Russian Jew, Denied Permit for Israel, Sentenced to Soviet Prison Camp

A Russian-Jewish engineer whose appeal for permission to emigrate to Israel was denied a year ago, has been sentenced to three years in a Soviet prison camp on charges of slander against the Soviet state and social system, the Times reported from Moscow today. The report said the sentence was pronounced May 16 on Boris Kochubiyevsky after a four day trial at which spectators shouted anti-Semitic epithets during examination of witnesses.

A London dispatch carried by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month reported the arrest of Mr. Kochubiyevsky after he and his wife, a non-Jewess, were summoned to the passport office last November, ostensibly to pick up emigration documents. The JTA also reported the text of a letter written by Mr. Kochubiyevsky last Nov. 28 to Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev, demanding the right to emigrate to Israel and the right of all Soviet Jews to live a Jewish life and to educate their children in Jewish schools in the Yiddish language. The young engineer wrote that if he were sentenced and lived until his release he would go to Israel “even if it means going on foot.”

The charges of slander against Mr, Kochubiyevsky stemmed from remarks he made at a memorial meeting at Babi Yar, a ravine outside of Kiev, where the Nazis slaughtered most of the Jewish population of the Ukrainian capital, the Times said. According to the Times, he told the several dozen Jewish mourners at the site, “Here lies part of the Jewish people.” The court ruled this to be “bourgeois-nationalist-Zionist propaganda.” Soviet policy is to memorialize the Babi Yar victims without reference to their Jewish origin, the Times said. That omission was brought to world attention in the celebrated poem “Babi Yar” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. When Mr, Kochubiyevsky mentioned this at his trial, the judge admonished him for “excursions into the history of literature,” the Times reported. Further charges of slander were brought against Mr. Kochubiyevsky for an argument he had with a Soviet lecturer who called Israel the aggressor in the June, 1967 war and for remarks he allegedly made at the passport office, the Times reported.