U.S. Grants Asylum to Ukrainian Jew

A Jewish immigrant who said she received repeated death threats in her native Ukraine won a reprieve from deportation Friday when a federal appeals court panel approved her request for asylum.

Vera Korablina, now 57 and a resident of Los Angeles, arrived in the United States on a tourist visa in 1995 and applied for asylum on the grounds that she would be persecuted if she returned to Kiev, according to her lawyer, Joseph Rose.

U.S. immigration authorities twice rejected her request on the grounds that the beatings and death threats she experienced in Ukraine did not meet the standard for official persecution.

But a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, saying Korablina presented evidence that the Ukrainian government had done little to eliminate the violence that she and other Jews had suffered in the Ukraine.

“The fact that members of her family were severely beaten soon after she left the Ukraine, with specific threats made regarding her absence, indicates that persecution would continue,” one of the judges wrote in Friday’s ruling.

Rose said Korablina, who worked at an exhibition center in Kiev, had been subject to numerous anti-Semitic actions.

“Members of a nationalist group almost strangled her to death because she was Jewish,” he said in an interview. “A lot of problems were due to the fact that her boss was also Jewish. He disappeared one day and she never saw him again.”

Rose said he had not yet spoken with his client, but said friends had described her as “pretty happy.”