“I want my husband freed forthwith,” Avital Shcharansky, wife of Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky, declared here yesterday to the cheers of more than 2000 people, including California Governor Jerry Brown and actor Charlton Heston.
Addressing a rally in support of the release of her husband, who was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment on a charge of treason, Mrs. Shcharansky said: “I do not have 13 years to wait. Today, just as Hitler did 40 years ago, the Soviet Union is waiting to see what will be the world’s reaction to the imprisonment of Jews in the Soviet Union.”
In a related action, present and past leaders of bar associations, political figures, and members of the academic community have joined together to form the Los Angeles Committee of Concerned Lawyers for Soviet Jews, it was announced here at a press conference. Chaired by attorneys Paul Ziffren and Marshall B. Grossman, the new group’s members include Attorney General Evelle Younger, former Governor Edmund G. Brown, Congresswoman Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, State Senators David Roberti and Dennis Carpenter, Assemblyman Howard Berman and Julian Dixon, Los Angeles City Attorney Burt Pines, L.A. District Attorney John Van de Kamp and UCLA Law School Dean William Warren.
According to Grossman, the Lawyers’ Committee is necessary because, “The Soviet legal system is used as an instrument to threaten and deny the emigration of Soviet Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel and other countries. If one ‘goes public’ about the refusal and becomes a ‘refusenik’ the Soviet legal system goes into full gear.”
The Lawyers’ Committee, Grossman explained, “will document individual cases of refuseniks within the Soviet Union and analyze Soviet law as it applies to these cases. The Soviet Union is a party to countless international agreements guaranteeing the free right to emigrate, the right to be united with families and similar international rights and guarantees. The Constitution of the Soviet Union contains countless constitutional guarantees including freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.”
The Lawyers’ Committee will speak out whenever violations are found to exist and will help to focus public attention upon the human rights violations within the Soviet Union, Grossman said.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance termed the trials against dissidents in the Soviet Union “deplorable actions.” He said the Carter Administration will “continue to speak out on these questions relating to human dignity and fundamental rights where violations occur, whether it be in the Soviet Union or other places around the world.” Interviewed yesterday on the ABC-TV program “Issues and Answers” the Secretary also said that the recent Soviet actions against dissidents have set back Soviet American relations.
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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.
