Soviet Emigre Dies in Israel; Transplant Was in Vain

JERUSALEM —  Michael Shirman, the Soviet emigre biologist who took his battle for life to the superpower summit meeting in Iceland last October, has died of leukemia four months after his sister was finally allowed out of the Soviet Union for a bone marrow transplant in a vain effort to save him.

Shirman, who was 32, died Thursday and was buried Friday with about 300 friends and supporters looking on.

Doctors advised a bone-marrow transplant after Shirman was diagnosed in October, 1985, as having leukemia. They said there was no real chance of success unless the donor was a sibling.

Shirman’s sister, Inessa Flerova, who was still in the Soviet Union, applied for permission to travel to Israel, but a decision was delayed until last September. Then Soviet authorities said she could go but that her husband, Victor, could not.

‘Strong Will to Live’

Although a friend, Yuri Stern, described him Friday as having a “fantastically strong will to live,” Shirman advised his sister not to leave her husband behind in the Soviet Union “because he felt he would die and didn’t want her to be alone, with no family.” Instead, he took his case to the press.

Bald from chemotherapy treatment, the ailing biologist became a familiar figure around the world when he appeared at the summit meeting of President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Reykjavik.

Three weeks later, Soviet authorities allowed Flerova and her family to leave for Israel, where on Jan. 4 the delicate transplant took place. But by then it was too late, according to Shirman’s doctor, Alain Berrebi.

Survival Chances Slim

“If we had been able to perform the transplant by April last year, statistics indicate a 50% probability of recovery,” Berrebi said. “By the time we were eventually able to operate, in January this year, Shirman was already so ill that his chances of survival were slim.”

Shirman’s friend Stern, who is an official of the Soviet Jewry Information Center here, said the death underlines the plight of 30 other Soviet Jewish “refuseniks” who suffer from cancer but are prevented from leaving the Soviet Union to spend what could be their last days with relatives in Israel.

“We can give no credit to any Soviet statements on a new, more humanitarian approach as long as these most immediate and desperate cases, like (Shirman’s), are not being solved immediately,” Stern said, “because if the policy was really changing substantially, and not just in public relations, those cases would be the first to be solved.”

Of Shirman, Stern said: “He won, in a sense, politically. But not medically, unfortunately.”