Soviet Jews who were told recently that they could emigrate without paying the heavy education head tax were informed right after last Tuesday’s U.S. Presidential elections and the celebration in the Soviet Union of the 55th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution that they would now have to pay the fees, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry reported today. The SSSJ said it learned of the reversal in a telephone conversation yesterday with Yuli Tartakovsky, a leading Jewish activist in Kiev.
Tartakovsky said the Soviet authorities also reneged on their earlier promise in the cases of about 70 Jews from Kiev, Novosibirsk and other cities who had been waiting from three weeks to four months for their exit visas. The SSSJ said one of them was Eleanora Poltinnikov Yampolsky, the recent bride of activist Mark Yampolsky. She has been ordered to pay 5500 rubles for a visa.
The SSSJ said that four Kiev Jews who have been waiting 18 months to get visas have renounced their Soviet citizenship. They were identified as Yuri and Batya Soroko, Simha Remenik and Zhinovy Melamed. Melamed has been cut off from communications with relatives abroad and packages sent to him last June have not been delivered, the SSSJ reported. According to the SSSJ, Genady Goldberg, 18, of Kiev, was drafted into the Army soon after he applied for an exit visa.
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.
