he recalled Tuesday night with a wry smile, were, “I’ll see you in Israel very soon.”

The couple met in Moscow on Oct. 13, 1973, in front of the Moscow synagogue when Anatoly and Avital’s brother were members of an aggressive young Jewish group who were not satisfied to wait patiently after their emigration requests had been refused. The authorities refused to recognize their marriage because it was performed by a rabbi.

And they seldom allowed Anatoly to receive the hundreds of letters that Avital has written over the years from her small apartment in a working-class section of Jerusalem.

During their long separation, Avital has become far more religious than either had been in Moscow. Asked once how he viewed her new kosher practices, including the requirement of keeping meat and dairy dishes separate, Anatoly reportedly told his mother that he had always confused the two, and he would now have an excuse not to wash the plates at all.

She also learned English to help in her earnest and simple appeals to world leaders to aid her husband’s cause.

President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz have been particularly impressed by Avital’s uncommon devotion and perseverance, and that reinforced their efforts to win his release.

Along the way, too, she increasingly surrounded herself with religious Jews here and abroad, which sometimes conveyed the impression that she lead a cloistered existence. Some of her closest associates are former “refuseniks” who, like Josef Mendelevich, also embrace right-wing politics in Israel.

Some more secular Jewish groups, and even at times Israeli officials, have expressed dismay at Avital’s single-minded aggressiveness, or chutzpah, on Anatoly’s behalf, and her pursuit of maximum publicity when there were hopes that quiet petitions to Moscow might have been more effective.

She nonetheless pursued his release through whatever avenues were open, sometimes devising clever approaches such as an open, woman-to-woman letter to Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the Soviet leader, during the Geneva summit in November. And sometimes she silently picketed with only his picture in front of a Soviet embassy at one of the capitals of the world.

Anatoly’s mother, the other key woman in his life, is a retired schoolteacher who kept her maiden name throughout her long marriage to Boris Shcharansky. A journalist who once worked for an industrial journal, Anatoly’s father died of a heart attack three years ago.

The elder Shcharanskys, who were observant but not religious Jews, moved to the Donets region after World War II where their two sons, Leonid and Anatoly, were born. Milgrom, for the past eight years, has importuned Soviet officials whenever Anatoly’s letters did not arrive on time or when his health grew increasingly fragile due to solitary confinement and other punishment.

Warm, short, matronly and determined, she asked a guard during one visit if she could walk around the glass partition to hug her son. When he refused, she demanded to know why a mother could not embrace her own son.

Anatoly, perhaps to ease his mother’s growing stress, turned it into a joke.

“If Carter can kiss Brezhnev, why can’t my mother hug me?” he asked, referring at that time to a recent summit between the late Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, and President Jimmy Carter. It quieted his mother, but he still didn’t get the hug.