Natan Sharansky said at the March for Israel Rally in Washington DC: "Dear family, when a small group of Soviet Jews started to fight to move to Israel, they challenged the most powerful empire, the most cruel dictatorship of those days. And that's why many people thought that their struggle, our struggle, is doomed. How can [just] a few men and women bring down the empire on their own?"
"But the fact is that we never thought that we were alone. We knew the Jewish people and the State of Israel is with us. From the small demonstration initiated by four students at Columbia University in 1964, to the massive rally of 250,000 just here in this place in '87, there were three generations of world Jewry who fought for our freedom. Many of your grandparents fought for our freedom. Many of your parents fought for our freedom. Many of you fought for our freedom. And that made all the change," he said.