The issuance of visas to Jews, with or without payment of the education head tax, has been suspended since yesterday in Moscow, and possibly other Soviet cities, without explanation, it was learned today from telephone conversations with Jewish sources in Moscow.
According to the informants, Jews summoned to the ovir (visa office) in Moscow yesterday to pick up their visas were denied them on “technical grounds” although they had paid the tax and made the other necessary arrangements. Officials at the ovir did not offer an alternative date for the issuance of visas and no Jews were called to the visa office today, the sources said.
Moscow Jews were reported to be fearful that the brief period recently in which a number of Jewish families were granted visas without paying the exorbitant “diploma tax” is over. “We shall have to wait and see how things develop,” one source said. According to rough estimates, about 170 Jews, 100 of them from Moscow, were exempted from the tax.
The sources said that the special committee set up by Russian authorities to hear pleas for exemption has ceased to function. Officials at the ovir were reported to have told Jewish applicants that they did not know when the committee would meet again if at all.
(In Jerusalem, two 26-year-old Soviet Jewish emigres who said they spent two years at the Potma forced labor camp, held a hunger strike at the Western Wall to protest conditions at the camp and to demand the release of a fellow inmate, Silva Zalmanson Kuznetsov who is reportedly in bad health. The two emigres said they were permitted to leave the Soviet Union after each paid an education tax of more than $7000.
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