 He is married to the daughter of Reb Zusya Hirsh Lyubarsky, a shochet from Kharkiv.Azman was active in the refusenik movement since his youth and received ordination as a shochet (ritual slaughterer) when he was 18.In 1982, the central communist newspaper Pravda, reporting on Jewish refusenik activities in Leningrad, referred to him as "An enemy of Soviet Power."