Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich, who participated in "Operation Wedding" to aid Soviet Jewry, spoke to Arutz Sheva this week about his friend Mark Dymshitz, who recently passed away. 

Dymshitz was a Jew, a pilot and a former military man who decided that his place was in Israel and knew there was no chance the Soviets would allow him to leave.

Dymshitz decided to try to leave the USSR by hijacking a plane - an event known as "Operation Wedding" or "The First Leningrad Trial."

In his search for accomplices, Mark met Hillel Butman, one of the operatives for a Zionist group in Leningrad who shared the same idea.

The idea became a program whose main objective was to expose to the world the plight of Soviet Jews who wished to immigrate to Israel but were held behind the Iron Curtain.