Four Jewish women staged a rare public protest in downtown Moscow today and were immediately arrested, Jewish sources said. The four women, wives of Moscow Jewish engineers who had been refused permission to emigrate to Israel, demonstrated outside the Soviet visa office, the sources said. They carried signs reading “Let My People Go.”
Minutes after the protest began, KGB (Soviet secret police) agents hustled the women into the visa office and arrested them. The women were taken away in unmarked police cars, the sources said. The women are the wives of Jewish activists arrested briefly in Moscow June 17 because the Soviet government feared they were planning demonstrations during Soviet Party Leader Leonid I. Brezhnev’s visit to the U.S. They were identified by telephone from Moscow as Nina Balfour, Valeria Krizhak, Olga Rutman and Rima Peskin.
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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.
