N.Y. Official to Represent Jew Barred from U.S. Embassy in Moscow

Daniel Greer, First Deputy Commissioner for Ports and Terminals, said today he will handle legal details here for Leonid Rigerman, a 30-year-old Russian-born Jew who has met Soviet resistance in his attempts to assert his United States citizenship. Mr. Rigerman was scheduled to appear in court in Moscow today on charges of failing to leave the premises of the American Embassy there on Sept. 8 and twice this past Monday, when he tried to see U.S. officials about certifying his citizenship. Mr. Rigerman’s mother, who also lives in Moscow, was born in Brooklyn and wants to return with her son. She had gone to the Soviet Union in 1931 at the insistence of her late husband, a Communist. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has protested to the Soviet Foreign Ministry the barring of Mr. Rigerman from the embassy in violation of a Soviet-American consular treaty. Mr. Rigerman said the policemen called him “an enemy of the Soviet people.” removed him from the embassy steps and bore him away by car. Mr. Greer, who recently spent two and a half weeks in the USSR with Rabbi Steven Riskin of Lincoln Square Synagogue, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Mr. Rigerman, a bearded computer programmer, had signed “a few” petitions demanding emigration rights for Soviet Jews, as a result of which he has been “harassed” at work and followed and bugged “for quite some time.” Mr. Greer, who was not present at the times of the apparent rebuffs to Mr. Rigerman by the Soviet police, emphasized that he would be handling Mr. Rigerman’s citizenship procedures as an individual, not as a member of the Lindsay administration.