Natan Sharansky has been selected as the next head of the Jewish Agency. Sharansky was unanimously elected on Thursday by the organization's Board of Governors.
Sharansky's candidacy was controversial because he was nominated by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Some Jewish Agency governors feared Sharansky's appointment would undermine the organization's efforts to seek freedom from Israeli political influence.
Netanyahu offered to make reforms to the Jewish Agency structure advocated by American members of the organization in exchange for Sharansky's appointment as chairman.
Some United States-based organizations, among them the United Jewish Communities of North America, have pushed to reduce the representation granted to the World Zionist Organization within the Jewish Agency. The WZO includes both overseas Zionist groups and Israeli political parties.
UJC members fear that the WZO influence within the Jewish Agency makes the agency dependent on Israeli political trends, one WZO member explained this week.
On Wednesday, Jewish Agency board members from the Labor and Kadima parties invited former Labor MK Colette Avital to speak before the board. The move raised concerns that the Labor and Kadima members planned to vote for Avital, leaving Sharansky without the nine out of 10 votes required to head the agency.
A member of the board told Maariv that the parties had invited Avital to present herself as a candidate for head of the agency in order to pressure the Likud party to offer Labor and Kadima prized positions in Israel's largest Zionist organizations, such as the Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organization.
Sharansky is a former minister known for his history as a Zionist activist and a prisoner of Zion. He was jailed for nine years in Soviet Russia after applying for a visa to Israel. In 1986 he was freed and allowed to immigrate following international pressure.
In 1996 he founded the Yisrael B'Aliya party, dedicated to assisting Russian immigrants to Israel. In 2006 he left the government and took up a position heading the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.