Israel is calling for world-wide intercession with the Soviet Union on behalf of Aleksandr Paritsky, a 43-year-old Jewish engineer and emigration activist, who went on trial in Kharkov yesterday on charges of “disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda.”
The Knesset issued an appeal to the Soviet authorities yesterday to release Paritsky and permit him to emigrate to Israel. At the same time, it urged other parliaments and world public opinion to support his cause. Leon Dulzin, chairman of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency Executives, said Paritsky’s trial was part of Soviet moves to shut down completely all avenues of exit for Soviet Jews. He said world public opinion must condemn the persecution of Soviet Jews who want to emigrate to Israel.
Paritsky and his wife, Polina, who live in the Ukraine, applied to emigrate in 1976 but were rejected. They have been in the forefront of the Jewish emigration and culture movement in Kharkov and were among the founders of the “free Jewish university” in that city which held informal seminars to keep refuseniks and their children abreast of developments in Jewish and academic life.
REPORT ON FIRST DAY OF TRIAL
(The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, reported from New York today information they received from Kharkov on the first day of Partisky’s trial. The three charges against him are: writing letters to Soviet officials; forcing his daughter, Dorima, 15, to write a school composition stating she had two homelands, one Russia and the other Israel, writing a letter to his brother, Isaac, in Israel, which was confiscated before it was mailed and which the authorities claim he asked for money. The letter contained no such request, the SSSJ said.
(No one except Paritsky’s sister-in-law was permitted in the court room when the trial opened. His wife was admitted only at the end of the session. Partisky has no attorney and defended himself. Another refusenik, Dr. Evgeny Chudnovsky, a 33-year-old physicist who wanted to testify in court, was placed under house arrest.)
After the Knesset voted yesterday to intervene in Paritsky’s behalf — a resolution opposed by only one Communist MK — Likud Knesset member Ronnie Milo observed: “We know very well how bad the situation of Anatoly Shcharansky is at the moment. We are afraid that Paritsky will meet the same fate.” Shcharansky, an activist arrested for alleged treason and slandering the Soviet Union, is in the fourth year of a 13-year prison sentence.
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.
