Anatoly Sharansky, the 30-year-old Moscow Soviet Jewish activist presently being investigated on charges of treason, has been refused legal representation, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry reported today.
Ida Milgram, Sharansky’s mother, has told the Conference that every lawyer she has approached to represent her son has refused because they believe him to be guilty. Although Sharansky has insisted that he is innocent of the charge of being a CIA agent, several attorneys have offered to take the case only if he admits to guilt with extenuating circumstances.
Mrs. Milgram has further appealed to Soviet authorities to allow a doctor to visit her son in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, a political prison where prisoners have the right to receive packages and to be visited by a doctor appointed by the family. No one has seen or heard from Sharansky since his arrest in early March, the Conference said.
The Conference also reported that it has learned that Yakov Suslenski and Mikhail Mager, two long-time Soviet Jewry activists, have arrived in Israel where they were reunited with their families. Suslenski is a former Prisoner of Conscience who served a seven-year sentence in the notorious Vladimir prison for spreading anti-Soviet slander with the intent to undermine the Soviet regime. He suffers from a serious heart condition. Mager was first refused a visa in 1972 and has been separated from his wife and son for four years.
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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.
