By Ron Kampeas

(JTA) — Ida Nudel, the Russian Jewish refusenik whose 16-year effort to leave the Soviet Union moved figures as diverse as Republican Secretary of State George Schultz and activist actress Jane Fonda, died Tuesday, Sept. 14.

Nudel, an accountant, began her activism in the 1970s after her request to emigrate to Israel was turned down. She supported Jews imprisoned for their activism and their families, delivering needed supplies and making representations on their behalf. Soviet authorities twice sent her into exile, once to Siberia and then to Moldova, and she suffered privations.

Her short stature — she was 4’11” — and her determination made her one of the most prominent faces of Jewish refusal in the Soviet Union. Women’s groups adopted her cause. Fonda and her then-husband, the activist Tom Hayden, took up her case. Liv Ullmann, the Norwegian actress, played Nudel in a movie.

Fonda met with Nudel in the Soviet Union and was in Israel in 1987 when Nudel arrived to a hero’s welcome, flown in on the private jet belonging to Jewish billionaire Armand Hammer. “Her courage and boundless hope inspired me. Ida Nudel has become a role model for me,” Fonda said then. Schultz said his most cherished moment as secretary of state was learning that Nudel, whom he had met in Moscow, was free. “Mr. Secretary, this is Ida Nudel, I’m home,” Shultz quoted her as saying, during Senate testimony in 1988. He said he was moved to tears.

Nudel, who never married or had children, was thrilled at first to be in Israel, saying she had all she needed. But Nudel soon soured on Israel’s government, saying it was not doing enough to absorb Jews from the former Soviet Union. And in 2005, in an interview with JTA, she worried that Israel was not Jewish enough; she also had ensconced herself in Israel’s right-wing camp.

“I cry in my heart because what we dreamed of is not happening,” she said.

Main Photo: Ida Nudel and her faithful dog arrive on a private Boeing Jet, owned by American oil billionaire Armand Hammer, at Ben-Gurion Airport on Oct. 15, 1987. (Wikimedia Commons/Israel Government Press Office.)