70-year-old Doctor Implores Soviet Authorities to Permit Family to Join Her in Israel

The American Jewish Committee today made public a plea by a 70-year-old woman pediatrician who lives on a kibbutz in Israel, in which she asks Soviet authorities for the 28th time to allow her sick daughter, the latter’s ill husband and their two children to leave Russia and to join her in Israel. In releasing the document. Philip E. Hoffman, president of the AJCommittee pointed out that the denial of permission for this family to be reunited was in direct contradiction of the pledge of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, who in Dec. 1966, in Paris, asserted that “with respect to reunions of families, if some families want to meet, or if they want to leave the Soviet Union, then the road is open and no problems exist in this respect.” Hoffman added that this case, though particularly heartrending, was unfortunately typical of hundreds of similar pleas that had gone unanswered. “The Soviet Union is continuing not only to break the unequivocal pledge of its Premier in keeping Jews in Russia against their will, but is exploiting their presence to foment a vast anti-Semitic campaign for its own political purposes,” Mr. Hoffman declared.

The pediatrician, Dr. Fruma Gurwich, who survived the Nazi occupation of Kaunas, Lithuania and who now lives in Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (“Fighters of the Ghettos”), said that her daughter and her family had been refused permission for the last four years by Soviet authorities to leave Kaunas where they live, for Israel. Dr. Gurwich, in her public appeal, pointed out that both her daughter, Etta Levitan, 38 and her son-in-law, Imanuil Levitan, 42, are ill. “The husband has spinal tuberculosis, and my daughter had an abdominal operation some time ago, and needs regular medical care,” she stated. Dr. Gur which listed in her plea the many attempts she has made to Soviet authorities seeking permission for her daughter and her family to leave. “Still believing that the refusal of the Soviet government is perhaps a misunderstanding or even a mistake, I addressed 27 requests for help to different addresses but no answer has been received…I still wish to hope that our dream be fulfilled and I am waiting that my daughter, her husband and their children join us in the near future. This is the only wish I have in my life, the life of a 70-year-old mother. Please do your utmost to help us.”