The five-year exile sentence handed down yesterday by a Moscow district court against Mark Nashpitz and Boris Tsitlionok was denounced as “barbaric and inhumane” by Mrs. Inez Weissman, president of the Union Councils for Soviet Jewry. The sentence, she declared, “clearly establishes the intent of the Soviet Union to destroy the freedom movement of Russian Jews,” Like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, “the Soviet regime will learn that the urge for freedom in their promised land will not be destroyed, They may have temporarily stilled the voices of Mark and Boris, but their brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union and in the free world will only fight harder on their behalf.”
Mrs. Weissman said that the Councils will respond with protest actions throughout the country. This afternoon, she noted, members and friends of the Long Island Committee for Soviet, Jewry are scheduled to protest outside the Soviet compound at Glen Cove.
RABBIS PROTEST SENTENCES, DISPERSAL
In a related action 20 rabbis gathered outside the Soviet Mission to the United Nations this morning to denounce the sentences. The rabbis were joined by the two men’s mothers, Itta Nashpitz and Batya Tsitlionok, Three of the rabbis at the protest rally offered themselves to the Soviet Mission in return for the freedom of the two men and Dr, Mikhail Stern whose son, August, participated in the rally.
The rabbis, wearing prayer shawls, also protested the “blasphemous storm trooper tactics” used by the Soviet police in abruptly halting a Sabbath service last weekend in a Moscow synagogue and ordering hundreds of Jews to go home. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, spokesman for the group, branded the dispersal as “the latest act of terror” and as “another example of the campaign of oppression to which Soviet Jews are being subjected.”
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.
