Rally at Ex-nazi’s Home

The home of accused Nazi war criminal Vilis Hazners in Dresden, N.Y. was the site of a Tisha B’Av demonstration led by Rabbi Paul Silton of Albany. Silting on the road in Washington County some 70 miles northeast of Albany, Silton led a group of 18 college and high school students in praying from the Book of Lamentations. Original prayers linking the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis with the destruction of the Temple in ancient Jerusalem were also chanted.

“As long as Hazners is here, this will be an annual event on Tisha B’av,” Silton pledged. This was the second year that Silton, cochairman of the Greater Albany Jewish Federation’s Committee on Justice for Nazi War Criminals, led a peaceful protest at the Hazners residence.

Demonstrators used toothbrushes to scrub the pavement, re-enacting eyewitness accounts that Hazners forced Jews to do likewise in the courtyard of the Riga police station, where he was a Latvian police chief under the Nazis. They also carried placards with photos of concentration camp victims and Biblical quotations. Hazners, 74, was not at home during the protest. A neighbor said he had left for a doctor’s appointment in nearby Rutland, Vt., but family members were in the house.

BRIEF FILED WITH FEDERAL JUDGE

After more than two-and-a-half years of hearings, the U.S. government has filed a brief with federal Judge Anthony De Gaeto recommending that Hazners be deported. De Gaeto recently granted Hazners’ attorney, lvars Berzins of Babylon, N.Y., an extension in preparing his brief, which was due last month. The judge’s opinion should come two to six months after both briefs are filed.

Hazners is accused of illegally entering the United States in 1956 by concealing his alleged collaboration with the Nazis during World War 11. At his deportation hearings in Albany, witnesses from Israel, formerly from Riga, testified that Hazners had committed atrocities against the Jews of Riga in 1941 and 1942.

Silton’s group was met by three of Hazners’ neighbors who criticized the protest and called Hazners a good neighbor. They said that the Israeli witnesses had lied and that evidence against Hazners was propaganda.

Two of Hazners’ closest neighbors, Edgar and Ralph Steele, described him as a personable gentleman. “My family has Jewish friends,” Ralph Steele said to Silton. “We like the Jews, but you’ll keep talking until we don’t like the Jews.”

The Steele brothers were present at last year’s protest, when there was a group who identified themselves as members of the Christian Defense League which has been described as a right-wing anti-Semitic organization, Silton asked them why they were carrying signs last year that said, “All Jews are thieves.” While admitting carrying a sign, Ralph Steele claimed he didn’t know what it said. He told reporters later: “I didn’t print those signs. But I’m glad somebody did.”