A prominent Soviet Yiddish poet has had his request for a visa to Israel rejected by the Soviet authorities, Jewish informants said here today. He is Meir Kharatz, 59, of Czernowitz, the Ukraine, who was imprisoned during the Stalin regime for what the sources called “loyalty to Jewish values.” In April, 1960, he was attacked in the Ukrainian newspaper Radianska Bukovina. His poems have occasionally appeared in Sovietish Heimland, the only Yiddish periodical in the USSR, but he has been published mainly in leftist journals outside the Soviet Union, such as the Folkstimme of Warsaw, the Neie Presse of Paris and the Yiddisher Kultur of New York. The sources also reported that Benito Borokhovin, a Jewish engineer from Moscow who was arrested June 14 after two searches of his apartment turned up Jewish materials, suffered a heart attack during his interrogation.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
