The Israel Supreme Court began today to hear the government’s appeal in the Kastner-Gruenwald case verdict which precipitated a Cabinet crisis in this country in June 1955.
A year and a half ago, the president of the Jerusalem District Court, Dr. Benjamin Halevi, ruled that the government had failed to prove a libel charge against 75-year-old Malkiel Gruenwald. The latter had published a newsletter in which he accused Dr. Israel Kastner, a leader of Hungarian Jewry during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, with abetting in the mass expulsions of Jews from that country and the subsequent Nazi murder of many thousands of those Jews. Mr. Gruenwald said that Dr. Kastner had committed these acts as liason man between the Jewish community and the Nazis.
Dr. Halevi upheld Mr. Gruenwald’s main allegations, but found that the latter had not proved that Dr. Kastner used Jewish community funds for personal ends. The judge imposed a token fine on Mr. Gruenwald of one pound (55 cents), but imposed costs of 200 pounds ($110) against the government for bringing the case into court on behalf of Dr. Kastner, at the time an official of the Israel Government As a result of the decision, the General Zionist Party quit the coalition government the headed by Moshe Sharett.
Today’s appeal, submitted by Attorney General Haim Cohen, called Judge Halevi’s decision a “grave injustice” although it conceded that Judge Halevi had been correct in finding “contradictions and lies” in Dr. Kastner’s original testimony. But he insisted that there was “a wide gap” between such “inaccuracies” and the judge’s statement that “Kastner had sold his soul to the devil.”
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