Dr. Yevgeny Levich, the former Soviet physicist who emigrated to Israel in April, 1975, said here on his arrival for the beginning of a nationwide one-month tour that he is seeking “continued support and increased pressure from scientists across the United States to help my father and mother and other Jews leave the Soviet Union.”
Dr. Levich, whose tour is under the auspices of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and the Committee of Concerned Scientists, said his-parents’ condition is serious. “I believe that continued protest from Western scientists could result in my parents’ release. If necessary, I would suggest that Western scientists apply both moral and practical pressure, especially on scientific exchanges, until Soviet Jewish scientists can freely emigrate and the open exchange of scientists between the two countries becomes the rule, rather than the exception.”
Yevgeny’s father, Dr. Benjamin Levich, a noted Soviet electrochemist and Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, first applied to emigrate in March, 1972. As a result of his application he was dismissed as department head of the Moscow Institute of Electrochemistry and from his job as full professor at Moscow University. His request for an exit visa was refused on the grounds that he possessed “scientific secrets.”
In 1973, despite two military exemptions, Yevgeny was ordered for military duty as a private. Refusing to do so, he was sent to a camp for military criminals in Tiksi Bay in the Arctic. Zone. He is currently a senior scientist in the department of nuclear physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth.
MARKMAN DUE IN THE U.S.
In a related development, Vladimir Markman, a 38-year-old engineer from Sverdlovsk who served three years in a strict regime Soviet labor camp on charges of “hooliganism” and “dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda,” will arrive here March 24 to begin a national tour on behalf of others still imprisoned in Soviet labor camps, it was attributed by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry which is coordinating his stay in New York.
Markman, “who together with nine other Sverdlovsk activists signed a statement six years ago protesting the harsh sentences meted out to the first Leningrad trial defendants and was arrested in April, 1972 following a malicious campaign in the local press, was released in July, 1975, now lives with his family in Beersheba.
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