Tatyana Sapunova

Tatyana Sapunova (born c. 1974) is a Russian biophysicist who was seriously injured by an act of anti-Semitic terrorism on May 27, 2002, and who was subsequently awarded the Order of Courage on June 21 by President Vladimir Putin.

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Family background

Tatyana Sapunova's maternal grandfather was a Yiddish-speaking Jewish doctor from Belarus, who was imprisoned in the 1930s, and then sent to fight in the war. He moved around the USSR several times, going from Kiev to the Ural Mountains, and then to Tomsk in Siberia. His daughter Yelena (born c. 1947) married a Russian atheist, later saying that she had not felt her Jewishness for much of her life. Their daughter Tatyana was baptised as a Christian, and she grew up not identifying herself as a Jew, either.

The bomb

On the morning of May 27, 2002, Sapunova was driving along a road about 32 km (20 miles) southwest of Moscow, with her 4-year-old daughter and 55-year-old mother Yelena as passengers, when she spotted a sign near the roadside bearing a slogan variously translated as "Death to Yids", or "Death to the Kikes". The sign had in fact been there for at least a day, but no-one had taken it down. Tatyana was greatly offended by it, stopped her car, and got out to take the sign down. However, it was booby-trapped, and when she pulled on the sign, it set off a bomb, resulting in severe wounds to her legs, hands, and face. She was left with burns and lost sight in one eye.

Her treatment

Sapunova was treated in a hospital in Russia, where she was visited by Rabbi Berel Lazar, one of Russia's two chief rabbis, and the man for whom a Russian security source has claimed was the intended victim. Lazar arranged for her to be flown to Israel for further treatment, for which various Jewish organisations offered to provide money. In Israel, Sapunova received further treatment for burns and eye damage.

The Order of Courage

On June 21, 2002, President Vladimir Putin awarded Sapunova the Order of Courage. Sapunova was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying, "The news was entirely surprising."