Maria Weizmann and her husband V.M. Savitsky were long denied the right to emigrate from the USSR by the authorities (see also refusenik). Her husband was arrested in 1949.
On February 10, 1953 she was arrested in connection with the alleged Doctors' plot. Her case was handled by the GRU (as opposed to MGB as it was common), an evidence of its importance to the Soviet regime. After Stalin's death and the admission by the Soviet leadersip that the "plot" was made up, she was still kept in Lubyanka prison, and released only on August 12, 1953. Weizmann emigrated to Israel in 1956.
Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), Zionist leader and first President of Israel, was born in the village of Motol, near Pinsk, in the Russian Pale of Settlement, one of 15 children of a timber merchant where he attended a traditional heder; at the age of 11, he entered high school in Pinsk.
Weizmann went on to study chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of Darmstaat, Germany, and at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland, where, in 1899, he was awarded a doctorate with honors.
Weizmann's first Zionist steps began at an early age, and from the second Zionist Congress onwards, he was a prominent figure in the Zionist Movement.
Weizmann was born in a small village Motol (Motyli, now Motal') near Pinsk (Russian Empire, now in Belarus) and graduated in chemistry from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1899.
Siding with neither Labour Zionism on the left or Revisionist Zionism on the right, Weizmann was generally associated with the centrist General Zionists.
In 1921 Weizmann went along with the known Jewish physicist Albert Einstein for a fund-raiser to establish a Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
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