Court in Holland Hears Case of Orthodex Jew Charged with Embazzlement

The Court of Cassation today heard an appeal ####nst the sentence of three-and-a-half years imprisonment imposed upon Frederik ###reb, a 37-year-old Dutch Orthodox Jew convicted on charges of having embezzled ###y secured from other Jews in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation under ###pretext of helping them to flee the country and escape deportation by the Gestapo ###xtermination camps in Poland.Counteracting this appeal, the prosecutor demanded that the term of Wein#### imprisonment be increased to six years, less the two years he has served under ###iminary arrest. The Court of Cassation decided to announce its verdict on ###l 19.A charge of collaboration with Nazi occupation forces during the war which originally brought against Weinreb was subsequently dropped. At the time of the ###t trial, Weinreb admitted that he had accepted money from Jews who feared ###ation to the Nazi death camps in the East, but insisted that all of the money ## to bribe the Nazis in order to secure permission for these Jews to escape from country.Taking the stand today, Weinreb told the court that the testimony of earlier ###esses against him had not proved his guilt. He maintained that he vas not a ###tor and said that he had not been released from the Westerbork concentration ### by the Nazis in order to aid them in their campaign against the Jews, and never been asked for full information in his own defense and had therefore never on it.(Acting on behalf of the International League for the Rights of Han, the ###ed Dutch Jurist A.E.D. von Saher, who is now in the United States, sent a brief ### New York to the Department of Justice at The Hague urging Weinreb’s release. ### World Jewish Congress, at the time of Weinreb’s earlier arrest, asserted that was innocent of the charges brought against him. The World Agudas Israel Organization last year called the case a “kind of new Dreyfus case in our times.”)