Longtime refusenik Abe Stolar arrived with his wife and son in Israel on Wednesday night, but refused to leave the airport and go to a hotel, as proposed by Jewish Agency and Absorption Ministry officials.
He demanded that the family be housed immediately in an immigrant absorption center. Officials tried unsuccessfully to convince him that there was no room available at the moment in absorption facilities.
Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, the Stolars deposited their personal papers with officials at the airport and moved in with friends in Jerusalem for the night.
Stolar told Israel’s Itim news agency that he refused to sign an agreement to leave the hotel after a specified period and then move to a rented apartment, fearing he would not be able to abide by such an undertaking.
Absorption officials said they hoped to be able to solve the “Stolar problem” by next week.
Soviet Jews here complain that the available housing for arriving immigrants is sorely inadequate. Even Immigration and Absorption Minister Yitzhak Peretz acknowledged recently that the gaps in services for new immigrants were “astounding.”
Stolar, a 77-year-old Russian-English translator; his wife, Gita, 71; and their 31-year-old son, Michael, were ready to board a plane on their way to Israel in 1975 when they were turned away at Moscow airport, on the grounds that Gita, a chemist by profession, knew state secrets and would not be allowed to emigrate.
He said Wednesday night that subsequently “all sorts of lies were used to stop us from leaving. Only after the intervention of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in a talk with (Soviet leader) Mikhail Gorbachev in May 1988, was exit permission finally granted.”
Stolar, who was born in Chicago and has lived in the Soviet Union since his parents moved there in 1931, said he is “not a Zionist by political philosophy.” But he added, “I always thought the Jews should have a country of their own, and that I should live there.”
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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.
