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Friday, September 20, 1985 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

PEANUT BUTTER

For a refusenik, Abe Stolar's
needs are pretty basic. Freedom and
peanut butter. He got the peanut
butter, a commodity which isn't
readily available in the Soviet
Union, last month via Southfield
Democratic Congressman Sander
Levin. But Stolar and Levin both
know the even stickier desire to
emigrate to a country where Stolar
can be accepted for what he is — a
Jew — may never be fulfilled.
That tendency to hang on to the
dream of one day being able to leave
the USSR, no matter how hard the
Soviet authorities try to yank it
away, made a deep impression on
Levin during a week-long trip to the
Soviet Union Aug. 19-26. The trip
was sponsored by the Union of
Councils for Societ Jews, a
Washington-based umbrella group of
28 grass-roots organizations working

•

to ease the plight of Soviet Jewry.
The Congressman was joined by his
wife, Vicki, U.S. Rep. Edward
Feighan (D-Ohio), Feighan's wife,
Didi, UCSJ Executive Director Mark
Epst3in and Elizabeth O'Malley, a
Washington activist who served as a
liaison with the Soviet Jewish com-
munity.
The group spent three days in
Moscow and three days in Lenin-
grad. They met with five refusenik
families and a number of political
and diplomatic figures.
Although Levin did not have the
chance to meet Stolar, he passed the
peanut butter to a friend, who as-
sured the Congressman that the re-
fusenik would receive the gift. A
Detroit-area contact, Rae Sharfman,
knew about Stolar's peanut butter
infatuation and had included the in-
formation in a letter on Soviet Jewry

to Carl Levin, Sander Levin's
brother in the Senate.
If the peanut butter story
sounds like a Robert Ludlum spy
thriller, it pales when compared to
the clandestine tactics the group
used to meet their Jewish contacts
in the two Russian cities. "Whom
you are going to see you're not sure
of in advance," the Congressman
said. "We had a list of people and we
hoped that we could get to most of
them. But it's not like you just call
people ahead of time and let them
know you're coming."
Just before the trip, local con-
tacts called refuseniks and in the
course of conversation asked casu-
ally if they would be going to syna-
gogue on Saturday. "My name
wasn't mentioned,' Levin said, "but
the refuseniks know when they get a
message like that that an American

