page_title: Sylva Zalmanson
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Sylva Zalmanson / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Zalmanson family in Riga 1952
context_page_description: Sylva Zalmanson is a Soviet-born Jewish Prisoner of Zion, human rights activist, artist and engineer who settled in Israel in 1974.
  "Sylva Zalmanson was most memorable with the stringing and hunting effect, not heard since the publication of Anne Frank's diary of a young girl"
  A. Phillip Spiegel, author, Triumph over Tyranny 2008
context_section_description: 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. 
   Zalmanson graduated Riga Polytechnic University in 1968, worked as an engineer and dreamed of living a 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 who came up with a plan to escape.
caption: Zalmanson family in Riga 1952
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