Funeral services will be held Friday for Charles Kremer, a Rumanian-born dentist who was instrumental in bringing about the deportation from the United States of Archbishop Valerian Trifa, the Rumanian cleric who was the leader of the fascist Iron Guard which fomented a massacre of Jews in Bucharest in 1941. Kremer died here Tuesday after a long illness. He was 90 years old.
Born in the town of Braila, Rumania, Kremer immigrated to the U.S. in 1919. He graduated dentistry school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1924 and was in practice for more than 53 years. He became famous in Rumania for introducing penicillin there in 1947.
Kremer, who was active in many American Jewish organizations and in the Rumanian Jewish community in America, devoted his life to bringing to justice Nazi war criminals who found refuge in the U.S. He lost scores of relatives in the Holocaust.
He played a major role in discovering evidence about Trifa’s fascist past which culminated in a Federal deportation order. Trifa left for Portugal two years ago and died there several months ago at the age of 72. Trifa admitted concealing his past when he entered the U.S. in 1950. He headed the Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate in Grass Lake, Mich.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
