December 30, 1985

''It was very, very hard for me to leave the motherland, but I chose to be with my husband.'' - Helle Frejus, arriving in the United States from Moscow. [A9:1.]

Orders for American-made machine tools fell 19 percent in November from their October level, the National Machine Tool Builders' Association said in a report to be released today. The association said orders had declined 12.2 percent from November 1984.

When historians size up the major business strategies of 1985 they are likely to focus not only on the many billion-dollar mergers but also on several major court decisions that will help set rules for takeover battles in years to come. What is noteworthy about this year's key judicial decisions on takeovers, many legal experts say, is that they give corporate boards the go-ahead to use a larger arsenal of weapons to rebuff potential acquirers. A key one, for instance, was the ruling by Justice Joseph Walsh of the Delaware Supreme Court that upheld the Household International Corporation's ''poison pill'' strategy, which was aimed at making the company too expensive for an unwanted suitor. Another one, also in Delaware, gave the Unocal Corporation the green light to make a discriminatory tender offer that excluded a hostile bidder, T. Boone Pickens of the Mesa Petroleum Corporation. ''The trend of the Delaware decisions has been to give management greater power to resist takeovers,'' said Geoffrey P. Miller, a professor of corporations law at the University of Chicago.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said today that it was Israel's initial assessment that the shadowy, pro-Libyan Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal was responsible for the Rome and Vienna airport attacks. ''I cannot say for sure,'' Mr. Rabin told a visiting American delegation, ''but that is our impression.'' In Rome the head of Italian military intelligence said that the four terrorists who killed 12 people there Friday were members of the Abu Nidal group and that they had been trained in Iran. The Ministry of Defense distanced itself from the official's remarks but diplomats in Rome and British and other Italian intelligence aides lent weight to the contention that Iran may have been involved. [Page A6.] Cabinet Considers Response The Israeli Cabinet today discussed how to respond to Friday's terrorist attacks, which left 18 people dead and more than 110 wounded.

Helle Frejus, the first of eight Soviet citizens to have been given permission by Moscow to live with their spouses in the United States, arrived at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport this afternoon. Mrs. Frejus left her home in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a Soviet Republic northwest of Moscow, Thursday morning. She flew to Baltimore today aboard a World Airways DC-10 en route to Los Angeles for a reunion with her 82-year-old husband, Kazimierz Frejus. Mrs. Frejus, who is 50 years old, is one of 10 people with American ties living in the Soviet Union who were told in November that they would get formal permission to live in the United States. The announcement that the 10 divided family cases - eight of them involving Soviet- and American-born spouses -would be resolved came just before the summit meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, in Geneva in November.