Protest in Moscow

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32663, 20 July 1971, Page 9

Protest in Moscow

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) MOSCOW, July 18.

The Moscow police broke up a hunger-strike by 44 Russian Jews on Thursday and held more than 30 of the protesters in custody, possibly for forcible return to their native Soviet Georgian republic. About 4 a.m. Jewish sources say, 50 to 100 policemen entered Moscow’s central telegraph building, where the Jews had been fasting since Monday, and led out the demonstrators without a struggle. The Jews were demonstrating for the right to emigrate to Israel.

The police took the entire group to a nearby “soberingun” station —these are common in Moscow—where 10 Muscovite Jews were freed after receiving warnings of "serious punishment for further Zionist demonstrations.” But more than 30 Jews who had come to Moscow from Soviet Georgia to agitate for the right to emigrate were loaded on to buses with police officers. “We don’t know where they went, but we think that they are being sent back to Georgia,” the sources said. One Georgian Jew was held in separate custody because his travel papers were said to be out of order, and one female hunger-striker, Mrs Nony Yanovskaya, aged 45, from the Ukraine, was detained “for possible mental treatment.”