Vladimir Lazaris of Moscow, a major Jewish emigration activist, has received permission to leave for Israel, according to the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ). The 30-year-old patent attorney, who first applied to emigrate in 1973, will be rejoining his wife, Esther, and six-year-old son, Raphael, in Israel.
Lazaris’ Jewish activism spanned a range of issues, from an unofficial legal observer at the 1974 “show trial” of Dr. Mikhail Stern in Vinnitsa to editorship of the “samizdat” journal, “Jews in the USSR.” He has often been threatened with imprisonment for “treason” or “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and was held under house arrest as one of the organizers of last December’s unofficial, aborted symposium on Jewish culture in the USSR. In the past few weeks, he has been under threat of trial for “parasitism.”
Meanwhile, the SSSJ and UCSJ have learned that Kishinev activist Yuri Shechtman, a 31-year-old electrical engineer, has also been granted on exit visa for Israel.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
