Ofer’s Death Stuns Official Circles

Funeral services will be held here tomorrow for Avraham Ofer who committed suicide yesterday. Ofer, who was Minister of Housing. will be buried at the Kiryat Shaul cemetery with the full honors accorded a Cabinet member. His body will lie in state at the Tel Aviv Municipality building before the funeral procession.

Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren swept aside halachic problems affecting a suicide and decreed that Ofer’s remains could be interred in the customary gravesite. According to religious law. persons who take their own lives must be buried in an isolated grave, but Goren found exceptions in rabbinical rulings of the past.

Ofer’s death stunned official circles in Jerusalem and caused Premier Yitzhak Rabin to defer a meeting with President Ephraim Katzir last night after hearing the news. Katzir postponed till today to ask Rabin to form a new government to act as a caretaker regime until elections this May.

Rabin and his wife were among the long procession of government officials, friends and associates of Ofer who visited his Tel Aviv flat last night to offer condolences to his widow and children. Others included Defense Minister Shimon Peres and Finance Minister Yehoshua Rabinowitz Ofer had been the target of accusations that he engaged in illegal activities while president of the Histadrut housing company, Shikun Ovdim, before he joined the Rabin Cabinet in 1974.

None of the allegations was proven, but a police investigation reportedly was in progress. Ofer left a suicide note declaring his innocence of any wrong-doing. His final words were “I have no doubt that my innocence will be proven… But I cannot wait for that day, I can bear no more.”

Only a few days ago he had confided to a friend that most of his friends and associates were avoiding him since the allegations were published in the press. He also said the slow pace of the investigation, which he was sure would clear his name, gave him a feeling of helplessness.

PRESS BLAMED FOR TRAGEDY

Last night many of the persons who Ofer said had shunned him were seen entering his apartment to offer condolences. Newsmen were barred. One reporter who tried to enter the apartment was forcibly ejected amid shouts of “You journalists killed him.”

The Israeli press, always tenacious in its pursuit of scandal in high places, devoted considerable space in recent weeks to the allegations against Ofer. This caused Rabin to remark, at a Bank of Israel meeting only a few hours before Ofer’s suicide yesterday, that in Israel a man is innocent unless otherwise proven. And Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, in a speech to Haifa Technion students at about the same time, declared that, “with all due respect to the press, we shall not let it be the judge.”

ACCOUNT OF LAST HOURS

According to police accounts, Ofer shot himself at about 6 p.m. local time yesterday with a 22 caliber pistol. His body was found slumped in the seat of his Volvo car parked near a lonely stretch of beach north of Tel Aviv by a passerby who summoned police. Fishermen on the beach did not hear the shot, apparently because it was drowned out by the noise of wind, rain and heavy breakers.

Ofer left Jerusalem at about 10 a.m. yesterday after canceling his appointments which included a meeting with the Austrian ambassador. His driver took him to Tel Aviv early in the afternoon where he was interviewed on the Army Radio Station, Galei Zahal. He spent some time at his home and then had his driver take him some distance north of Tel Aviv. He dismissed the driver with instructions to wait for a telephone call. After that, police said. Ofer drove to the isolated beach, closed all the windows of his car and shot himself in the head.