Sylva Zalmanson

Sylva and Edward's only daughter, Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov, an Israeli Filmmaker, directed a documentary film in 2016 about their story, Operation Wedding.

Today, Sylva lives in Israel. She and Edward had a daughter and were divorced two years after his release, in 1981 without a trial. For years, until her retirement in 2005, Sylva worked as a Mechanical Engineer. She started painting in 1992, working in acrylics, oil and mixed media. Sylva became a member of the "Painters and Sculptors Association of Israel" and has exhibited in Israel, the US, UK, Italy, Romania, and Finland.

Most of the group, including Sylva's husband and brother were released in April 1979, due to a prisoners exchange with the American government that caught two Soviet spies in New Jersey.

In Israel, Sylva worked as an engineer in the aerial industry but continued her non-stop activity for the release of her family and friends, including a 16-day hunger strike in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1976, refusing to eat to the point of losing consciousness.

Sylva spent four years in Potma women’s penal colony and was later put in solitary confinement, after hitting another camp's inmate who made anti-semitic remarks. On 22 August 1974, Sylva got an early release, due to a secret prisoners exchange between the Soviet government and the Israeli government who caught a Soviet spy, Yuri Linov who was exchanged for Sylva Zalmanson and Heinrich Shefter, a Bulgarian Jew, UN employee who was arrested by the Bulgarian Security Service and sentenced to death for espionage, apparently solely for the purpose of extorting Linov's release.

On 15 June 1970, moments before boarding the Antonov An-2, the group was arrested and tried for "high treason". Sylva was the only woman on the trial that took place on 15 December 1970, and the first to go up the stand, she said:

Zalmanson graduated Riga Polytechnic University in 1968, worked as an engineer, and dreamed of living in Israel. Repeatedly requesting and being denied an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, Zalmanson and her husband Eduard Kuznetsov became members of a group of activists in a Zionist underground cell which came up with a plan to escape.

During the time Zalmanson and the other Zionist activists were imprisoned, and as a result of the diplomatic pressure put on the Soviet authorities, hundreds of thousands of Jews received visas to leave. Between 1948 and the trial, 10,720 Soviet Jews left the Soviet Union. After the trial and until 1979, around 300,000 Soviet Jews emigrated.

Sylva Zalmanson (Russian: Сильва Залмансон, Hebrew: סילווה זלמנסון; born Siberia, 1944) is a Soviet-born Jewish Prisoner of Zion, human rights activist, artist and engineer who settled in Israel in 1974.

Born in Siberia in 1944 to a middle-class Jewish family from Riga. The family escaped the Nazis and returned to Riga in 1945, after the Soviets defeated the Nazis and liberated Latvia. While she was a university student at the Riga Polytechnic University, she became engaged in Zionist activities, distributing Hebrew-language study books to different Jewish communities around the Soviet Union, listening to Israel Radio programs in Russian, and other activities that were considered illegal under Soviet law.