About 35 people gathered in front of the offices of Aeroflot, the Soviet airlines, here yesterday to protest the trial of Soviet Jewish activist Victor Brailovsky. Brailovsky, a cybernetist, is charged with crimes against the State and defaming the Soviet Union and its social system. The trial reportedly opened in Moscow this morning as scheduled.
Prof. William Glaberson, physicist from Rutgers University and a member of the Committe of Concerned Scientists read a statement outside the Aeroflot office saying that the charges for which Brailovsky is on trial “are the culmination of years of official harrassment brought on by his application to emigrate to Israel.” Brailovsky first applied for an exit visa in 1972.
Brailovsky had been the founder of the Moscow Sunday Scientific Seminar, weekly meetings and international conferences for scientists. Glaberson, who has participated in the Sunday Seminar said they are “purely scientific, adding that hundreds of other Western participants can attest to the fact that “nothing can be construed as defamation of the Soviet State.”
Others participating in the demonstration included representatives of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, the Council of Jewish Organizations in Civil Service, Pioneer Women, the United Synagogue of America, Hashomer Hatzair and the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.
In addition to the demonstration, which succeeded in closing the Aeroflot office just before noon, preventing individuals from entering the offices, hundred of telegrams directed to Soviet officials and to the Reagan Administration have been dispatched in the last few days, according to the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.
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.
