The New Year has brought no respite for Soviet Jews. The first reports of 1973 from Jewish sources in the Soviet Union spoke of Jews facing trial, Jews languishing in prison camps under wretched conditions, seriously ill Jews pleading in vain for exit visas to go to Israel and Jews deprived of jobs either because they applied for visas or some cases in retaliation for the departure of a colleague.
According to the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, Solomon Dreizner, 41, a second Leningrad trial defendant serving a three-year sentence at the Potma forced labor camp, is facing severe and unjust punishment because he retaliated when assaulted by a fellow prisoner known to be a pathological anti-Semite. Dreizner’s wife, Lilia, has appealed to the Soviet prosecutor General Roman Rudenko to send a special emissary to Potma to investigate the case.
She said her husband was waylaid as he left his living quarters at the camp by another prisoner surnamed Erst who hurled anti-Semitic epithets at him and then attacked him physically. Because he struck back he was brought before a camp committee and threatened with punishment, Mrs. Dreizner wrote to Rudenko.
JEWS PURGED FROM MOSCOW RADIO ORCHESTRA
She begged the Prosecutor to look into the case personally and not to refer her complaint to the prosecutor in Mordovia who will only refer it back to the Potma administration. “One gets the impression that a chain of provocation planned beforehand is taking place,” she said in her letter.
The National Conference on Soviet Jewry reported today that Jan. 15 has been set as the date of the trial of Lazar Lubarsky, a Rostov engineer accused of giving secret documents to unauthorized persons. The NCSJ also reported that Soviet authorities have disconnected the telephone of Valery Panov the Jewish ballet star, apparently because he ignored orders to stop making statements to Western newsmen.
In another development, the SSSJ reported that the purge of Jewish musicians from the Moscow Radio Orchestra is continuing. Twenty-four Jews have been dismissed and only four remain with the 80-member orchestra. The four have been told that they will be fired when replacements are found. According to the SSSJ the Jews were being made scapegoats for the former conductor, Yuri Aaronovich, who received an exit visa and went to Israel last summer.
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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.
