Colin ShindlerThe festival of Purim was celebrated by many Soviet Jews last week. For them the figure of Haman had a more modern connotation. As Ovsei Gelman from Tbilisi, Georgia, put it in a message to a friend in London: On the eve of Purim, which symbolises the vain efforts of all enemies of the Jewish … Read more
LAST week saw two very similar human rights protests in the USSR, but with completely opposite aims. Well-known dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Maximov stated that Solzhenitsyn should not have been expelled from the Soviet Union and insisted on his right to remain. Simultaneously. Jewish members of the Moscow intelligentsia began an indefinite … Read more
Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you not even suspect that the day already dawned outside. It is longer that stifled, that sombre, Irrevocable time when you expelled Akhmatova in the same servile manner It Is not … Read more
Among the many tragic stories of Soviet Jewish prisoners, the case of Yankel Leibovich Khansis is one of the saddest. he was first sentenced in August 1970 to two and a half years imprisonment on a hooliganism charge. in March 1972 he was arrested again and at the trial held some nine months later, was … Read more
US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was greeted in Moscow with appeals from Jews asking him to raise the emigration issue during his present talks. Ostensibly Dr Kissinger’s visit to Moscow is to talk about American proposal at the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) in Geneva. Arrangements for President Nixon’s planned visit to the Soviet … Read more
A most remarkable letter has reached London from the “strict regime” labour camp no 35 in Perm. The author of the letter is Hillel Butman who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in the second Leningrad trial nearly three years age. It is addressed to Grigory VertIlb, Butman’s one-time friend and compatriot in the Exodus … Read more
An old anti-Semitic stereotype in the Soviet Union used to be the hook-nosed Jewish drug-pusher. In the minds of the populace, this became yet another aspect of anti-Jewish folklore, another “truth” to characterise the rootless cosmopolitans in their midst. In a more modern sitting, the drug libel has been revived in the USSR. Recently two … Read more
The full written appeal of Alexander Feldman’s lawyer, I. S. Yezhov against the three-and- a half year sentence reached London earlier this month. A moving legal document, it highlights the absurdity of the charges against Feldman and shows what an honest Soviet lawyer is up against in a KGB-rigged trial. Feldman was alleged to have … Read more
The rejection by the Ukrainian Appeal Court in Kiev on December 27 of Alexander Feldman’s appeal against his sentence to three and a half years in a forced labour camp for “hooliganism” does not provide much encouragement for a change of attitude by the Soviet authorities in 1974. The KGB’s offensive against the Jewish exodus … Read more
It is clear that during the past few weeks there has been a definite tightening of the screw in repressions against the Jewish movement. Refusals of exit visas to would-be emigrants at the Moscow Emigration Office have multiplied. Specialists and professionals have been particularly prominent amongst the refusals. Leonid Byelpolsky is a medical doctor specialising … Read more