The official noose around unofficial gatherings of Moscow Jews grew tighter as KGB agents yesterday prohibited a mass memorial meeting to victims of the Holocaust in the Ovrazhki woods near Moscow, it was reported today by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.
Under the rubric of closing the woods to the public for “sanitary cleaning,” KGB agents prevented the memorial meeting from being held by prohibiting anyone who could not prove having a summer home in the area from leaving the Ovrazhki train station. In Moscow, at least II families were held under house arrest to thwart their participation in the gathering which annually takes the form of family outings.
According to the SSJ and the UCSJ, the apartment of one of the families, Dr. Vladimir Brodsky’s was ringed by plainclothesmen, and uniformed officers and five police cars. Earlier, several activists were warned by the KGB that the gathering would violate a regulation allegedly passed on April 16 banning unauthorized meetings of seven or more persons in the greenbelt surrounding the capital, and that those who showed up would be jailed for 15-30 days. Last October, almost 1,500 Jews, the largest group ever, celebrated Succoth under the watchful eyes of dozens of police agents.
In an earlier move to halt unofficial gatherings, Soviet authorities shut down a weekly biophysics seminar led by Prof. Alexander Lerner which had been operating for the past six years. Authorities have also sought to intimidate participants in unofficial Hebrew and religious classes and in the children’s kindergarten and have arrested Dr. Viktor Brailovsky, a Jewish cultural and emigration leader. Brailovsky, who was arrested last November, continues to be held in Butyrka Prison. To date, no formal charges have been made against him.
Lerner’s seminar, which continued when other scientific, Hebrew and religious study circles were being shut down by the authorities in recent months, was itself stopped on April 28 when police barred refusenik scholars from gathering at Lerner’s apartment. Lerner has been denied an exit visa to rejoin his daughter in Israel for the past decade.
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