Appeals by Soviet Jews: Right to Emigrate; Right to Live As Jews; Release Defendants

The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry today released three impassioned statements by Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel. One was an essay by Lev Sheinkar, a Moscow Hebrew teacher, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned, was arrested there after making a live radio broadcast to Israel by telephone. Another was an appeal for emigration rights addressed to Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev by Arkady Shpilberg of Riga, who was arrested on Aug. 4 and is one of four Jews who will stand trial in Riga tomorrow on charges of anti-Soviet activities. The third document was an appeal to the Soviet Prosecutor General, R. Rudenko by the families of nine Jews who are defendants in the second Leningrad trial which opened on Jan. 6 and was suddenly adjourned. The trial is expected to be resumed later this month. Sheinkar, 23, has been leading a Hebrew class turned over to him by Anatol Dekatov, a Jew who was permitted to emigrate to Israel. Last month he demonstrated outside the Russian Federation Supreme Court on Red Square while hearings were underway on the appeals of the 11 defendants in the first Leningrad hijack trial.

According the paper circulated by the SSSJ, Sheinkar publicly proclaimed himself a Zionist, “not as a matter of party membership, but as a matter of conviction” because he is “a Jew who is convinced that there is no life without Israel either for him or for his people.” Sheinkar accused the Soviet government of “lying when it claims that there is no single Jew wishing to be repatriated.” He wrote, “I demand from the Soviet government that it should allow me to go to Israel for permanent residence. This is my right, a right declared by the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination which, incidentally, has been ratified by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.” He concluded by asking “All honest people to help me.” Shpilberg, 32 an engineer, wrote to Brezhnev on May 4, 1970 that his family had been applying for emigration papers since Nov. 1968 but was consistently turned down without explanation. “I want to live in the land of Israel,” he wrote. “I want my daughter to study in Hebrew, just as Russian children study in Russian and Ukrainian children in Ukrainian. I want my children to learn about the kings, Saul, David and Solomon just like Russian children learn about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. I believe that my children have the same right to hear in school about the prophet Isaiah’s passionate appeal for peace among peoples, as the children of Russian parents hear about the ‘song on Igor’s Legion,'” he wrote.

Shpilberg apparently got no reply from Brezhnev. His arrest the following Aug. was in connection with the alleged plot to hijack a Soviet airliner at Leningrad. The appeal to Rudenko dated Aug. 19, was signed by the mothers, wives or sisters of eight of the Leningrad 11 defendants. It claimed that the arrests on June 15 and Aug. 5, 1970 “were made on the basis of charges that could be the result only of a monstrous mistake. The charges are based on the hijacking of a plane and on anti-Soviet activities. All of those arrested were either home or at their places of employment at the time of the arrest. In all our homes, searches have been made. The articles confiscated consisted of textbooks for the study of the Hebrew language, dictionaries, textbooks of Jewish history, tapes with texts of Jewish poems and songs, letters and postcards from Israel, notices to the effect that letters handed to the addressees in Israel, as well as books in Jewish and all books mentioning the words ‘Israel,’ ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish,’ ” they wrote.