Soviet authorities Tuesday granted a temporary tourist visa on medical grounds to Olga Goldfarb, enabling her to visit her emigre father David Goldfarb, who is recuperating here from lung cancer surgery.
She may pick up her passport Thursday, according to her brother, Alex Goldfarb of New York. It will contain a visa good for a week’s stay in the United States. Her request to take her older daughter with her was rejected. The temporary visa is independent of her family’s application for emigration visas.
The granting of her visa is unusual. “This is the first case known to me that a refusenik, who is in conflict with the regime, is given a foreign passport, which is a privilege only for the elite,” said Alex Goldfarb.
The brother, a Columbia University professor of microbiology, saw a connection between his sister’s visa and the issuance last week of formal regulations stipulating acceptable grounds for emigration by Soviets, which includes visitation of seriously ailing relatives. The rules indicate that an emergency visa would be considered within three days. “This is exactly what has happened,” Alex Goldfarb said, “so they really do what they say.”
LETTER TO GORBACHEV
After learning he had cancer on October 29, David Goldfarb wrote a frank letter November 2 to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asking that his daughter, a 34-year-old Moscow physician, be permitted to visit him. The elder Goldfarb praised Gorbachev’s recent signs of more Soviet flexibility, yet criticized overall Soviet policy toward Jews and emigration.
“…(Y)ou have both the will and the capacity for radical change,” Goldfarb wrote, “…yet, there can be no true relaxation without trust, and your emigration policy is not helping to build the trust…I realize that my decision to emigrate may be embarrassing to the Soviet Union, because it doesn’t fit the official doctrine.
“But my decision has been made, and destroying me and my family would not undo the embarrassment. It will only make more people listen to politicians who call the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.'”
David Goldfarb was flown suddenly to the U.S. October 16 with his wife Cecilia aboard industrialist Armand Hammer’s private jet. The 67-year-old retired geneticist was a patient in a Moscow hospital at the time, suffering from severe complications of diabetes and heart disease.
He underwent four hours of surgery last Wednesday to remove an upper lobe of his left lung.
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