Soviet Scientists End Hunger Strike

Six Jewish scientists broke a 15-day fast in Moscow last night. They ended their hunger strike, undertaken to protest the denial of visas, after repeated telephone appeals by supporters in Israel, the U.S. and Britain to call off the fast before their health was seriously impaired.

Prof. Yuval Neeman, president of Tel Aviv University and chairman of the Academic Committee for Soviet Jewry, assured them by telephone last night that the whole world was by now aware of their determination to fight for exit permits.

Anatoly Leibgrober, a 24-year-old mathematician from Moscow who had Joined his six older colleagues in the hunger strike two weeks ago, arrived in Israel this morning. Leibgrober was unexpectedly granted a visa last week and ordered to leave Russia in three days. He ended his fast at that time, with the agreement of his colleagues Asked why he was the only one of the original seven hunger strikers permitted to emigrate Leibgrober replied that there is no semblance of logic in Soviet actions with regard to Jews.

He said he had joined the hunger strike because “I was convinced that while Brezhnev is in the U.S. we should take some action in Moscow so that the world would know the real situation.”

Leibgrober said he lost ten pounds during the week in which he subsisted on water. He said the others probably have lost more weight. He said that during the fast, no doctors visited the strikers and no pressure was put on them by Soviet authorities to discontinue their demonstration. “Not a word was mentioned in Russia about the strike,” Leibgrober said.

APPEAL TO NOBEL COMMITTEE

(Three Jewish scientists in Tblisi, Soviet Georgia, have appealed to the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm to intervene on behalf of Yevgeny Levich, a young Russian-Jewish scientist who has been sent to a military base in Siberia despite the fact that he suffers from a serious stomach ailment.

(According to a report reaching the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in London, the appeal was signed by Dr. Gregory Goldstein, a physicist, Dr. Issai Goldstein, a mathematician and Dr. Y. Hellman, a physicist. The Goldstein brothers were recently threatened with imprisonment for alleged anti-Soviet statements.)

SUPPORT FOR JACKSON AMENDMENT

(In Chicago yesterday. Rep. Samuel H. Young (R.Ill.) declared that many Congressmen “are not satisfied” with the Soviet suspension of the education tax “and intend to press” for passage of the Jackson and Mills-Vanik bills that would make U.S. trade concessions to Russia conditional on the removal of emigration restrictions.

(Rep. Young addressed a meeting of the Chicago Region of the Zionist Organization of America. He said that the U.S. “must devise appropriate wording in our foreign trade legislation that will permit affirmative action on trade but, at the same time, maintain our devotion to the cause of freedom of emigration for Soviet Jews.)

(In New York, Jacob Stein, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, In a statement Issued today strongly affirmed the support of the Conference of the Jackson Amendment and the Mills Yanik bill. He expressed the belief that this important legislation will continue to alleviate the plight of Soviet Jews. Continuing, he said: “The Jackson Amendment must be supported in the most effective way to bring about the desired policy of free emigration.”

(“The general air of friendship and the expressed desire for detente must be translated into positive action for Soviet Jews, so that their basic human rights be granted without delay,” Stein concluded.)

(Jewish Defense League chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco staged sit-ins at the American Red Cross offices in those cities to demand that the International Red Cross insist on conducting an inspection of prisons in the Soviet Union where Jews are incarcerated.)