Speech #530132397

These Soviet Jews may be unfamiliar to the general public. but their plight is just as serious as the plight of better known refuseniks such as Ida Nudel. Lev Elbert. or Anatoly Shcharansky. Grigory Goldshtein. a physicist from Tbilisi. has been awaiting permission to emigrate since 1971. He quit his job at the Mendeleyev Meteorological Institute so he would not be denied an exit visa on the grounds of "secrecy." However. he repeatedly has been denied an exit visa because of his "access to secret information." Most recently. he was accused to "taking advantage of his position" at the Central Bureau of Statistics and was informed his file was transferred to the local prosecutor. He faces a new 3- to 5year prison sentence for "parasitism" and "antiSoviet slander". The KGB have also informed Goldshtein that his activism has made him a political personality. and he may never receive his visas. Mikhail Beizer of Leningrad is one of the few teachers of Jewish history and culture in the Soviet Union. He has led unofficial tours of Leningrads Jewish sites. He has applied and been refused permissions to emigrate to Israel five times since 1979. He was recently threatened with arrest by Soviet authorities if he fails to "discontinue his activities." Viktor Brailovsky. a computer scientist from Moscow. first applied to leave the Soviet Union with his family in 1972. Since their first denial. the Brailovskys became activists in the Jewish emigration movement. In 1973. Brailovsky along with eight other scientists held a 17day hunger strike to protest the nonexistence of free emigration for Soviet Jews. He also played a major role in refusenik seminars for unemployed Jewish scientists awaiting permission to emigrate. Brailovsky was arrested in 1980 after orchestrating 237 refusenik signatures on a letter to then Soviet President Brezhnev. He was charged with "circulation of fabrications known to be false which defame the Soviet state and social system." He was sentenced to 5 years of internal exile. was released this spring. has returned to Moscow. and is awaiting an exit visa. Naum Meiman. a 73yearold mathematical physicist. has been waiting for his exit visa since 1974. He was refused permission due to the alleged secrecy of his work. despite the fact that the Director of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics confirmed that since 1955 Meimans work has been published in open Soviet scientific journals. The statement was written on the condition that Meiman retire. which he did. He became an activist in the human rights movement and in the Helsinki Monitoring Committee along with Shcharansky and Sakharov. Meiman suffers from a gallbladder condition and weak heart. and his wife Ina is gravely ill and could receive better treatment outside the Soviet Union if allowed to emigrate. Nadezhda Fradkova. a 36yearold mathematical linguist. has been waiting for an exit visa since 1978 to join relatives in Israel under the Soviet Family Reunification Act. She was denied on the grounds that her father is involved in "secret work" that may have been divulged to her. However. if her father did indeed give away state secrets. he would have been incarcerated by the Soviets a long time ago. Soviet denials of her exit visa have made her very desperate. She has undertaken several hunger strikes and has recently been hospitalized in serious condition as a result of a lifethreatening hunger strike. She has written many letters of protest including one to the International Red Cross claiming that she was being injected with harmful drugs.