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Priest’s Testimony Helps Acquit Rumanian Poet Charged with Flouting Christianity

June 21, 1939
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Testimony by a noted Orthodox priest, a prominent literary critic and a legal scholar resulted today in the acquittal by a military court of Aron Oknitzer, Yiddish poet, who had been held for two months in the ill famed Jilava prison on charges of insulting the Christian faith by his volume of poetry, “Evangelic Motives.”

Father Gala Galaction, who is a professor at the Kishineff Theological Seminary and author of a Rumanian translation of the Bible published under the auspices of King Carol, declared that Oknitzer “far from insulting had extolled Christian morals by his beautiful verse. Similar opinions were expressed by Prof. Eugen Lovinescu, literary critic, and Prof. Eugen Heroveanu, of the Bucharest Law School.

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