First Time in 60 Years for Soviet Dissident : Ill Goldfarb Attends Hanukkah in N.Y.

The ailing Soviet dissident who refused to help the KGB frame journalist Nicholas Daniloff ignored serious illness Friday to attend his first Hanukkah celebration in more than 60 years.

“I am excited,” said David Goldfarb, 68. “I am going to take part in a ceremony that symbolizes the freedom of the Jews.”

Goldfarb gained his freedom on Oct. 16 when industrialist Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., persuaded Soviet officials to allow him to travel to the United States.

Had Surgery for Cancer

Since arriving in New York, Goldfarb has been staying at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he underwent surgery for lung cancer. He was also being treated for advanced diabetes, and is scheduled to be released next month.

Goldfarb said he could have attended a Hanukkah celebration two years earlier had he agreed to a KGB demand that he help frame Daniloff.

His visa to immigrate to Israel was abruptly canceled just days before he was to leave the Soviet Union in 1984 when he told Soviet authorities he would not turn on his longtime friend.

“They said if I would like to go to Israel I would (have to) help them,” Goldfarb recalled. He said they indicated they wanted to place “some kind of documents” in Daniloff’s bag.

A private car picked him up at the hospital and took him to Temple Shaaray Tefila on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Attended Rite as Toddler

Goldfarb said he last attended a Hanukkah celebration when he was little more than a toddler living in the Ukrainian village of Zhitomer, but he said he remembered little of the celebration.

Goldfarb said he was “very satisfied” when the invitation to attend the temple’s service was offered.

“It reminded me that I am a Jew,” something, Goldfarb said, he had at least partly forgotten during his long years in Moscow, where religious worship is discouraged.

“Unfortunately, it was not simple for me to take part in something like this when I was in Moscow,” he said. “It was dangerous.”

Every time he headed for one of the few overcrowded Hanukkah celebrations in Moscow, he recalled, authorities would approach him and warn, “Go away, go away.”

After he lost a leg fighting the Nazis at Stalingrad in World War II, Goldfarb said, attending one of the celebrations became an impossibility.