Avraham Shifrin

Avraham Shifrin was born in 1923 in Minsk

Shifrin was born in Minsk in 1923 to a Jewish family. In 1937 his father, Isaak Shifrin, was arrested and sentenced on false charges to 10 years of labor in Kolyma.

In World War II he was sent to a Soviet penal battalion as the son of an enemy of the people. After being wounded he changed his personal details, served in another unit and fought in the Battle of Königsberg. He left the Red Army in 1945 as a major.

From 1949 to 1953 he worked as a lawyer for the Soviet Ministry of Defense and took part in underground Zionist activity. In 1953 he was accused of spying for the US and Israel and sentenced to death. The sentence was changed to 25 years in the Gulag, followed by exile and loss of civil rights.

He was released in 1963, having lost a leg during his imprisonment, and was allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1970. In 1973 he testified before US Senate committees on Soviet labor camps and said American prisoners of war were held in them. His 1982 guidebook listed Soviet prisons and camps, and he later claimed that the passengers of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 survived and were taken to camps, a claim others disputed.

He was married to Eleonora Shifrin, a leader of the Yemin Israel party. He lived in Zikhron Ya'akov and in his last years in Jerusalem, where he died in 1998.