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Two Soviet Jewish Activists Sentenced to Additional Terms

February 3, 1981
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— Two Jewish activists, one in Siberian exile and the other in Moscow, have been tried and sentenced for the second time, according to the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.

Alexander Podrabinek, who was given five years’ banishment to Siberia in 1978 for exposing Soviet psychiatric abuse in a “samizdat” book, “Punitive Medicine”, has been handed an additional three years of exile. His brother Kiril had been imprisoned as further retaliation, and was rearrested on the day he had completed his sentence.

In Moscow, Makar Limanov was sentenced to 15 days in jail for “disobeying a police order,” less than two weeks after he was released from prison for demonstrating at the Lenin Library to mark the 10th anniversary of the 1970 Leningrad Trial. Limanov had received a summons to report to the police. He phoned to say he could not leave his small, sick son at home. A half-hour later, four police officers burst into his apartment and took him away.

Meanwhile, former Prisoner of Conscience Alexander Vilig of Bolgrad, who had been sentenced to 1 1/2 years for “draft evasion” in February 1979 after he had received an exit visa, has now been notified that his reapplication to emigrate has been denied. The grounds are that the same Israeli relative who had sent the original invitation document to leave was no longer considered a close enough relation.

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