Judy Says She Will Try Again to Get a Visa for a Civil Wedding to Gavriel in Moscow

Judy Silver Shapiro told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency yesterday that she was seeking an appointment with the Soviet Consul in Washington next week in a further attempt to obtain a visa to Russia to attend a civil marriage to Moscow activist Gavriel Shapiro. The Shapiros were married in an Orthodox ceremony in Moscow June 8 and in a subsequent proxy service in Washington. Shapiro was sentenced Wednesday to one year’s corrective labor on draft-evasion charges, Mrs. Shapiro said she had urged the State Department today to "support my husband’s Moscow attorney’s appeal," scheduled for Aug. 2.

Mrs. Shapiro asserted to the JTA that she was "not aware of any personal intervention on the part of President Nixon" to save Shapiro from sentencing. On Tuesday she complained that "the President is too busy with the multi-billion-dollar trade deals with the Soviet Union" to help her husband "and others like him." But on Wednesday, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, Interreligious Affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, told the JTA that "the White House" and other governmental circles had "made direct and forceful interventions" for Shapiro.

Soviet officials were urged by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry to allow Mrs. Shapiro to join her husband, who will be allowed to live at home while serving his sentence. Rabbi Gilbert Klaperman, conference chairman, also asked that the Shapiros be permitted "to emigrate to Israel at the end of his one-year term, where they can fulfill their desires to live as Jews together." He described the judicial proceedings against Shapiro and other Jewish activists as "a mockery of justice."

(The Shapiro trial was marked by a quiet assembly of some 70 Jews outside the court and the admission to the trial of only seven relatives and friends, according to reports to London from Jewish sources in Russia. The latter included Gavriel’s parents, Ita Nashpitz, wife of Mark Nashpitz, also charged with draft evasion, and activist Vladimir Zaslavski. Both the judge and defense attorney were women — a person identified as Galkina and Sofia Vassilievna Kalestratova respectively.)