10 U.S. Scientists Join Jewish Colleagues in Moscow to Mark Fifth Anniversary of Seminar

Ten American scientists, including several Jews, joined Soviet refusnik colleagues in celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Moscow Seminar on Collective Phenomena, held last week in the Moscow apartment of Mark Azbel, one of the refusniks, the Committee of Concerned Scientists reported here.

A spokesman said that the seminars have been held on a weekly basis since 1972, first in the apartment of Alexander Voronel and then in the Azbel apartment after Voronel emigrated to Israel. The anniversary conference began on April 17 and ended April 20.

Two of the Americans who came to the Soviet Union to take part in the session, Nobel Laureate George Wald of Harvard, and Dr. Robert Goldberger, chief of the biochemistry laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, were told in Leningrad they could not go to Moscow. Refusnik scientists from cities other, than Moscow also were barred from attending the session, the Committee said.

The seminar on “The Many Body Problem and its Applications in Physics and Other Fields,” was led by Azbel. Other members of the organizing committee were Benjamin Levich, Victor Brailovsky, Alexander Lerner, Benjamin Fain and Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov.

THREATS NOT CARRIED OUT

Two of the scientists, Prof. Bertrand Halpern of Harvard University and James Lander of the Varnie Mellon Institute, were detained at Moscow airport and threatened with expulsion if they attended the session. They attended and were not expelled, the Committee spokesman said. The Committee called the session the first unofficial international conference held in the USSR in more than 50 years.

The Committee said the special session served to acquaint the Soviet scientists with current Western research while the Western scientists had the opportunity to hear the latest ideas of the Soviet participants.

The spokesman said that apart from the warnings to Halpern and Lander, the American scientists had no problems in the Soviet Union and no difficulties in getting visas, in contrast to the refusal of Soviet authorities to give visas to American Jewish academicians to attend a Moscow symposium scheduled for Dec. 19-21, which lasted only a few hours.

The Committee spokesman said the difference in the treatment accorded the two groups of American scientists stemmed from the fact that the December symposium had been scheduled to discuss means of Jews maintaining their Jewish culture in the USSR and all of the invitees were Jews. The special scientific session in Moscow was devoted entirely to science and the Soviet authorities, while opposed to the scientific session because it was held in the home of a refusnik and designed to help the refusniks to keep up with developments in their fields, did not want to hurt on-going American-Soviet scientific exchanges which provide Soviet scientists with information they need and cannot easily acquire otherwise, the spokesman said.