Isaac Gilyutin, a 36-year-old Leningrad cybernetist, was sentenced yesterday in Leningrad to a one-year term in a labor camp on charges of attempted art smuggling after a three-day trial, sources here reported today. Gilyutin was detained recently at Leningrad Airport as he, his wife and daughter, were about to board a plane for Israel. Customs officers checking Gilyutin’s luggage found a number of personal paintings the family intended to take with them to Israel. The court also confiscated all Gilyutin’s property.
Meanwhile, the trials of Jewish activist Lev Roitburd of Odessa, and that of Anatoly Malkin, 21, a Kiev activist, are still pending. Roitburd’s trial, which had been scheduled to start Aug. 15, was postponed, purportedly because the judge was ill. Malkin, who has sought to emigrate to Israel, is charged with “draft evasion.” He faces up to three years in prison, the sources reported.
Stanley H. Lowell, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, stated that “not only is the meaning of the Helsinki document on human rights trampled upon by these latest acts of Soviet repression,” but if Roitburd is found guilty and Malkin suffers retaliation for his emigration-related activities, “this can only be interpreted as a repudiation of any hopeful signs” that progress toward an understanding on the human rights issue that may have been achieved thus far is continuing.
In a related move, more than 1000 New Yorkers sent protest telegrams to Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev urging that the trials of Roitburd and Malkin be cancelled and that both men be released, it was reported by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.
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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.
