Student Spurs College to Aid Ailing Refusenik : Campaign Ends With Arrival of Soviet Mathematician

When he applied to attend Pitzer College, David Straus wrote about the plight of Soviet Jews and his hope that the college would help refuseniks seeking to immigrate to the United States.

Today Straus, 20, a student of psychology, has accomplished his mission. At the Encino resident’s urging, Pitzer College offered a position to refusenik Benjamin Charny, who arrived in Boston recently after enduring years of delays at the hands of Soviet authorities.

Straus, who is credited by college officials for spurring them into action, traveled to the East Coast to greet Charny. Also making the trip were Alfred Bloom, Pitzer vice president, and his wife, Peggy; Jon Parro, director of admissions, and Josephine de Young, the college’s director of public relations.

“We’re all ecstatic. We’re all thrilled,” Straus said in an interview. “When Dr. Charny comes on campus, the students will be welcoming a friend.”

Charny and his wife, Yadviga, will remain in Boston for a short time while Charny undergoes tests and medical treatment for heart trouble and a malignant tumor. The couple will then travel to Pitzer, a 25-year-old liberal arts institution in the Claremont Colleges consortium at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, where Charny has accepted a teaching fellowship in mathematics.

Though Straus had spent hundreds of hours building a movement that included support from students at all five of the Claremont Colleges, he was unprepared for the drama that unfolded as Charny arrived July 16 at Logan International Airport in Boston.

The refusenik and his wife were escorted to the United States in the private jet of Armand Hammer, head of Occidental Petroleum, who has close ties with the Soviet government.

As if that weren’t enough to transform Charny’s arrival into a media event, it was also attended by Kitty Dukakis, wife of Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis, and Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts.

“I just wanted to go up to the Charnys and give them a big hug,” Straus said. “I felt uncomfortable in all that formality, but that’s what I finally did. I was at a loss for words.”

On May 12, Pitzer College had invited Charny, 50, a well-known professor of mathematics at the University of Moscow, to join its staff as a visiting fellow. As students and faculty listened in on an emotional telephone conversation to Moscow, Charny accepted, with the understanding that he would first get treatment for his medical problems.

Within a month, the Soviet government announced that the Charnys would be allowed to leave the country, but officials did not say when.

The couple’s sudden departure from Moscow came as a surprise to hundreds of friends and supporters in America. Charny is one of a small group of refuseniks who pleaded for permission to emigrate because of their urgent need for medical treatment.

He is undergoing tests at a Boston hospital this week and could not be reached for comment.

“It is hard to say how you feel after something that has been the ultimate goal for several years of your life finally comes true,” Anna Charny Blank, the couple’s daughter, said in a telephone interview last week.

Blank and her husband, Yuri, and baby daughter were granted permission to leave the Soviet Union last year. They joined Charny’s brother, Leon, and his family in Boston, where Leon is a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Blank is also a mathematician, and her mother is a metallurgical engineer.

“We have been so afraid this moment would never come, because my father’s health is not strong enough,” Blank said. “But now he may still live long years. Doctors are optimistic.”

After the medical treatment, she said, the family will visit Pitzer College as soon as possible “to see the wonderful people who helped us when we needed it most.”

Blank said Straus’ efforts on her parents’ behalf and the offer of a position at Pitzer had been “very important from several points of view.”

First, she said, “was what it did for my father’s morale. He thinks work is the most important thing in life. He is a brilliant mathematician but was unable to continue his work--partly because he was so ill, and because he was a refusenik” who lost his job nine years ago when he applied for permission to emigrate.

“And it’s important to him now, to know that people value his skills,” Blank said.

Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman of Temple Israel in Boston, who said he has worked for the release of several hundred refuseniks, including Charny, said he had “never heard of a college doing this.”

Straus and Pitzer College “in fact galvanized an entire community and raised the issue of Charny’s release to a much higher degree of visibility” than it would have otherwise attained, Mehlman said in a telephone interview. “They made a great contribution in the Charnys’ ultimate release.”

Straus became interested in Soviet Jews while he was a high school student in Sherman Oaks, when he first realized that Jews in the Soviet Union were denied the right to study their culture and their ancestral language.

Before entering Pitzer College in 1986, he wrote in an admissions essay “that I would like to see the college help Soviet Jewry,” Straus said.

“I want people to know that it’s possible for all of them to make a difference. Everyone who signed a petition at Pitzer brought it to the attention of the college, and the college brought it to the attention of the Soviet Union. I’d like to challenge all the other Claremont Colleges to sponsor a refusenik,” Straus said.

“I don’t want us to stop here. I want this to be a starting block for other universities around the country.”

Times staff writer Suzanne Schlosberg contributed to this report.