Lt. Wolf Zalmanson will appeal the ten year prison sentence handed down last week by a Soviet military tribunal for his alleged role in a plot to hijack a Soviet airliner, it was learned today. His plans were disclosed by his father, Josef, in a telephone call to relatives in Israel. The elder Zalmanson said he was permitted to visit his son, an engineer officer in the Russian Army, after sentence was pronounced. He said the young man asked Israeli relatives to send him a Hebrew primer so that he could study the language while in prison. Zalmanson’s brother Isak, his sister Silva and his brother-in-law, Edvard Kuznetsov, were sentenced to severe prison terms by a Leningrad City Court last month. Kuznetsov was originally sentenced to death but the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation later commuted his sentence to 15 years at hard labor and reduced the sentences of several other defendants. According to his father. Zalmanson said he would appeal because he has nothing to lose. Members of Kibbutz Bar Am said today that they had received a cable of thanks from former Major Grischa Feigin of Riga who was released from a mental home recently. Feigin, a much decorated hero of World War II, was committed after he returned his medals in protest against Soviet anti-Jewish policy. His cable to his friends at Bar Am said, “We all thank you. Our hearts and souls are with you.”
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