Natan Sharansky (; ; , born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky on 20 January 1948) is a Soviet dissident and later Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018. Sharansky currently serves as chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization. Biography Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. His father, Boris Shcharansky, a journalist from a Zionist background who worked for an industrial journal, died in 1980, before Natan was freed. His mother, Ida Milgrom, visited him in prison and stubbornly waged a nine-year battle for her son's release from Soviet prison and labor camps. She was permitted to follow her son to Israel six months after he left the Soviet Union. He was attending physics and mathematics high school No.17 in Donetsk. As a child, he was a chess prodigy. He performed in simultaneous and blindfold exhibitions, usually against adults. At the age of 15, he won the championship in his native Donetsk. Sharansky graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. When incarcerated in solitary confinement, he claims to have maintained his sanity by playing chess against himself in his mind. Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996. After Sharansky graduated from university, he began working for a secret state research laboratory. Sharansky lived near Sokolniki Park, on Kolodezniy Pereulok (Water-well Lane). In his spare time, Sharansky would coach young chess players at the famous chess club in the park. He took his current Hebrew name in 1986 when he was freed from Soviet incarceration as part of a prisoner exchange and received an Israeli passport with his new name. Natan Sharansky is married to Avital Sharansky and has two daughters, Rachel and Hannah. In the Soviet Union, his application to marry Avital was denied by the authorities. They were married in a friend's apartment, in a ceremony not recognized by the government, as the USSR only recognized civil marriage and not religious marriage. Arrest and imprisonment Sharansky was denied an exit visa to Israel in