A 61-year-old Russian Jewish ship captain arrived here seven years after he first applied for an exit visa and was summarily dismissed from the Soviet merchant marine. Captain Misha Edelman of Riga, unfolded his saga for reporters at Ben Gurion Airport Monday night where he was greeted by his wife Feiga, who was allowed to come to Israel four years age and his daughter who came here in 1972.
Edelman, who began his sea-faring career in 1934 as a cadet at a maritime school in Italy run by the militant Zionist youth group, Betar, spoke bitterly of the “dropouts”–Soviet Jews who leave the USSR with Israeli visas but opt to settle in other countries. He accused them of using Zionists in order to change one “golah” (exile) for another.
Edelman went to sea in 1937 as a deckhand in the Betar training ship Theodor Herzl. He was sailing under the Lithuanian flag when World War II broke out. He was captured by the Germans and spent the next six years as a prisoner of war.
After liberation by the American army he returned to Riga to find his family and that, according to Edelman was his biggest mistake. “It cost me 33 years of my life,” he said. Nevertheless, he did well in the Russian merchant marine, rising to the command of a large freighter, the Smolensk. He said he was tempted many times to jump ship at foreign ports and make his way to Israel but feared reprisals against his family. Edelman said that after being relieved of his command for requesting a visa, he was arrested by the Soviet authorities for speaking at a memorial rally for Nazi victims.
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