Ailing ‘Refusenik’ Goldfarb Getting Tests in N.Y. Hospital

Doctors began a series of tests Friday on David Goldfarb, the ailing Jewish scientist suddenly freed from the Soviet Union.

“He will begin to be evaluated for diabetes, cardiac status and peripheral vascular disease,” Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center said in a statement.

Goldfarb, a 67-year-old geneticist, arrived here Thursday evening with his wife, Cecilia, more than seven years after he first asked permission to leave the Soviet Union for Israel.

Hospital administrator Bill Johnson said Goldfarb’s condition “is satisfactory. He’s resting comfortably and doing pretty well considering his voyage.”

Goldfarb’s son, Alexander, appeared on the “CBS Morning News” on Friday and said doctors told him that his father probably will be hospitalized for a week “because they are still trying to fix his leg after the operation he underwent in Moscow.”

His son said that Goldfarb, who lost a leg in the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II and had part of the foot on his other leg amputated due to diabetic gangrene, “should have been out seven years ago and not in this condition.”

The Goldfarbs flew from Moscow aboard the private jet of Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., after the American industrialist got permission for their departure through a former Soviet ambassador to the United States.

Hammer, whose relations with the Soviets go back 65 years, intervened after Goldfarb’s son addressed an open letter to him in the Wall Street Journal.

Hammer, speaking on the CBS program, called the release “a good omen for the future” and expressed hope for the future emigration of other refuseniks , Jews seeking to leave the Soviet Union.

The elder daughter of Goldfarb, Olga, remains in Moscow with her husband and their 9- and 4-year-old daughters.