Students from Philadelphia area universities chained themselves to the memorial monument for the six million martyrs here and held a fast in protest against a new book by Trofim Kickhko considered to be anti-Semitic and against the arrest of a Soviet Jew who sought to emigrate to Israel. The "chain-in" and "fast-in" began at sundown Saturday and lasted until sundown today, according to Nelson Berman, a member of the sponsoring organization known as Lapid (Torch);
Despite rain, the students passed out leaflets throughout the night dealing with the new book "Judaism and Zionism" and told passers-by about the arrest of Boris L. Kochubiyevsky, a 30-year-old Kiev engineer, whose arrest was reported a few days ago. (The Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington also protested the book and the engineer’s arrest. It described the volume as "repetitions of the anti-Semitic slanders of the Stalinist period at its worst.")
According to reliable sources, Mr. Kochubiyevsky wrote an impassioned letter to Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev demanding the right to live in Israel "just as it is the right of a Ukrainian to live in the Ukraine, the right of a Russian to live in Russia, the right of a Georgian to live in Georgia." He reportedly said that if he were released from jail he would be ready to go "even on foot to the fatherland of my ancestors." A copy of his letter was reportedly smuggled out of Russia by friends after his arrest in order to contrast his treatment with that of another Jewish student, Yakow Kazakov, who proclaimed himself an Israeli in a letter written to the Supreme Soviet a year ago. No punitive action was ever taken against him.
Mr. Kochubiyevsky and his non-Jewish wife were promised emigration visas last November but Soviet authorities reneged and he was charged with slandering the Soviet Union. The charge was based on his denunciation of Soviet propaganda attacks on Israel after the June, 1967 Arab-Israel war.
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