Intrator, Genya, 1927-2008 : Genya Intrator, a pioneering activist on behalf of Jews in the former Soviet Union, was born into a Jewish family in Moscow, USSR, in 1927. In 1934, at age 7, Genya and her family emigrated to Palestine. Focused largely on her studies growing up, she claimed that her real education was directed towards building an autonomous Jewish state where Jews could live in freedom and dignity. In 1948 she joined the Zionist military organization "Haganah", and subsequently served for two years as an officer in the Israeli Army during the War of Liberation (the 1948 Palestine War). In 1950 she married Alfred (Fred) Intrator in Vienna, Austria, and moved to Canada. She and her husband initially lived in Montreal for two years before moving to Toronto, Ontario. It was here that she attended the University of Toronto while raising her two daughters, Daphne and Orna, studying literature and political science, and obtaining her degree in 1974.
While earning her degree, she began her involvement with Jewish student activists on the University of Toronto campus. Knowing that she spoke Russian, they asked her to translate during an initial phone call to a Russian refusenik in 1970. Around this same time, she was visited by the Israeli consul based in New York, who talked to her about Soviet dissidents and refuseniks, informing her that Soviet refuseniks were forbidden to emigrate until their knowledge of state secrets became obsolete. He gave her a list of refuseniks to call so that she could provide moral support and obtain information about persecution and human rights violations. These conversations were monitored by the KGB and she was sure to make it clear to them that western democracies were aware of the refuseniks' plight.
During her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1973, Intrator met with refuseniks in Moscow, Kiev and what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Following this trip her involvement with refuseniks greatly increased; she became involved with the Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky imprisonment, amongst others. Throughout Sharansky's nine-year imprisonment, she was in touch with his family in Moscow every week, and she organized petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins and hunger strikes with his wife, Avital. In an online memorial book dedicated to Intrator after her death, Sharansky and Avital wrote that, in the "1970s and 80s, the years of the most intense struggle of Soviet Jewry, the name Genya Intrator was both a symbol of the direct link and strong bond of world Jewry to our daily lives."
In 1971 Intrator founded Women for Soviet Jewry, a group that represented all the Jewish women's organizations in Toronto. This organization was a forerunner of the Canadian Committee for Soviet Jewry, under the auspices of the Canadian Jewish Congress. She served as national president of the committee from 1975 to 1983. In 1974 she co-founded with Beverley Bronfman the Canadian arm of the "Group of 35", a women's organization that relentlessly campaigned for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. From 1982 to 1984, she served as president of the Women's Canadian ORT (the English translation of the Russian phrase for "The Society for Trades and Agricultural Labour"), and in 1984 she founded and became co-chair of the Inter-Religious Task Force on Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Soviet Union, an organization affiliated with the National Inter-Religious Task Force, which was founded in Chicago in 1972. This organization was comprised of Christians and Jews working together to educate, sensitize and encourage Canadians to act on behalf of people in the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc countries whose basic human rights were ignored. In addition, in 1984 she began writing a weekly column for the Toronto Sun called "Lifeline Letters," which focused on human rights in the Soviet Union. She continued this column until 1994.
In 1990 the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, an American-based NGO that reports on human rights conditions in countries throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, gave a mandate to create The Prisoner's Commission. This group, chaired by Genya Intrator from its inception until 1995, advocated both nationally and internationally on behalf of prisoners in the former USSR who were jailed on trumped-up charges, for reasons of economy (ie. being unemployed), or where the punishment was not commensurate with their crime. The Commission also sought rehabilitation of former prisoners of Zion and prisoners of conscience.
Genya Intrator died on July 31, 2008, in Toronto of liver cancer.
