“We will never forget you — not even for one day,” Premier Menachem Begin told Yosef Mendelevich when they met last Friday at the Premier’s office here. Begin recalled that he, too, had spent some time in the Soviet “Gulag” camps.
But Mendelevich, the last of the imprisoned Jewish defendants in the 1970 Leningrad hijack trial to be released, seemed unconvinced. He told television viewers last night that he felt insufficient interest was shown in Prisoners of Zion while they languish in Soviet camps.
“My impression is that Israelis are fantastic in organizing receptions when a Prisoner of Zion arrives here, but they take little interest while the prisoner is still languishing in captivity,” Mendelevich, who arrived in Israel last Wednesday, told the TV interviewer in near-faultless Hebrew. He said that he and his fellow-prisoners rarely felt that effective public action was taken on their behalf.
URGES CONTINUED PUBLIC ACTION
He called for public action on behalf of the two non-Jewish participants in the Leningrad escape attempt, Yuri Fedorov and Aleksei Murzhenko, who, he said are still detained “in the most harsh conditions.” He also mentioned Ida Nudel, Vladimir Slepak, Iosif Begun, Victor Brailovsky and Anatoly Shcharansky.
Brailovsky, a leading activist of the Soviet Jewish emigration movement and editor of the journal, “Jews in the USSR,” had been arrested last November in Moscow, Mendelevich noted. “Did you do anything about it?” he challenged the TV interviewer and the viewers. He said “Nathan” Shcharansky was loved by all his fellow-prisoners for his “tzadik-like” qualities and that this love triggered even greater hostility on the part of the prison authorities. Mendelevich’s release, however, has sparked hope in some Soviet aliya circles in Israel that the freeing of Nudel from Siberian exile might also now be close at hand.
A day after his arrival from the USSR, Mendelevich called on “Every Jew in the United States to do whatever is in his power” to help in the campaign to free other Prisoners of Zion.
At a press conference at Allon Shvut, the West Bank home of his sister Rivka Dori, Mendelevich also called on Jews the world over to step up the public struggle. The days of quiet diplomacy were over he said. He recited from the Passover Hagaddah that God had taken the Jews from Egypt “with a strong hand and firm arm.”
Mendelevich said his last hunger strike in the prison camp had lasted 55 days and was triggered by the confiscation of a book from which he was teaching a fellow Jewish prisoner Hebrew and Jewish history. He said he was often punished though not physically beaten, because he insisted on observing the Sabbath and other religious rites. He said that not a single one of the thousands of letters sent him from around the world had been passed on to him in prison.
“Thank God, this is everything we hoped for Yosef, for him to come to Jerusalem,” Rivka Dori told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I want to tell all the people who worked for his release that their efforts succeeded,” she said. “I am sorry that Ida Nudel and Anatoly Shcharansky are not out. Now we have to work for them. I have seen Avital Shcharansky (Anatoly’s wife) lately and she is very sad.”
PUBLIC RALLIES HELPED RELEASE MENDELEVICH
Dori stressed her belief that demonstrations of concern and public attention were crucial in securing her brother’s release. “In the past few days people throughout the world have pressured the Soviet Union on his behalf,” she said. She and her family were particularly concerned because they had been notified last week by the Soviet authorities that he had been moved from his prison camp.
Mendelevich’s second sister, Eva Lecizl of Elkana on the West Bank, had told a United Jewish Appeal American Jewish journalists’ mission just a few hours before news of his release came through that she had not heard from her brother since November. “I appeal to you to publicize my brother’s cry as strongly as you can,” she said, “and to ascertain his conditions is he still alive?”
Mendelevich told the press last Thursday that his health was not so good but he was confident that doctors in Israel would soon restore him to top condition.
Meanwhile, relatives of Shcharansky today expressed growing concern over his medical condition following more than two months of not hearing from him. His wife called on President Yitzhak Navon to lead a redoubled effort on his behalf. Shcharansky has been reported to be in failing health. His mother, Ida Milgrom, in a telephone call from Moscow, said she had been told by prison authorities that technical problems were delaying letters from him and this, she said, had heightened her concern.
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.
