— Representatives of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and the Jewish Identity Center (JIC) have issued a joint statement calling upon Jewish organizations, particularly synagogues and yeshivas, to spotlight the critical condition of Prisoner of Conscience Iosif Mendelevich who has been conducting a hunger strike for almost three months in the Perm labor camp in the Soviet Union.
An Orthodox Jew, Mendelevich recently related in a letter to his sister in Israel that he is “between life and death” and is forced to work on the Sabbath as an iron cutter which he had previously been able to avoid by working additional hours during the week, the two groups reported.
They also said that a Passover Haggadah that had been gotten through to him from the outside, along with a few other items of religious comfort which sustained him through intolerable conditions of his long imprisonment, were recently confiscated along with his personal letters.
In the joint statement, Glen Richter, chairman of the SSSJ, and Shifra Hoffman, member of the JIC’s executive board, declared: “As we join in gratitude to God for the release of the hostages in Iran, we must simultaneously bring to world attention the plight of Iosif Mendelevich whose ‘crime’ of wanting to emigrate to his homeland, Israel, has made him a hostage of the oppressive Soviet regime for 10 years.”
Richter and Hoffman urged all Jews as well as all people “for whom the concept of freedom is dear” to participate in the Iosif Mendelevich Remembrance Day at the Isaiah Wall opposite the United Nations on Feb.8.
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