In this capacity, he travelled around the world, meeting with Jewish communities to encourage them to support the Soviet Union in its war against Nazi Germany. While this was useful to Stalin during World War II, after the war, Stalin opposed contacts between Soviet Jews and Jewish communities in non-Communist countries, which he deemed as "bourgeoisie". The Jewish State Theater was closed and the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested – all except for two were eventually executed in the purges shortly before Stalin's death. Mikhoels was the most visible of the intellectual Jewish leadership, and a show trial would have cast aspersions on Stalin's rule. Thus in January 1948, he was assassinated on Stalin's personal orders in Minsk. His death was disguised as a hit-and-run car accident. Mikhoels was taken to a Ministry for State Security (MGB) dacha and killed, along with the theatre critic and MGB informer Golubov-Potapov, under supervision of Stalin's Deputy Minister of State Security Sergei Ogoltsov. Their bodies were then dumped on a road-side in Minsk and run over by a truck. Mikhoels received a state funeral and was buried at the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow. Mikhoels was married to Anastasia Pototskaya, a Russian of Polish descent. He had two daughters from his first marriage to Sara Kantor, Nina and Natalya Vovsi. Mikhoels' cousin Miron Vovsi was Stalin's personal physician. He was arrested during the Doctors' plot affair but released after Stalin's death in 1953, as was Mikhoels' son-in-law, the Polish-born composer Mieczysław Weinberg. In 1983, Mikhoel's daughter, Natalia Vovsi-Mikoels, wrote a biography of her father: "My Father Shlomo Mikhoels: The Life and Death of a Jewish Actor".