According to sources in Moscow, confirmed by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the anticipated trial of 44-year-old Viktor Polsky, a Soviet Jewish activist, on charges of “operating an automobile in an unsafe manner” is scheduled to begin Aug. 15. The defendant faces a maximum three-year sentence under Article #211 of the Soviet Criminal Code.
Polsky was involved in an auto accident last March in which he allegedly knocked down 19-year-old Tatyana Zhukova. The young woman immediately exonerated Polsky of any wrong-doing by her statement that she had deliberately thrown herself in front of his car. The ambulance driver and the physicians who first admitted her to the hospital corroborated her darting out into the road after a quarrel with her parents.
However, Miss Zhukova and her parents, both Communist Party members, subsequently changed their testimony, and hospital records disappeared. Attention by concerned individuals and groups in the West succeeded in prolonging the preliminary investigation stage, which drew to a close early this month.
Polsky, a physicist specializing in photo electronics, and his family applied to emigrate in Feb. 1968. They represent one of the “oldest” cases to have met with repeated denials of emigration visas. Observers have pointed out that no other legal action of this magnitude against a potential emigrant to Israel has yet taken place in Moscow.
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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.
