Actions Launched on Behalf of Moscow Jewish Hunger Strikers

A group of about 30 young Soviet Jewish activists began a hunger strike today in front of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations to express sympathy with the hunger strikers in Moscow. The group was led by Alexi Tummerman, 24 a former Moscow Jewish activist who himself had been arrested several times in the USSR for his dissident activities. Tummerman, who recently emigrated to Israel and is in New York for a visit, was a friend of the three Moscow hunger strikers. He led the group here with a sign stating: “Let my friends go.”

According to the sympathy hunger strikers here, their action will continue until the Soviet hunger strikers–David Azbel, Vitaly Rubin, Vladimir Galatsky and Ida Nudel who joined them two days ago–end their action. The strikers here include members of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. More people are expected to join this group as the hunger strike continues.

Meanwhile, an appeal to the women of the world from Rakhil Azbel, Natalia Galatsky and Inessa Akserlord-Rubin, the wives of the hunger strikers, to “help us in the struggle for our rights” was released here by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. The appeal noted: “Just like you, we are first and foremost occupied in every-day concern about our children and our near ones. But while you can be unworried about their future, we expect every day that the Soviet authorities send new repressions on our families.”

The three wives said further: “Our husbands have been practically deprived of the possibility to work and that means of the possibility to provide for our families. The exhausting struggle for their human rights deprives them of their strength and their health. We have already seen that the Soviet authorities have no leniency onther for the age or for the state of health of those Jews who have applied for emigration from our country.” The wives said nonetheless that they had not tried to dissuade their husbands from the hunger strike “but we even help them as we can.”

8 U.S. ARTISTS APPEAL FOR GALATSKY

As the appeal was made public, eight American artists cabled Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, with a copy to the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, supporting Galatsky’s plea for an exitvisa. “We are deeply concerned for our fellow artist, Vladimir Galatsky, now in the 12th day of his hunger strike in Moscow protesting in desperation denial of emigration rights by Soviet authorities.” the message said.

As Western artists “many of whom have roots in other countries.” they urged the Soviet government “to end the suffering” of Galatsky and his fellow hunger strikers by recognizing their right to emigrate according to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which the Soviet Union has ratified. The cable was signed by Red Grooms, John Koch, Alexander Dobkin, Philip Pearlstein, Chaim Gross, Jack Levine, Ruth Gikow and Robert Gwathmey.