Esther Markish, the widow of writer Peretz Markish, who was killed in a Stalinist purge, told Israeli officials by telephone from Moscow today that she would register a complaint with the Soviet Committee for Religious Affairs for the violence she said she met with in a Moscow synagogue. Mrs. Markish, who along with her son David have reportedly been under harassment following their application to emigrate to Israel, gave her account of the incident to the Israelis in the telephone call.
She said she went with her son to the Great Moscow Synagogue to arrange for a Kadish for her late husband, who was murdered in 1952 in the Lubiyanika Prison together with other Jewish intellectuals. She said she went to the women’s gallery where many of her friends and American visitors worship. There, a woman in charge, presumably a government functionary, asked her to leave but a greed to let her finish praying.
On her way down from the gallery, she told the Israelis, a man, also a synagogue official apparently in the employ of the Soviet government, grabbed her by her paralyzed hand and pushed her into an anteroom where he began beating her as he tried locking the door. Mrs. Markish’s screams brought her son David and a number of friends, who freed her from the man’s clutches. The young men wanted to retaliate but Mrs. Markish, fearing recrimination, prevailed upon them and she was taken to a doctor by car.
(Glenn Richter of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry reported in New York that Mrs. Markish was just beginning to recover from abusive treatment she had suffered from the Soviet authorities. Richter said that government functionaries acting as monitors in Soviet synagogues is not a new practice. “They try to make sure to keep Russian troublemakers away from foreign tourists,” he said. “When a Russian woman sits near an American tourist, the functionary would interpose herself and often scream to scare the Russian woman away.”)
David Markish, who like his father is a poet, has been working as a porter in Moscow following his application for an exit permit.
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