Vladimir Markman will appeal the three-year hard-labor sentence imposed on him in Sverdlovsk last Wednesday. Russian Jewish sources reported today. The authorities, they said, have received a large number of protests from around the world condemning the sentencing of the 34-year-old engineer.
In another reported development, friends and colleagues of Ilia Glezer, the biologist, and Grigory (Grisha) Berman, the scholar, may be put on trial soon. Glezer was arrested Feb. 7 and accused of writing “anti-Soviet slander” in anonymous letters to government departments. His mother’s appeals to President Nikolai V. Podgorny and other Soviet leaders have gone unanswered, the sources said. Glezer is in Leftortovo Prison in Moscow. Berman, who applied for a visa to go to Israel, was arrested by the KGB (security police), charged with evading military service–although, according to the sources, he had volunteered–and is imprisoned in Odessa.
Meanwhile, Prof. Evgeny Levitch, 24-year-old astrophysicist son of Prof. Benjamin Levitch, was abducted Aug. 9 while driving with friends from Moscow to the countryside, according to sources. They said the son, en route to recuperation from a three-month hospitalization, was seized by four militiamen and driven away. He has been told that he may either join the Red Army for two years or face trial for draft evasion, according to the sources, who reported that he has been medically classified and reclassified as unfit for military service.
Prof. Benjamin Levitch, a noted electrochemist, was chastised last month by the Soviet government on his expulsion from the Academy of Sciences and his teaching post at Moscow University. The 55-year-old scientist is known as a signer of protest petitions. Prof. D.B. Spalding of the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Imperial College of Science in London told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had cabled leading Soviet academicians expressing the concern and shock of scientists throughout the world at the reported abduction of Evgeny Levitch.
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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.
