Anatoly Shcharansky was visited by his family at Chistipol prison this week, for the first time in 18 months, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews reported today.
News of the visit by Shcharansky’s mother, Ida Milgrom and his brother, Leonid Shcharansky, was obtained by telephone from a family friend, Dina Beilin, in Jerusalem. They were able to speak with him for two hours through a glass partition, she said.
According to Beilin, she was told by Mrs. Milgrom that her son looks like “a tiny old man and has lost all his hair. His health is very poor. Towards the end of his 110-day hunger strike in January he weighed only 77 pounds and is today only a little more than 110 pounds.” Shcharansky’s family also told Beilin that “he is being deprived of all his few rights as a Soviet prisoner and is treated as a hostage.”
Shcharansky, who first applied for an emigration visa in 1973, is serving a 13 year prison term for alleged “treason” after he campaigned to join his wife Avital in Israel. He was sentenced in July, 1978.
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.
