Alexander Goldfarb, son of long-time refusenik David Goldfarb, has issued a plea for the life of his father, a diabetic who lies seriously ill in a Moscow hospital and is in danger because of lack of proper medical facilities and care offered for his condition in the Soviet Union. David Goldfarb’s situation is further complicated by the fact that, according to Alexander, he is a good friend of Nicholas Daniloff, the American correspondent for U.S. News and World Report whose arrest for espionage has touched off an international furor.
David Goldfarb refused two years ago to help the KGB ensnare the Moscow-based reporter in a contrived espionage act very much like that staged August 30 that landed Daniloff in prison and charged with spying for the United States. As a result, David Goldfarb lost his permission to emigrate to Israel, which was scheduled for a few days from then.
David Goldfarb, according to Alexander, Daniloff and his wife Ruth, and friends of the Daniloffs, is willing to testify to the 1984 attempt. There is a feeling on their part that as a result, David Goldfarb’s condition may be neglected to a point where his life will be endangered. His son has asked for help in publicizing his father’s plight and, in so doing, coming to the aid of Daniloff.
‘INTERESTED IN EACH OTHER’
Alex Goldfarb, assistant professor of microbiology here at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, first met Nick Daniloff, as he is known, in 1981 briefly, just before Daniloff was to leave for his second stint as Moscow correspondent for the magazine. Alex asked Daniloff to look up his father, a retired molecular geneticist of eminent international renown and formerly director of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Bacteriophages of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The two men “were very interested in each other,” Alex Goldfarb told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, emphasizing that “they are very opposite types. Daniloff is a noble, his grandfather was a Czarist general. My father is a Jew who was a Soviet war hero.” And yet, he said, “They really were close friends.”
“My father owed a lot to Nick, ” said Alex Goldfarb, stressing that Daniloff was constantly concerned about and solicitous of the health of the older man, whose current hospitalization is due to severe complications of his diabetes.
Alex’s knowledge of the events surrounding the KGB’s attempt to have his father betray his friend came by chance. It was right after the KGB had left his father’s apartment that Alex called his father from New York. He learned what happened in cryptic language, including “Warn Nick not to come close to me.” Alex called the State Department, who alerted the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The Embassy notified Daniloff. Two months later, Daniloff came to the U.S. on vacation and told Alex the whole story.
ALEX HAS PURSUED HIS FATHER’S CASE
David Goldfarb was a refusenik since 1979 when, retired, he applied for permission to emigrate with his wife, Cecilia, daughter, Olga–both of them physicians–and Olga’s family, to join Alex in Israel, where he was a doctoral student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. The Institute had even offered David Goldfarb a position, according to Alex. Alex emigrated in 1975, after many years as a Soviet Jewry activist whose fluent English made him a natural spokesperson and liaison to the world movement for Soviet Jews.
Alex did postdoctoral work in Munich and was offered a position at Columbia-Presbyterian in 1981. Throughout all his studies and work, he has been constantly vigilant for Soviet Jews, and described by the leaders of the Soviet Jewry movement in glowing terms of admiration and respect. Throughout all these years, he has pursued his father’s case vigorously, according to spokespersons of human rights and Soviet Jewry organizations.
As Alex Goldfarb relates the events involving his father, David Goldfarb and his family had received permission to emigrate and were to leave April 20, 1984, 10 days after receiving their visas Daniloff came to Goldfarb’s apartment to say goodbye, at which time Goldfarb gave the reporter the gift of a book on the history of Czarist Russia. Daniloff placed it in his brief case and left, watched by the KGB.
QUESTIONED INTENSIVELY ABOUT DANILOFF
The next day, Goldfarb was summoned to the KGB office and questioned intensively for hours about Daniloff. They requested his cooperation in inviting Daniloff back to his apartment with his briefcase, Daniloff has told the press. David Goldfarb refused, fearing that his friend could be framed with “incriminating evidence” placed into his briefcase.
The KGB, search warrant ready at hand, nevertheless went to Goldfarb’s apartment and overturned everything, confiscating his research materials, including dead bacterial cultures of no value, which they declared, along with written scientific material, “state secrets.”
David Goldfarb, and his colleagues and students, were called every other day, says Alex, and Goldfarb was charged with disseminating “anti-Soviet literature.” But David Goldfarb had very many friends in scientific societies throughout the world who would not let the issue rest.
David Goldfarb, says Glenn Richter, national coordinator of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, was the first refusenik of professorial rank who had been given an exit visa within the previous six years, and it appeared, he said, that the visa resulted from pressure from, among others, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
In December 1984, the Committee of Concerned Scientists asked that a moratorium be staged in the sending of any biological and bacterial strains to the USSR until the Goldfarbs be permitted to emigrate, a moratorium that still stand, according to Alex Goldfarb. European colleagues of David Goldfarb were urged to take the same step.
The investigations appeared to drop, although there was no action to dismiss the charge of disseminating anti-Soviet literature. Neither Goldfarb junior nor senior felt it advisable to say more publicly about the incident. Those who pressed for David Goldfarb’s case knew only that his exit visa had been rescinded. David Goldfarb and his family just joined the ranks of perhaps hundreds of thousands who sought to emigrate.
FEARFUL FOR GOLDFARB’S LIFE
Then, last April, Goldfarb was rushed to intensive care at a Moscow hospital. A visiting colleague of Alex Goldfarb, Dr. Kenneth Prager, sought in vain to visit David Goldfarb to ensure that he was receiving adequate medical care.
Prager told the JTA he is fearful for David Goldfarb’s life, and since then he and a surgeon at George Washington University, Dr. Glen Geelhoed, have requested permission from the Soviet government to attend to the 68-year-old scientist’s medical and surgical supervision. They have also urged, along with the family and countless other concerned parties, that David Goldfarb be transferred to the West for adequate medical care.
They have received no response from the Soviet authorities. In the interim, David Goldfarb has been sent home and been readmitted, and transferred to three more hospitals, in each case necessary care severely absent, Alex says.
According to published accounts by Ruth Daniloff, Nick Daniloff was going to visit David Goldfarb in the hospital on the day he was arrested; the reporter had been visiting his friend weekly, said Ruth Daniloff, visits she described as “sacred.” Ruth Daniloff went to David Goldfarb’s hospital bedside instead of her husband, and there, she told the press, received David Goldfarb’s promise to testify on behalf of her husband and tell about the 1984 incident between them and the KGB.
Since then, she has not been allowed to visit him. Only the immediate family is now permitted into the hospital, and both Alex and Ruth Daniloff have been apprised of David Goldfarb’s worsening condition by his wife Cecilia. According to Alex, his father’s leg is in danger of amputation. David Goldfarb lost his other leg during World War II.
RISKED LIFE TO PROTECT A GENTILE
Nick Daniloff has spoken highly of David Goldfarb to the press since his release from Lefortovo Prison and his stay at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He maintains that Goldfarb “might have been getting medical treatment in the West if he had turned me in and agreed to go along” with the KGB.
Alex Goldfarb requests that everyone who reads about his father send a cable to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, telling that this case is being monitored by the public. Alex Goldfarb said that in the past, “Gentiles risked their lives to save Jews. Here we have one case where a Jew risked his life to protect a gentile.”
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.
