Six members of the Brit Kanaim, arrested in connection with the alleged plot to blow up the Parliament building in protest against legislation they considered anti-religious, were ordered released yesterday by the examining magistrate. One of the six is a reporter on the Agudist newspaper.
Five other Brit Kanaim suspects were transferred from the detention camp at Jalameh to the Jerusalem jail as investigation of the alleged plot continued. Police officers testified in magistrate’s court that they found plans to sabotage the Knesset by disconnecting the electric wires and throwing incendiary bombs into the building while it was plunged in darkness. They also testified to the discovery of plans for the theft of documents from the Ministry of Defense dealing with the mobilization of religious women.
Police officer M. Budinger read before the magistrate testimony given by Yehuda Ridder, the 23-year-old chief defendant, confessing that he manufactured the bomb which was to be thrown in the Parliament on the day when the parliamentary debate on the conscription of women was to have taken place. Ridder, who arrived in Israel in 1937 from Germany, was a member of the Haganah and was one of the defenders of Mt. Castel in Israel’s war of liberation. He told the police that he organized the Orthodox underground group “in order to impose the rule of the Torah.”
The Knesset Home (Rules) Committee today decided that the Parliamentary investigation of the conduct of the Israeli police would be investigated by representatives of the six largest parties in the Parliament. The investigation has developed out of the smashing of the underground Brit Kanaim religious movement and complaints that a number of the men detained were mistreated by the police.
(In New York, orthodox Jewish leaders protested the arrest of religious youths in Israel at a mass meeting sponsored by Agudath Israel Organization of America. The meeting adopted a resolution proclaiming “the solidarity of the religious Jewish community in the United States with the religious Jews in Israel.”)
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
