International Scientific Seminar Scheduled in Voronel’s Moscow Home

An unprecedented international scientific seminar, sponsored by an international advisory board of eminent scientists including eight Nobel Laureates, and Tel Aviv University, will be held in Moscow July 1-5 in the apartment of a prominent Jewish physicist, Alexander Voronel. The announcement was made at a news conference here by the seminar’s international secretaries: Professors Edward Stern, University of Washington, Seattle; Norman Chigier, University of Sheffield, England; and Raymond Orbach, Tel Aviv University.

The seminar has been organized in response to the “desperate need of persecuted Soviet Jewish scientists for contact with the scientific world,” the professors said. These scientists have been dismissed from their scientific positions and ostracized by official Soviet science because of their desire to emigrate to Israel. In his introduction, Stern explained that the “seminar was born to help these scientists break out of scientific isolation…it was conceived in an effort to maintain their scientific viability and to publicize their plight.”

Two members of the international board of sponsors, Prof. Yuval Neeman, a physicist and president of Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Sylvan Schweber, professor of physics at Brandeis University. Waltham, Mass., whose scientific works have been published in the USSR, said that sixty-eight papers have already been submitted for presentation at the seminar on physics. Both reaffirmed support “for our Soviet colleagues’ struggle to exercise their internationally recognized right to freedom of emigration and freedom of inquiry and association, of which they have been deprived by the Soviet government.”