Leading Moscow Jewish activists Inna and Igor Uspensky and their son, Slava, who were refused exit visas for eight years, have received permission to emigrate.
But Igor’s 77-year-old mother, Irina Voronkevitch, a retired biologist, has not yet won permission to leave the Soviet Union, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry reported.
Slava, whose full name is Viacheslav, will leave soon for Israel to join his wife and infant daughter, whom he has never seen.
But his parents will not leave without Igor’s mother, according to the Uspenskys’ cousin, Anna Kholmiansky, whom the National Conference reached by telephone at her home in the West Bank suburb of Ma’aleh Adumim.
The information was corroborated by Lynn Singer, executive director of the Long Island Committee for Soviet Jews. Kholmiansky said that Slava might leave within the month to join his wife, Alla, who has lived with Kholmiansky since her arrival in Israel last March.
The couple were married in a secret religious ceremony last year. They wanted their child born in Israel.
Voronkevitch has been told by the OVIR emigration bureau in Moscow that she must now obtain documents from her former work place in order to receive security clearance.
The Uspenskys were originally refused permission to emigrated in March 1981, because Inna’s brother, Professor Alexander Ioffe, allegedly had access to state secrets.
Ioffe, a mathematician, was permitted to emigrate in January 1988. Following this, Slava applied to emigrate independent of his parents.
His application was refused last August, this time because of his grandmother’s alleged exposure to state secrets.
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