Baruch Asher (born Boris Kochubievsky)

Baruch Asher, born Boris Kochubievsky, was one of the first Soviet Jews to be imprisoned for demanding the right to emigrate to Israel, and he became known as a founding figure of the Prisoners of Zion movement. He died on 23 October 2026 at the age of 90 and was laid to rest at Yarkon Cemetery near Tel Aviv.

Kochubievsky was born in Kyiv in 1936. His father was murdered at Babi Yar in September 1941, when Nazi forces and their collaborators killed tens of thousands of Jews outside the city in two days. That loss shaped the rest of his life and his eventual confrontation with Soviet authorities.

In 1968, at an official memorial ceremony at the Babi Yar site, Kochubievsky publicly objected to the Soviet government's refusal to acknowledge that the victims had been murdered specifically because they were Jews. Later that year he wrote an open letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in which he declared his Jewish identity and his wish to live in Israel. The Soviet authorities responded by having him dismissed from his job as a radio engineer, and in May 1969 he was put on trial in Kyiv on charges of spreading anti Soviet slander. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in a labor camp, becoming one of the earliest people imprisoned purely for seeking to emigrate on Zionist grounds.

His arrest and trial drew international attention at a time when few people in the West knew much about the plight of Soviet Jews. His image was printed on posters, buttons and pins used by activists across the United States and elsewhere, and his case helped launch what became known as the movement to free Soviet Jewry, a campaign that over the following two decades contributed to roughly a million Jews and their relatives being allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Israel.

After serving his sentence, Kochubievsky was eventually permitted to leave the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel in 1972, where he took the Hebrew name Baruch Asher. He settled in Jerusalem, worked for the Israeli electronics company Tadiran, raised three children, and lived a quiet life largely out of the public eye for the following decades, even as the movement he had helped spark continued to grow.

News of his death prompted tributes from Israeli officials and from organizations representing immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Alex Rif, founder and head of the Million Lobby organization, described him as the first public face of the struggle to free Soviet Jews. A family obituary remembered him as a Holocaust survivor, Prisoner of Zion and freedom fighter who endured great suffering with pride and courage.