Benjamin Levich, a leading Jewish scientist in the Soviet Union has appealed to international medical organizations to help his son, Evgeny, who he said was taken away to an army camp above the Artic Circle despite an undiagnosed tumor in his intestine, it was reported here this weekend by Jewish sources.
Levich, an internationally known electrochemist, said his son was abducted into the army only because he requested a visa to emigrate to Israel, as did the rest of the family. The elder Levich, a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, is the highest ranking Jewish scientist to request exit papers.
At a press conference in his Moscow apartment, Levich showed what he said were clinical records of his son, a 25-year-old astrophysicist. The records showed that the younger Levich has chronic colitis and diverticulosis of the bowels and recommended he see a specialist. Later a “tumor of whitish color” was discovered in the intestine.
As Evgeny and his wife were walking to the hospital May 16 to have the tumor diagnosed, his father said, his son was seized by three men bundled into a car and sent to an army transit camp near the Siberian city of Chita. Levich said he has since received official notification that his son has been drafted as a private and sent to an army outpost near the village of Tiksi on the shore of the Laptev Sea, 350 miles north of the Artic Circle.
HELP MARINA BECOME FREE
At the same time, Jewish sources also reported that Alexander Tiemkin, a Soviet Jew whose 14-year-old daughter, Marina, was abducted Feb. 19 and taken to a Communist youth camp in Tuapse on the Black Sea, has appealed to Jewish organizations throughout the world,” Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, and the Procurator of the Tuapse Region, for Marina’s release.
In his letter to Jewish organizations, Tiemkin related, that he has been told by the director of Marina’s school in Moscow that she is “being saved from your influence so that she can be brought up as a Soviet girl.”
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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.
