Dr. Iosif Irlin, a world-renowned cancer research specialist, arrived in Israel Sunday with his wife, Svetlana, also a scientist, after a seven-year struggle to leave the Soviet after a seven-year struggle to leave the Soviet Union. Both had been dismissed from their jobs at the Oncological Center of the USSR Academy of Medicine when they first applied for exit visas in April 1979.
Iosif Irlin, 52, held a hunger strike last August, breaking it only when world figures, including Israel’s Chief Rabbis, had promised to intercede on his behalf. The U.S. Association of Oncologists and the French Cancer Society were among the world bodies which organized a campaign to obtain his release from the Soviet Union. “I thank you for your very warm welcome, and for all you have done on my behalf,” he told reporters at a news conference at the Ben Gurion Airport upon his arrival here.
Irlin, who has published over 20 papers on cancer research during the past two decades, is expected to take up a research position at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
In March 1981, while he was trying to leave the USSR, he wrote a letter stating: “I am deprived of my work and put in the position of an outcast. The same is true about my wife. Now I have made up my mind to turn to the international scientific world, to individual colleagues-scientists with the request to help me in the hope that their interference, their appeal to the Soviet government will help me leave the USSR.”
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