I.S. Ezhov, the lawyer for Aleksandr Feldman of Kiev, who put in a strong appeal against Feldman’s sentence, has been forcibly retired, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry reported today. The SSSJ reported that the Cincinnati Council on Soviet Jewry learned by phone that Ezhov was retired after a six-hour hearing in Kiev. Feldman’s father and brother are now looking for another lawyer, according to the SSSJ. Feldman was sentenced last Nov. 23 to 3 1/2 years in a labor camp on a charge of hooliganism.
Recently Ezhov’s appeal was made public in the United States after it was smuggled out of the USSR by New York City Council President Paul O’Dwyer and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton. Ezhov, in his brief, said he “considered the verdict as incorrect and subject to being repealed.” The court investigation, he wrote was “conducted solely one-sidedly, superficially and not objectively” in violation of the Ukrainian criminal code.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.