The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and Union of Councils for Soviet Jews reported today that 30-year-old Kishinev refusenik Mikhail Roiz, a radio engineer, has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for “draft evasion,” although he has already served three years in the Red Army. Roiz’s wife Rache, who had immigrated to Israel, was killed in an auto accident last year near Eilat.
Meanwhile, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry conducted an outdoor Tisha B’av prayer service yesterday for Anatoly Shcharansky, Vladimir Slepak and other Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR. Some 250 people took part in the service which was held in front of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. Rabbi Avraham Weiss, who led the prayer service, explained that Tisha B’av, a fast day, marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples in ancient Israel. “But,” he declared, “the Western Wall at which we mourn for the Temples will be the Wall at which Shcharansky and his wife Avital will be reunited.”
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