Rita Hauser, chairwoman of the National Lawyers Committee for Soviet Jews, has sent a telegram to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington asking that a committee member be allowed to attend the trial of the Soviet Jewish activist, Victor Polsky, scheduled to start tomorrow.
Noting that Polsky, a physicist, has been charged with “operating an automobile in an unsafe manner,” Ms. Hausner wrote: “From evidence which we have been provided with, it appears to us that Polsky is innocent of all these charges, and that, if he is permitted to call witnesses, he will be proven innocent.”
Ms. Hausner’s telegram also noted: “This case has attracted considerable attention and it would serve the interest of both detente and international justice for an impartial observer from our committee to be permitted in the courtroom. As you know, there is a precedent for this as regards Soviet observers in American courtrooms.”
In March, Polsky was involved in an auto accident in Moscow. Prosecutors held that he was criminally responsible because his car injured a 19-year-old woman. Yet the initial testimony indicated that the woman had thrown herself in front of the car in a suicide attempt. However, since March hospital records have disappeared or been altered, and the woman, the ambulance driver and other witnesses suddenly, changed their testimony. The woman’s father, Col. A.Y. Zhukova, is a high official in the secret police and her mother works for the Communist Party.
The National Conference on Soviet Jewry has learned that in a petition filed several weeks ago Soviet Jews expressed fear that Polsky would be brought to trial because the Soviets “wanted to make an example of him.” Polsky was fired from his job after applying to go to Israel in 1968.
Meanwhile, in a demonstration sponsored by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry at noon tomorrow, a group of costumed professional actresses will transform the steps of the New York Public Library into a surrealistic open air “courtroom” depicting the arrest and trial of Polsky. Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold chairman of the Greater New York Conference, will introduce the dramatization.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
