Kahane Has Until Wednesday to Appel 1-year Jail Sentence

Barry Slotnick, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s lawyer, has until Wednesday to file an appeal on behalf of the former JDL leader who was sentenced last Friday by a federal judge in Brooklyn to one year in prison on charges of violating the terms of a 1971 probation. Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who had sentenced Kahane in July, 1971 to five years probation after he pleaded guilty to a one-count indictment of making a fire-bomb, gave Slotnick the five-day appeal arrangement.

At the 1971 probation sentence Judge Weinstein made it a special condition of the sentence that Kahane could have nothing to do “directly or indirectly with guns, bombs, dynamite or any other weapons. Last Friday, the judge said he was handing down a one-year sentence because four years of the original probation sentence had expired. He said Kahane had “willfully and intentionally” violated the condition of his probation. Kahane admitted the violation, saying, “I did what the government says I did. I violated probation.”

Kahane also said that he was being persecuted for his political views, asserting that “we know that if a detente” with Russia “was achieved,” Soviet Jews were doomed. “Our only leverage was to prevent a detente.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas R. Pattison said Rabbi Kahane had violated the terms of his probation twice while he was in Israel. Pattison said the first violation included a plan to smuggle arms from Israel to Europe for use for revenge against Arab terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Pattison said the second violation involved letters by Rabbi Kahane in 1973 urging JDL members to bomb the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and to kidnap or kill some Soviet diplomats.