Prosecutor Says Yonkers Youth Admitted Setting Fire to Jewish Center

An 18-year-old Yonkers youth accused of having set the fire at the Yonkers Jewish Community Center in December of 1965, resulting in the deaths of 12 persons, had admitted that he was “responsible for the fire,” Assistant District Attorney Thomas Facella charged in County Court here, where the youth is on trial. The defendant, Thomas A. Ruppert, is being tried on 24 counts of murder and one count of arson. The trial went into its third day today before Judge Robert E. Dempsey and a jury of 10 men and two women selected after three weeks of culling the county’s jury lists.

Mr. Facella charged that Ruppert made his virtual confession to Zvi Almog who was, at the time of the conflageration, director of the Jewish center. However, the youth’s voluntary defense counsel, Mrs. Eleanor Jackson Piel, told the court Ruppert had been “psychologically coerced” into making his statement of guilt. The prosecutor told the court that he would prove that the fire was “deliberately set and was incendiary in origin.” He declared that, in confessing to Mr. Almog, the youth had stated he wanted to go to the police and “get everything off his chest.”