Teens Don’t Have to Hunger for Soviet Emigres

When the telephone rang Saturday for a small group of eighth-grade students in Los Angeles, it signaled freedom for a friend they had never met but for whom they were willing to go hungry.

The nine youths were among 150 students at Stephen S. Wise Temple Middle School who had pledged to go on a hunger strike to publicize the plight of a Soviet Jewish couple asking to emigrate to Israel. The hunger strike, which was set to coincide with the Reagan-Gorbachev summit Monday through Wednesday was canceled because the couple, Pavel and Marta Abramovich, were granted exit visas Thursday.

On Saturday, the students who had gathered at the temple, expecting to launch their hunger strike, found themselves instead waiting for a long-distance call from Pavel Abramovich in Moscow.

The students, clad in pastel-colored T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Hungry for Freedom,” enthusiastically fired questions at Abramovich and strained to understand the accented words coming over the transcontinental telephone lines.

The teen-agers offered congratulatory wishes of mazel tov and wondered how the 48-year-old electrical engineer felt knowing that he will soon be living in Israel, 17 years after applying for emigration.

“Now I am a free man,” Abramovich said slowly in a phone conversation broadcast over the temple’s sound system. Abramovich invited the students to visit him in Israel, and they, in turn, said they looked forward to meeting him on his scheduled May visit to California. They offered to show him Disneyland. “I’m ready,” he said with a chuckle.

“I am very happy to know I have so many friends in California,” Abramovich said. “Warmest regards and thanks for your support and help to me and all my family.”

The Abramoviches’ cause was taken up by members of the temple five years ago, said Steve Saltzman, co-chairman of the temple’s social action committee. The temple’s campaign has received support from about 10,000 people who have signed cards and also from several politicians, but committee organizers most prize the involvement of the young students.

“We want to show young people--and older people--that one person can make a difference and that every person should try,” Saltzman said.

On Saturday, the lesson apparently connected.

“It was really exciting to actually get to speak to him,” said Danny Labin, 13, after the 10-minute call. “We were doing this for him, and we had never even spoken to him before. “