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Jewish Prisoners Punished for Staging Hunger Strike Jews in Ukraine Threatened

January 6, 1972
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Two Jewish prisoners serving ten year sentences at the Potma forced labor camp in Soviet Mordovia have been punished for staging a hunger strike on the anniversary of the Leningrad hijack trial at which they were convicted. According to Jewish sources in the Soviet Union, Anatoly Altman, 30 and Boris Penson. 26, went without food for seven days last month. As punishment for “disobedience” they have been confined to barracks and deprived of exercise and free movement around the camp, the sources said.

Jews in the western Ukrainian town of Khust, near Lemberg, have been threatened with violence by Ukrainian nationalists, according to information reaching here today. The threats were contained in a poster discovered one morning in the local synagogue. It said, “Accursed Jews. Get out of our motherland, the Ukraine, If you do not leave, we swear to bring back the years of 1941-1944,” the years of the Nazi holocaust.

The warning was signed by the “Freedom Union of the Independent Ukraine.” Police who were summoned removed the poster but a new one appeared the next day with the same text and the words added, “We shall have to use hand grenades,” the sources said. Local authorities reportedly are conducting an investigation.

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