A Jewish student in Moscow was detained by the KGB yesterday after a search of his a home turned up pamphlets on Jews and Judaism, It was reported today by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Ilia Glezer, a post-doctoral student in biological sciences at Moscow State University, was to be held for three days while the KGB decided whether to arrest him, the Conference said.
According to the report, seven police agents knocked on Glezer’s door and identified themselves as postal representatives. On being admitted, they presented a search warrant signed by a KGB investigator surnamed Goshkov, asked Glezer to hand over all his “anti-Soviet literature,” then searched his home for six hours. While confiscating the pamphlets, the agents did not touch several Hebrew-instruction books. The police telephoned Glezer’s mother that night to advise her they were detaining him.
The NCSJ also reported that the condition of Raiza Palatnik, the 35-year-old Odessa librarian serving a two-year sentence for distributing “anti-Soviet” literature has worsened. She has been complaining of heart pains and bleeding gums, and has refused to wear her number tag in protest against her treatment in a criminal-incarceration prison at Dnieprepetrovsk in the East-Central Ukraine. Her protest, the Conference said, caused her to be denied her sugar rations.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Jewish poet Meyer Charats of Czernowitz who has applied unsuccessfully for a visa to Israel three times, has been assailed in an open letter in a local newspaper.
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