Leonid Zabelishensky, a former Soviet Jewish “prisoner of conscience,” has arrived in Israel still suffering from injuries suffered during his six months of imprisonment for “parasitism,” the National Conference on Soviet Jewry reported today. Earlier in Vienna en route to Israel. Zabelishensky sent a telegram to New York City Council President Paul O’Dwyer thanking him for helping him to gain freedom.
Last winter, with the cooperation of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, Ogden and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton visited the USSR where O’Dwyer voiced particular concern over Zabelishensky. He intervened with Soviet authorities on behalf of Zabelishensky and after returning to New York corresponded with him and the American Embassy in Moscow.
Zabelishensky was dismissed from the faculty of the Ural Polytechnic Institute after applying for an exit visa in Nov. 1971. He was arrested Oct. 23, 1974 and charged with “parasitism” after he had been dismissed by administrative orders from an engineering job. The NCSJ reported today that Zabelishensky had been injured in an accident during his six-month term but the injuries had been exacerbated because he had been forced to continue working. He now has to wear a back brace.
Meanwhile, the National Conference said, the mother of Yuli Tartakovsky, the Kiev activist who is in hiding to prevent his induction into the army, said she has been told she cannot leave the USSR despite the fact that she has an exit visa. She is under constant surveillance by the KGB and has been told that her son will be prosecuted not only for draft evasion but also for other unnamed criminal acts, the NCSJ reported.
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.
