Grigory Geisha a Leningrad activist who completed a two-year sentence in a labor camp for draft evasion, has been released and returned home, it was reported here by Theodore Mann, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Geishas was interned at the Uhkta labor camp, an isolated region more than 900 miles from his home and family in Leningrad, Mann said.
Geishas first submitted his application for permission to emigrate to Israel in December 1978 and was immediately expelled from an institute where he was a second-year student. Ordered to appear before a military draft board in May 1980, he refused on the grounds that he had been denied the right to an education and that military service might expose him to state secrets, thus delaying his emigration even further. He was arrested in July, 1980 and tried and convicted one month later.
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.
