Ida Nudel, who personified the Cold War struggle of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel, died Sept. 14 in Israel, where she had lived since 1987. She was 90.

Ms. Nudel, an economist, became known as the “Guardian Angel” for mounting a one-woman campaign to maintain communication and monitor the condition of her fellow “Prisoners of Zion” — Soviet Jews, known informally as refuseniks, who, like her had been imprisoned or persecuted for seeking permission to emigrate. She was banished to Siberia in 1978 after unfurling a banner from her Moscow apartment that read, “K.G.B., Give Me My Visa to Israel.”

Ms. Nudel won her 16-year battle against the Soviet bureaucracy when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Communist Party general secretary, relented. “I was born here and lived here for 40 years, and you can’t deprive me of my childhood, youth or adulthood,” she wrote of Russia in her memoir, A Hand in the Darkness. “But I am also part of another land, which is the dream of my people.” She elaborated in 1987, when she first landed in Tel Aviv. “For me, it is the moment of my life. I am at home. I am on the soil of my people. Now I am an absolutely free person among my own people.”