BOSTON — Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli political figure, came here to speak at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate and honor the memory of the late senator, who among all his other legacies turned out to have played what Sharansky described as a significant role in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry.

During Sharansky’s nine years in Soviet prisons, when his wife Avital came to Washington to advocate on his behalf, her meetings often took place “in Ted Kennedy’s office,” Mr. Sharansky said.

Mr. Sharansky said Kennedy had played an “absolutely unique and special role” as the first American politician to meet with Soviet dissidents and “refuseniks,” as those whose applications to emigrate had been turned down were known. The Democratic senator from Massachusetts ventured out from his Moscow hotel room late at night in the 1970s to a professor’s apartment, where there had gathered a small group of dissidents and Jews seeking to leave Russia.

One of them, Boris Katz, who eventually escaped to America and who was in the audience Wednesday night, tells the rest of the story in an oral history interview available at the Kennedy Institute web site: “It was around midnight when a big cortege of cars pulled up, with police blinkers and black limos and all of that, and he was there. This was the fifth or sixth floor. Kennedy came on the elevator with a bunch of security men. They all entered the room, and he turned to them and said, ‘It’s a private meeting. Could you please leave?’ That was the first time in my life that I had heard anybody talk like that to the KGB. [laughs] And they left! They looked incredulous, but they left.”

Once Kennedy did it and managed to avoid being arrested, such visits became regular practice for American congressmen and senators visiting the U.S.S.R.

The Kennedy anecdote had a bittersweet sense to it, as Mr. Sharansky seemed to touch on in his remarks. In Ted Kennedy’s day, he said, an effort to help Israel in Congress might have involved 15 Democrats and five Republicans. Today the standard proportion would be reversed, a situation that Mr. Sharansky urged Democrats to remedy.

In today’s Middle East, Mr. Sharansky said, “Iran wants to lead, Russia wants to lead, and America doesn’t want to lead.”

The overall arc of Mr. Sharansky’s story has always been an inspirational one — a prisoner in solitary confinement in the Gulag archipelago, separated from his wife, finally winning his freedom, being reunited with his wife, becoming the deputy prime minister of Israel and an elected member of its parliament, seeing the Soviet Union defeated partly because of the human rights movement of which he was a hero.

But Mr. Sharansky’s remarks also highlighted some of the paradoxes, complexities, and frustrations he has confronted since arriving in Israel in 1986, 30 years ago. Mr. Sharansky recalled that Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War triggered in him, as a young man, an initial interest in Jewish history and identity. Today, he said, Europe demands that Israel return to its 1967 borders “as soon as possible,” while expressing little if any concern about the Islamic State’s eradication of the border between Syria and Iraq. In an Israeli withdrawal from territory, he said, “the competition will be whether Hezbollah will control it, whether Hamas will control it, or whether ISIS will control it.”

Mr. Sharansky said he had spoken to every American president from Reagan to Clinton about Saudi Arabia and human rights and was met with answers focusing on “oil and stability.” Likewise, when he spoke of the “most awful crimes” of Syrian dictators Assad and the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, American presidents explained to him that it was in America’s highest national security interest that they remain “dictators forever.”

Mr. Sharansky said he rejected that. “Our business is always, in all the regimes, to support democratic dissidents,” he said. Mr. Sharansky was interviewed by veteran Boston journalist Dan Rea and introduced by Kennedy’s widow, Victoria, in a room that is a full-scale replica of the Senate chamber. Israel’s consul general to New England, Yehuda Yaakov, gave introductory remarks.

In response to a question from me about how he viewed the Iraq War, Mr. Sharansky said he saw it in two stages. In the first stage, removing the dictator, “America had no problem. There was no resistance.” In the second stage, “America didn’t give one minute of thought what to do next.” That lack of planning he described as “absolutely irresponsible.”

Mr. Sharansky’s current job is chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which is responsible for ingathering and absorbing immigrants to the Jewish state, including a rising number — 10,000 in 2015 — from Europe. He replied to a question about whether there is a future for Jews in France by asking rhetorically, “Is there a future for France in France?” and responding, with reassuring humor, “There is always a future for France in Israel.”

Mr. Sharansky warned that there are now “tens of millions of citizens of Europe who don’t share the values of Western democracy.” Israel, by contrast, was rebuilt by Jews who had understood democracy for a thousand years through the idea of Talmud study and its “on one hand, on the other hand” approach of “no final answers.”

Whatever the strains on Israel in the international arena or the tensions or erosion in the relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party or the American administration as it has evolved since Kennedy’s death in 2009, Mr. Sharansky did voice some confidence. “We are simply destined to be partners,” he said. “In the long run, the free world has only one weapon — the desire of people to live in freedom.”

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com.