Signal victory over three anti-Semitic Gray Shirt leaders was won here today by the Rev. Abraham Levy when he was awarded judgments totalling £1,775 (approximately $8,900) and costs in his defamation suit, which grew to the stature of a world cause celebrate while it was being heard.
Specific awards for damages arising out of publication by the trio of a document which they falsely claimed to have stolen from levy’s Western Road Synagogue in Port Elizabeth, and which purported to show the existence of a Jewish world plot were as follows:
From Harry Victor Inch, £1,000; from Johannes von Strauss von Moltke, £750; from David Hermanus Olivier, £25. Each of the defendants also must pay the Port Elizabeth leader the costs of litigation. Levy in each case had sued for £2,000.
Heard in the Eastern Districts Division of the Supreme Court in Grahamstown before Sir Thomas Graham, Judge-President, and Justice Gutsche, the action presented so many complex and interesting angles that the court required 130 pages in which to explain its decision today.
World Jewry hailed the outcome of the case as a decisive blow at the South African Fascist movement, which was threatening to assume dangerous proportions until Levy brought it into the open by his courageous course of action.
Two of the defendants already have made it plain that the Grey Shirt movement faces imminent collapse. Inch tried to back water on July 23 by asking the court’s
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
