An unusual bridal party held a mock wedding ceremony yesterday at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations There was a bride, bridesmaid and flower girls–all in appropriate wedding attire. But there was no bridegroom.
The ceremony, coordinated by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, served to dramatize the continuing plight of Ida Nudel, a Soviet Jewish woman known the world over as the “guardian angel” of the Soviet Jewry movement. Similar demonstrations are being held on her behalf throughout the world during “International Ida Nudel Week.”
The bridal party left bouquets of white flowers at the Mission for the wife of Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik, and urged her to help reunite Ida and her husband, who is now living in Israel. Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams, Conference chairman, explained that the “wedding ceremony” was designed to call public attention to the fact that only three months after Ida was married to Yuli Brind, a former “prisoner of conscience,” the couple was forcibly separated.
Brind and Ida’s sister Helena–her only relatives–received permission to emigrate from the USSR to Israel in the spring of 1975, but Ida was forced to remain in the USSR. She has since been the target of harassment and threats of imprisonment. Ida, 45, is an economist who was dismissed from her job at Moscow’s Institute of Planning and Production when she first applied for an exit visa in 1971.
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