Tuesday, December 15, 2015

From My Pollard Archives

I finally climbed up to our attic (it's reachable by a collapsible ladder) to see if the files I have there from the period I was the coordinator of the Knesset Lobby on Behalf of Jonathan Pollard.  Those were the years of 1987 - 1996 (or so).

As MK Geula Cohen's parliamentary aide, I made the call to our then UN Ambassador Binyamin Netanyahu to discuss the conditions of his then incarceration.  I carried around the various petitions to be signed (Avrum Burg declined, calling him a 'criminal'), helped compose the motions for the agenda and the parliamentary questions, research legal issues, maintain contact with the family and lawyers and lobby American Jewish groups.  I also visited him twice.  

The first time was in 1990 at Marion, Illinois and again in 1993 at Butner, North Carolina.  By the way, we were not alone as Jay had a special government agent sit in on our conversation in case he might reveal a secret and no Hebrew was permitted to be spoken.

I recently tried to make contact with Jay to urge him to phone through both to Geulah Cohen as well as Edna Solodar.

Some examples of what I found in a very dusty box of four filing folders:

a) A New Year's card -



b) One of the petitions -


c) A Hebrew-language article I wrote published in Nekuda, entitled "A Prisoner of Zion in America" -


There's a lot of dust but I will process the material and find them a home so that they will be available for research purposes.

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