Protests Issued on Behalf of Two Soviet Jewish Prisoners; Friends Worried About Zand

Pioneer Women meeting here issued a protest against the detention of Miss Roiza Palatnik and the treatment of Mrs. Silva Zalmanson Kuznetsov. Reports read at the meeting about the two Soviet Jewish women stated that Miss Palatnik from Odessa, said to be in her 20’s, was no longer in solitary confinement but in a women’s prison awaiting trial. Miss Palatnik was arrested on Dec. I after applying for an exit visa to go to Israel and on April 22 she went on a hunger strike. The meeting was also told that Mrs. Zalmanson is now in her ninth month of pregnancy. She is serving a 10-year sentence in Siberia as one of the defendants in the trial of the Leningrad 11 last Dec. She is the wife of Edvard Kuznetsov, one of the 11, who is serving a 10-year prison term after his death sentence was commuted. The Observer reported friends are anxious about the fate of Mikhail Zand, the Jewish professor who was fired in March from his job at the Institute for Eastern Studies in Moscow after he and other Soviet Jews were arrested on March 26 in the office of Prosecutor General Roman A. Rudenko for staging a sit-in. Dr. Zand was subsequently released after staging a two-week hunger strike, After his release from prison Dr. Zand promised his friends an answer on his request to emigrate to Israel by April 28. Instead, the Observer report noted, he was called in a day before to the offices of the MVD and MGB security official and questioned as well as threatened. There is no further word, according to the report, as to when Zand will leave.