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
The blatant abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union already has a long history. Special psychiatric hospitals as prisons for “political criminals” were first established in the late 1930s by Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet Prosecutor-General and ringmaster of the Stalinist show trials as a way of dealing with some of the victims provided by Nikolai … Read more
Latest reports from Minsk indicate that the KGB investigation of Yefim Davidovich-Gedalya Kipnis case is moving to a close and that a big show-trial of Jews will take place shortly. On February 1, the KGB instigated a second series of searches of Jewish homes in Minsk, during which all books in Hebrew and Yiddish about … Read more
The trial of Lazar Liubarsky at Rostov-on-Don in February has received wide publicity in the free world. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lurk an unknown number of similar cases of Jews arrested on trumped-up charges, and perhaps brought to trial, with the aim of discouraging others from attempting … Read more