I am honored to participate in todays Congressional Vigil for Soviet Jewry. Soviet Jews are being subjected to unprecedented persecution and statesponsored harassment. While 51.320 Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate in 1979. the peak year. only 1.315 were permitted to emigrate in 1983. This year shows no improvement. in fact. the situation is getting worse. Reports reaching us from the refusenik community in the Soviet Union indicate that the level of physical harassment is escalating to a frightening extent. Confinement in psychiatric hospitals is evidence of this most ominous trend. Nadezhda Fradkova has applied to emigrate to Israel since 1978. Her appeal has been repeatedly rejected. and she has been unable to find work in her field of mathematical linguistics since her first application to emigrate 6 years ago. On May 2. Nadezhda was detained by three KGB agents who took her against her will to a psychiatric hospital in Leningrad. She was put in a ward for mental patients who are particularly violent and require constant observation. She was subjected to frequent interrogations about her personal life and her reasons for wanting to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Finally. she was released on May 5. Now that Nadezhda has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. she risks further forced hospitalization because she is now considered a "psychiatric case." Alexander Maryasin. who lives in Riga. the capital city of the Sovietoccupied country of Latvia. is a refusnik I have taken a personal interest in. and have attempted to correspond with.
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