Inessa and Victor Flerov were detained for two hours by the KGB in Moscow on Wednesday as they demonstrated in front of the Communist Party Central Committee headquarters, it was reported by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. At the time, they were holding up a sign that read “Families Should Not Be Separated.”
Victor Flerov has been on a hunger strike for two weeks protesting Soviet officials’ refusal to allow him to leave for Israel with his wife and two daughters. Soviet officials refuse to allow him to leave because they claim that he has not received a waiver of financial obligation from his father, with whom he has not been in contact for a long time.
Inessa Flerova has been waiting since February for permission to go to Israel to try to donate bone marrow to her gravely ill brother Michael Shirman, whose myeloid leukemia can possibly be treated by a bone marrow transplant from near kin. His mother, Evgenia, who immigrated with him to Israel six years ago, tested incompatible as a marrow donor.
Flerova finally received an exit visa in August, along with her daughters, after herself going on a hunger strike and with the intervention of several American officials and doctors.
Meanwhile, Shirman and 14 other Israelis left Wednesday night for Reykjavik, Iceland, and arrived there Thursday afternoon to participate along with a group of American Soviet Jewry activists in a demonstration on the eve of the summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Israeli group’s trip was sponsored by the Soviet Jewry Public Information Center in Jerusalem.
One of the members of the Israeli group is a doctor to attend to Shirman’s possible needs. Myeloid leukemia leaves its victims ambulatory until the very end of the disease.
Others reportedly in the group are Ilana Fridman, sister of refusenik Ida Nudel; Vladimir Brodsky, recently released former refusenik; Rabbi Benjamin Leyman; Zaloyga Glossman, a former refusenik persecuted for promoting Hebrew-language education in the USSR; and Chaim Margoles, a relative of a refusenik.
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.
